The best camera is the one you have with you - using your camera phone

This bonus mid-week post is a slight diversion from how to set up your point-and-shoot camera, but my sister pointed out to me that most of us use our camera phones more often than we use our other cameras, and she was right. I hardly consider myself a camera phone expert. I've never been impressed with photos from my camera, I've just found some to be tolerable, but then again, I'm pretty picky, and she assured me that I knew some tips that might help, so here it goes.

Last post I covered resolution, and it is worth checking to see if your phone has options for that as well. I just made the switch from iPhone to a Droid 2 and it allows me to select my resolution under "Camera Settings" and then "Picture Resolution." If your phone has a "Face Detection" option in your settings, I also recommend turning that on since most of us use our phones to take pictures of people. Those 2 things alone will help in improving your picture quality.

Once you take a photo you might find that the photo is under or over-exposed. Depending on your model you might be able to make an adjustment and retake that photo. Check to see if your camera settings have an "exposure" adjustment option with choices in positive and negative numbers. If so, if your photo was too dark you can select a positive number to adjust the exposure. The higher the number, the brighter the photo will be. Conversely if your image was a complete washout you'll want to choose a negative number, the lower the number, the darker your image will be. With practice you'll probably be able to judge what conditions you'll need to make adjustments on before you take a picture.

Whether or not your camera has options for exposure adjustment you may not have time to fiddle with options to make adjustments. By the time you "got it right" the moment had long past. Now what? How about a free app to the rescue?

Whether you are an iPhone user or an Android user (sorry BB users, no love from Adobe Photoshop for you yet) there is a free app that you should have on your phone - Photoshop Express. For Android users here is a link with info: and for iPhone users her is your link: The Photoshop Express App allows you to crop, adjust exposure, color saturation, contrast, brightness and choose effects like black and white, soft focus, and fun borders right in your phone so you can edit fast and share your improved photos instantly.

Here are a couple of photos I used PS Express on in my iPhone:

I liked the cute border for this one - it had the advantage of hiding some unwanted object in the bottom right corner - why didn't I just see that dang thing before I clicked? Who knows, but oval frame to the rescue:

and this one was horribly underexposed, it was hard to even tell it was a picture of a person (I had the 3GS which didn't have a flash and no option for setting exposure compensation) and PS Express did a fairly decent job recovering something salvageable out of it:

This Sunday it's back to info on your point-and-shoot, but I hope you found something useful here. I'm sure I'll come back to the camera phone topic again. I'll have to stop being such a camera snob and use mine more.