How to take the best Holi pictures on iPhone and Android smartphones

The festival of colours is almost here, and if there’s one thing that makes Holi celebrations memorable for the rest of the year, it is the vibrant pictures full of colours. Be it a small stroke of gulaal, or entire faces smothered with most shades of the rainbow, Holi pictures make for some of the best memories.

Thankfully, technology has come to a point where most people can get awesome Holi shots from their phone alone, without the need of any expensive cameras or equipment. Here are the best tips to capture those vivid punchy colours in all their glory this Holi!

How to take the best Holi pictures on iPhones

One of the aspects iPhones excel at is their photography capabilities. This is great for Holi pictures. To begin taking better photos, let’s start with some basic composition tips. Start by enabling the grid lines, which can help with symmetry and framing. You can then use the rule-of-thirds to take great portraits and other subject-focused pictures.

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To do this, head to Settings/Camera and enable the Grid option under the ‘Composition’ section. You can also use the ‘Level’ option for help with straightening photos in real time. You can also enable ‘Live Photos’ ahead of time to give your pictures a little more life.

To make the colours pop, you can use make use of the filters baked into the stock camera app. Open the camera app and tap on the arrow on top to bring up extra options from the bottom. You can now choose the filters option (shaped like three rectangles at an angle) and swipe right or left between filters to choose one you like. For colourful pictures, the Rich Contrast or Vibrant filters should look the best.

On Pro models, you will get access to some extra features. For instance, you can take higher-resolution photos using the ProRaw mode, for more details, but do keep in mind that your pictures will have a larger file size. You can also use ProRaw for RAW pictures that you can edit using Photoshop or similar tools later on.

How to take the best Holi pictures on Android phones

While the stock camera apps may differ on Android phones, the fundamentals for a good picture will not change. Whether it is the OnePlus camera app on Oxygen OS or the stock camera app on Redmi phones, you should begin with enabling grid lines for some symmetry and framing.

Next you can make use of filters to make the colours pop out and to make your photos look even more vibrant. Most Android stock camera apps will have some form of filters to modify the look of your pictures, and tuning them to get a more vibrant output will make your Holi pictures look the best.

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If your Android phone was purchased in the past few years, it may also have a telephoto or periscope camera. While long-distance zoomed photos may not be very helpful during Holi, you can use these cameras to get a nice bokeh effect on portrait mode shots.

Those are some of the tips to get the best pictures on Holi from your smartphone. Have some more tips you’d like to share? Put them in the comments below!