this video is teaching you the three things you need to know to shoot like a professional photographer with just your iPhone you'll go from taking photos like this to shooting photos like this after watching this video my name is Chris petta and I teach creative business and photography here on YouTube after my iPhone 14 pro review video I found a lot of people asking me how I'm able to take photos like this on just my iPhone today I'll share a preset with you for free that I love using all the time today I'm teaching you three things you need to know to be able to take five thousand dollar camera quality photos with just your iPhone you don't need the iPhone 14 pro for this but it will help if you have the 12 Pro or later let me tell you a story real quick last weekend I went on a trip to Seattle it was an awesome time with my friends but something happened that hasn't happened in five years for me I went on this trip without bringing my main camera that's right on every trip I would go on for the past five years I'd bring my main camera I was shooting on at the time if you've seen my iPhone review video you know what I'm about to say next the iPhone 14 pro has replaced my Sony A7 R4 as my main walk around camera so I wanted to test it as a travel camera too it did not disappoint throughout my trip there was never a single time when I missed my Sony camera I was able to zoom in and out with the different lenses shoot and roll are and edit these photos afterwards to my liking we went to the farmer's market and it was perfect for street photography as well this was a fast-paced environment and I was constantly fine-tuning my settings on the phone as I was shooting I'm super happy with all the photos I ended up taking especially this shot of flowers at the market this is incredible stuff coming out of an iPhone that I always had with me during the trip this video is going to teach you the three things on how to use your iPhone to take professional looking photos like me the first thing we need to do is switch up our setting before we can begin taking photos like a pro we need to get the right settings in place for our camera your photos might suck because your settings suck there's a few key settings that most people miss when they get their iPhone so right off the bat open settings and scroll down to the camera first we're going to go into formats I like to keep camera capture as high efficiency then we'll go down and enable Apple Pro raw this setting is huge this gives you quick access to this button up top in the camera app next I like to shoot at 48 megapixels for my raw files I won't be able to zoom in and recrop the photos from the main camera without losing quality down here we have apple prores this is for videos I almost never use it because the files are just so large but you can leave this on so you have the option to use it if you want to back to the main camera settings I like to use 4K 30 for video and I also recommend turning HDR off if you do any post processing with your video HDR will look weird since it's hard to process in the normal editing software back in the main camera settings let's go to preserves settings this menu is really important this menu gives you more control over how you shoot when you close your camera app all your settings reset by default here you can preserve those settings so if you were to reduce your exposure it would reset again after you close the camera app if you don't have preserve settings turn on some things here are personal preference but take a look at what I have here and you can go ahead and copy them I like keeping creative controls macro exposure and night mode all on in this settings tab now turn on the grid here to help with your composition this provides you with a 3X3 grid that overlays on top of the camera app have you heard of the rule thirds well here you go this grid helps guide you in your photography process finally go to photographic Styles I like to have Rich contrast on around 50 here in my opinion this just makes everything look better there are other styles that you can mess around with too one thing about photographic Styles this is only applied to photos that aren't shot in raw so for the most part if you plan on editing a photo after a shoot take it in raw otherwise you don't have to shoot in raw but for the sake of the this video almost all the photos we shoot will be in raw and that's it for settings I know there are a lot of settings here so I appreciate you bearing with me let's get into the action number two on our list how do we shoot like a pro your photos suck because you can't expose or compose them exposure and composition are the two biggest things you need to get right if you want your photos looking like this your phone takes care of almost all the settings like aperture shutter and ISO but did you know you can still adjust the exposure here's a quick lesson in exposure a good exposure makes or breaks a photo generally speaking each frame has two parts the bright parts and the dark Parts photographers call these parts the highlights and the Shadows the interaction between the highlights and the Shadows helps make a photo interesting professional photographer is often well exposed for the highlights this means the highlights are perfectly exposed and the Shadows look dark I love this look the iPhone does something different it'll expose for the entire scene it sees usually this means it exposes for the Shadows when you expose for the Shadows the highlights become blown out and you lose out on all the contrast in your photo we are here to prevent that we're going to force our phones to expose for the highlights the easiest way to do this is to Simply tap subject in your frame and adjust the slider to the right of the focus Square this will bring down the exposure to your liking you can move the slider up and down to perfectly expose for the highlights just like a pro photographer does you want to make sure to keep the Shadows nice and dark and the highlights as perfectly exposed as you can this may seem odd at first and you'll mess up the exposure a lot starting out but with some practice you'll develop a photographer's eye for this kind of stuff you'll be able to nail the exposure every time if you think your shadows are too dark I have good news and the editing process will be able to recover these Shadows pretty well you can't do that with highlights underexposing has this huge advantage that the data in the Shadows isn't lost it can always be brought back later there's another way to go about this as well you can hit the arrow up top here and then click on the plus minus sign on the bottom and then this pulls up the exposure compensation menu I always have this set to at least minus 0.3 you can mess around with this and see what you like over time if you have preserved settings on it'll keep the setting every time you open the camera app which is awesome now for a really low light photography I actually dragged the exposure all the way down to minus 1.7 or -2 the phone loves to expose to everything it sees in the frame and at night this means a lot of Shadows you don't want to expose for the Shadows if you want to expose for the highlights especially at night so what can we do to combat this we drag the exposure all the way down to the phone thinks it's underexposed when in reality it looks just right check out these photos I took at a concert last week side note this was a fret Again concert and it was one of the best concerts I've ever been to just an incredible performance so in the photo here you see the room is dark other than the Lights On Stage my phone was perfectly exposed for the Lights On Stage because I was shooting at -1.7 if I didn't have these settings the photo would look completely washed out the rule for night photography is to underexpose okay so hopefully you're an exposure Pro now it'll take a lot of practice but stick with it now let's talk composition composition is how you frame your shot it's what makes or breaks a good photo each frame has many elements in it it's your job app to show all the elements in the best way possible first off let's talk about the rule of thirds this basically states to keep your subject on the left or right of an image remember those grid lines we enabled earlier you want to align your subject on one of those lines if you can do that every time your photos will begin to look way better one of my favorite composition tips and an easy one to implement is to shoot from a lower angle if you're photographing down the middle of a road don't just shoot at eye level try and Crouch down a bit and get that street and part of the shot too this gives you leading lines and takes your image to another level speaking of leading lines these are any lines in your image that guide your viewers eye when someone looks at the image their eyes will wander by introducing leading lines you get to decide what the bureau looks at and in what order pretty cool right so these three composition tips are fine and all but they aren't strict rules to follow either feel free to learn these and then break them as you wish let your creativity shine through the iPhone 14 pro has three cameras four if you include the 2x crop this gives you a lot of options when choosing your position it lets you shoot wide on the main camera there's an ultra wide camera for those super wide shots and a telephoto lens for getting shots far away we also have the 2x camera and macro mode and night mode but that might be a bit much for this video we're still learning the foundation which you can learn the rest from Once you have that groundwork set personally I find myself either shooting on the main camera or on the telephoto lens all these cameras give you a lot of options when learning how to shoot properly and that can be bad my advice would be to actually limit yourself to one or two of these cameras at first learn them really well and then move on to the others this way you can apply the principles from this video into that one camera option without getting overwhelmed by all the choices I didn't cover shooting a manual or using third-party camera apps here personally I feel like that adds unnecessary friction to the phone photography process and with an iPhone you're leaning away from what the camera is anyways this is just a simple point and shoot camera so take it for what it is anyways let's talk about editing but first if you're a photographer looking to actually start a business and make money from your hobby I've got a free checklist down below it's got over 2 000 downloads and walks you through the first steps to jumpstart your creative business in 30 days free downloads below okay it's no secret that your favorite photographers on Instagram edit their photos some heavily some lightly editing has a bad reputation sometimes people think editing creates an unrealistic photo but the reality is that your phone already does some editing behind the scenes as soon as you capture the photo a lot of the time this isn't how the scene actually looked in real life it's just what your phone thinks it looks like that's where editing comes in every photographer puts on their own photographic style and edit and I certainly have mine today I'll share a preset with you for free that I love using all the time when you shoot in Pro raw editing really helps bring out your photo I love using Lightroom mobile for all my editing I'm going to walk you through my editing workflow real quick here this is the final edit we're gonna see here you can actually see all the principles I was talking about earlier we have a combination of highlights and shadows throughout the scene here we have a sidewalk as a leading line here and I got down low so I can really emphasize That Sidewalk finally we have benches on the thirds of the frame to add more interest into the scene pretty cool how it all comes together let's edit this photo first of of all when you import the prora files into Lightroom they always look super dark this is just how Apple exports them as raw file so don't worry about that let's brighten this up a bit with the exposure then we'll go ahead and adjust the highlights and the Shadows I usually drop the highlights and bring back the Shadows next I'll adjust the blacks here to bring in some more contrast it's fall in Chicago so if we want to adjust these leaves we can as well let's go to the color Tab and open up the mixer and change the green and yellow Hues so we have a more fall theme to it and there's the basic edit it looks a lot better than what we started with now let's use my signature preset you can get this down below for free there's no email required or anything it's the one I applied to almost all my photos I'll walk you through how you can apply this step by step right now first grab your phone go that link below for that free download hit continue on the website click download in the bottom left hit download on the screen and now go to your downloads tab select the file hit share scroll to Lightroom down here hit launch Lightroom right now and you've got it in Lightroom hit the three dots in the upper corner select create preset name your preset and hit the check mark and that's it you can now apply my preset to all your photos now let's apply this to the photo we have right here and make some minor adjustments so that looks great let's adjust the exposure to Brian up a bit bring down the highlights and then bring back a bit of Shadows I think it's looking good so far but let's adjust those trees up top here as well we'll slide the yellow and green Hue sliders to make these trees look a bit more like Vault finally we can go into the effects Tab and add in a bit more of a vignette to draw more Focus down the path and we're done can you believe this was shot in an iPhone from here you can export your photos and share them all over the place if you do share on social media tag me I'm at chrispiet on Instagram and on Twitter at Chris underscore pietta on Twitter I always respond to everyone so that's the best place to talk to me now you have the knowledge to shoot Pro level photos on your phone it's in your hands now to practice practice it'll take a while but it'll give you something to do before my next video drops in a week my name is Chris pieta and I'll see you then