Taking beautiful photos: This is how pictures get a lot of likes

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Today, the Instagram account is often also representative of one's own business or is used for self-marketing and is intended to provide more visibility.

If you want to be successful, you should be careful not to lose the balance between personality and professionalism.

This is how easy it is to give your social media account the aesthetic finishing touches:

1. Perspectives

Low-angle perspective: why not point the camera upwards

Source: instagram.com/katerina_leroy

Many photos are always taken from the same position: You stand up and take the picture straight away - the object to be photographed at the same height.

However, a picture becomes much more interesting when it is shot from an unusual perspective.

Just as interesting: the perspective from above

Source: instagram.com/katerina_leroy

For example, the perspective from below with a sky, lamp or an unusual ceiling in the background.

The perspective from top to bottom can be just as interesting - for example from the second floor, from the roof terrace or from a staircase.

Use the possibilities of image design - here the focus is in the foreground

Source: instagram.com/katerina_leroy

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The focus can be placed on the object in the foreground and the background blurred out of focus.

Playing with shadows also provides beautiful motifs.

There are no limits to the imagination, Pinterest and Instagram provide all sorts of inspiration.

2. Pay attention to details

When taking photos, there are important details that you should pay attention to.

First, a clean lens.

This particularly affects those who prefer to take photos with their smartphones, because cell phone cameras in particular are often very dirty.

With a clean lens, you can easily save 35 to 40 percent of the image quality.

The second rule of thumb is: don't zoom!

Because the zoom seriously worsens the image quality, instead you should get closer to the object to be photographed.

If you also stick to the standard image details - full size, American perspective (i.e. up to the knee) and portrait - hardly anything can go wrong.

3. Lighting conditions

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Ideally, you take pictures in natural light. Artificial light is difficult if only because it usually falls from above and creates such unsightly shadows - particularly unfavorable on the face. You should also do without yellow light, it rarely comes into its own. The same applies to the flash, there is a risk of overexposing the images - regardless of whether you are taking photos with a smartphone or professional equipment. In addition, there is also the problem of red eyes with the flash, which can hardly be corrected naturally when editing the images.

A simple tip for the light: observe from which direction it comes and turn towards the light, then it falls evenly on the silhouette and conjures up a beautiful picture.

It becomes more difficult when taking photos in the midday sun, it throws hard shadows and almost never leads to good results.

During the day, roofs, overhangs or balconies that block excessive light from above are the best solution.

Better still, you only take photos in the evening when the sun goes down.

The mood and colors of the pictures, especially in portraits and close-ups, are not only better due to the evening light, but also more harmonious, as the light comes directly from the front.

4. Your own style

Photography is multifaceted and individual, which is what makes it so incredibly exciting.

With a certain amount of creativity, impressive results can be achieved - in every style, from fashion to food to landscape photography.

However, it is important to choose carefully which area you want to devote your main focus to, because if you concentrate on many different ones, it takes a very long time to master all of them equally well.

On the other hand, it confuses followers if you post different content in a jumbled manner - today beauty, tomorrow pets and the day after tomorrow sports rarely work well.

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Better to choose one or two areas and focus on them.

If this is too narrow for you, you should at least concentrate on a uniformity of colors or create exciting image perspectives.

The most important thing, however, is to find your own style and be true to yourself.

You can let yourself be inspired by other photographers, but never copy their work.

5. The best photography apps

Ideally, you should use professional image editing programs such as Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom.

But you don't always have a laptop with you or the time for lengthy image editing.

If you want the photo to go online quickly, we recommend these mobile phone apps: Facetune, Facetune 2, Snapseed and Lightroom - the apps can be downloaded free of charge and used without limitation.

The two Facetune apps are very clear and are not only perfect for light skin retouching. It can also be used to retouch people who were inadvertently captured in the background or stains on the wall. The Snapseed app is recommended for fine-tuning. Small but effective trick that makes skin retouching superfluous: Go to "Tools", click on "Details", lower the structure, wipe up and at the same time increase the sharpness. Lowering the structure naturally smoothes the surface. The sharpness, in turn, emphasizes the object contours in the photo.

With the program or the app from Lightroom, however, settings such as color, brightness, contrasts and the like can be regulated. Image presets with predefined color settings can also be installed in the program - almost every blogger creates their own presets these days. Most of the time, depths are reduced in order to pull the black tones out of the picture. The heat is increased so that the picture becomes brighter - with a slight yellow tinge. You can do this with a little magic trick: reduce the saturation of the yellow color - what was previously yellow is transformed into elegant gray and light orange.

This technique works particularly well with images that were backlit, such as at sunset.

If you only increased the brightness of a backlit sunset photo, all the bright colors on the horizon would disappear.

But standard presets also have their pitfalls, because every image is different - and so the preset settings should also be individually tailored to light, background and perspective.

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This article was first published in November 2020.