Making good photos

From postmarketOS
To avoid reflections on the screen, you can take the photo from the side.

Here are a few tips on how to make photos with devices running postmarketOS look relatively good, even if you just use another phone to make the photo.

Taking the photo

  • Put your device on one or more pages of white paper, so it's easy to see it.
  • Make sure that the whole device is on the photo.
  • Run something postmarketOS specific on it, for example:
    • postmarketos-demos program
    • postmarketOS background from the artwork repository
    • uname -a in a terminal showing -postmarketOS in the kernel name
    • typing something with "postmarketOS" in a text input
  • If you have problems with the flash of the camera reflecting on the phone's screen, just shoot at it from a different angle (see example on the right).
  • If you're trying to photograph the console, but it's too hard to do it, try to make one photo where the whole device is visible and another one where you just photograph the interesting part of the terminal.
  • Finally focus your device and take a non-blurry photo (or multiple ones just to make sure).

Post processing

The example photo on the right had the following post processing applied. Of course this is optional, especially if you already have a good photo without any post processing.

It may also make your photo look worse, in case of the photo on the right it happened to look pretty good. Consider if the result is really better than what you had before, and if it is not and you want to improve the image quality, it's probably worth trying another camera.

  • With GIMP:
    • Cut out the device
    • Cut out the screen and put it on an extra layer
    • Use "Colors / Brightness-Contrast" to improve both the device and screen contrast independently
    • Add a shadow effect if you want to do that (Filters / Light and Shadow / Drop Shadow)
    • Possibly use "Filters / Artistic / Cartoon" on the device to improve the contrast some more (device layer only)
  • Use exiftool -all= -overwrite_original file.jpg to remove all metadata

See also