How to Take Better Photos With Your Phone

Flickr users upload close to 100 million photos to the photo-sharing site each month--and according to Yahoo, the iPhone continues to be the most common "camera" they use to upload all those photos. As more people leave the digital SLR--and even the point-and-shoot--at home, it's worth taking a look at how to get better photos from a smartphone. A few weeks ago I shared my five favorite iPhone apps, so this week I'll run through four handy tips for taking better smartphone photos. (If you have an Android handset, check out top photo apps for Android.) Consider the following to be bonus tips that complement my 11 tips to ensure great smartphone photography.

How to Edit Photos With Adobe's Camera Raw

For years, you've heard that shooting in RAW is better than shooting JPEGs. Your camera's RAW mode packs significantly more visual information, so it offers the potential to capture better photos. That comes at a cost, however, since you need to do extra work to coax better photos out of your camera. To help you do that, most photo editors come with some sort of mini photo editor that you can use to tweak RAW images. Photoshop Elements calls it Camera Raw; Corel PaintShop Pro calls it Camera RAW Lab. If you've always ignored such programs, give them a second look.

Why Use a RAW Editor?

In a word, convenience.

This is the same reason that I recommend programs such as Lightroom or AfterShot Pro--they dispense with all the graphical-design baggage packed into a full-featured image editor like Adobe Photoshop, and include only the stuff that's important to photographers editing photos. In the same way, a RAW editor is a photo editor stripped to the bone, sporting just the features you need to correct color and exposure. A lot of the time, you could make a few tweaks in the RAW editor and be done, never needing to mess with the bigger Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or PaintShop Pro.

Create Beautiful Star-Trail Photos With Almost Any Camera

If you're a space geek like me, you know that this has been a great season. Not only did we get to witness the extraordinary transit of Venus across the sun in June, but we also enjoyed a spectacular annular solar eclipse in May. And more recently, NASA announced that one of the Voyager probes has finally left the solar system for interstellar space.
Such events turn my attention to astrophotography. Some time ago, I told you how to shoot the moon, and I've also explained the basics of shooting star trails by using very long exposures. This week, I'll focus on shooting star trails by taking lots of relatively short exposures and then combining the results.