Tutorials

50 things I have learned about iPhone photography

Emil Pakarklis ∙ Updated March 16, 2018

In this post you are going to discover the 50 most important things I have learned about iPhone photography. Over the past two years I have taken some really great photos, and at least ten times more photos that did not turn out the way I wanted. I have done a lot of photo editing, which often only made my photos worse. I have spent countless hours on social media sharing my work and following the work of other photographers. And I have learned many things in the process.

I hope that by sharing the most important lessons I have learned I can accelerate your learning and help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made. But most importantly, I hope to inspire you to become a more active iPhone photographer. Let’s get started!

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How to create custom keyboard shortcuts for Mac apps

Jeff Benjamin ∙ Updated November 8, 2021

Have you ever used a specific menu command in an app and wondered to yourself, "Why is there no keyboard shortcut assigned to this command?" Or "why can't I change that shortcut to something else?" I think we've all been there before. Fortunately, fixing the issue requires little more than a few minutes of your time. Inside, we'll show you how easy it is to quickly create a keyboard shortcut for your favorite apps.

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How to edit beautiful Fall photos with your iPhone

Emil Pakarklis ∙ Updated April 14, 2018

As the leaves turn from green to bright yellow and red, the fall is one of the best times of the year for landscape photography with the iPhone. When ordinary landscapes change into magnificent vistas, it’s really hard not to take photos of all that beauty.

However, when you look back at your photos, you’ll often be disappointed to see that the iPhone hasn’t reproduced the fall colors as you expected, and the photos just look boring in comparison to the same scene in real life. Fortunately, this can be corrected in post-processing, and in this article I’ll show you a simple Snapseed post-processing workflow that will bring your fall photos back to life by making their colors much more vibrant.

While the fall is well on its way in most of Europe and North America, other parts of the world have different seasons. It’s spring in Australia and permanent summer in tropical regions. However, the same editing workflow can also be used to greatly improve sunset photos, so you should also give it a try if you live in other parts of the world...

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How to speed up animations in iOS and make your device feel faster

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated November 2, 2022
iPhone 5S colors running iOS 7

Apparently, the iOS parallax effects and animations can literally make people sick. If that doesn't happen to you, don't discount this as just a phony report. This is real for some people, although I have yet to meet any of them. Apple listened to the complaints from users who were experiencing various degrees of motion sickness while using iOS and drastically increased the motion reduction feature that was already present before iOS 7.0.3.

As it turns out, not only will this feature reduce the motion of the user interface, but it will also make your iOS device feel like it's blazing fast.

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7 tips for taking landscape photos with your iPhone

Emil Pakarklis ∙ Updated March 27, 2023

Have you ever taken a photo of a magnificent vista, only to find out that the image doesn’t look nearly as good as in real life? While all of us have experienced that at some point, there are some tips that can dramatically improve the quality of the landscape photos you take with the iPhone.

The iPhone (or any other smartphone) has a small digital sensor which inevitably leads to poor image quality in low-light conditions. However, landscape photos are almost always taken in abundant light, making them practically indistinguishable from photos taken with an expensive DSLR. If you follow the tips outlined in this article, you will be able to take landscape photos that look just as good, if not better, than the same scene in real life.

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This iMessage prank got me going for a while

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated February 28, 2017

Earlier this week, Jeff played a really good prank on me. As I received a message from him, I opened up the Messages application and couldn't see anything but a typing indicator. So I waited patiently for Jeff to finish typing, figuring that Messages were having yet some other issues, which could have explained why I received an alert, yet didn't see any message.

Long story short, Jeff got me pretty good, and here is how you can get your friends too...

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