How to photograph your nails

The light does most of the work

Nail polish is a glossy curved surface. What you photograph is not the polish, it is the reflection of whatever is in front of it, so the shape of your light source is the shape of the shine.

• A window is the best light you own. Large, soft and free. About a metre away, on an overcast day or on the shaded side of the house.
• Direct sun is the worst. It is a small hard source, so it produces a tiny white blowout on each nail and black shadows in between.
• Light across the hand, not straight at it. Side light shows the curve of the nail and the thickness of the polish. Front light flattens both, which is why flash photos of a manicure look like a colour chart rather than a manicure.
• The white card is not optional. Plain paper on the shadow side bounces light back and opens up the underside of the fingers. It is the cheapest improvement available.
• Never use the phone flash. It is a hard point source centimetres from the lens, so it puts a hotspot in the middle of every nail and a hard shadow under the hand.

For a chrome, glitter or mirror finish the reflection is the whole point, so give it something to reflect: sit closer to the window and let a strip of bright sky or a white card fall across the nails at an angle.

Focus, distance and why the ultra-wide handles close-ups

Every camera has a minimum focus distance, and phone main cameras are bad at close work. On most iPhones the main camera cannot focus closer than about 10 to 12 cm, and pushing closer just gives you a soft photo.

iPhone Pro models solve this with the ultra-wide camera, which focuses down to around 2 cm. Inside roughly 14 cm the phone switches automatically to the ultra-wide in macro mode, which is why the framing jumps as you lean in. That switch is the feature, not a fault.

Two things to watch at close range. Depth of field is very shallow, so keep the nail plane roughly parallel to the phone or only some of the nails will be sharp. And the closer you get, the more likely the phone itself blocks the window light and shadows the hand.

ShutterAI's Nails & Rings mode is built for this distance: it holds focus on the nail rather than the knuckle, and keeps the shine from clipping to white.

Getting the polish colour right

The most common complaint about nail photos is that the colour is wrong, and it is almost always one of three causes.

• Coloured walls and surfaces. Light bouncing off a green wall, a red sofa or a wooden table lands on the hand and shifts both the polish and the skin. This is the biggest single cause of a nude turning peach or a grey turning lilac. Put something white rather than something wooden under the hand.
• Mixed light. A warm bulb on one side and daylight on the other gives two different casts on the same nail, and no white balance setting fixes both. Turn the bulbs off and use the window alone.
• Auto white balance drift. Phones re-guess the colour of light between frames, so two shots of the same manicure come out different. Lock exposure and focus with a tap and hold.

For a shade you need to be accurate, put something known-neutral in frame for one test shot: a white card, printer paper, a grey towel. Correct that shot until the neutral is neutral, then apply the same correction to the rest.

Hand poses and backgrounds

A relaxed hand photographs better than a posed one, and the difference is mostly in the tendons. Some reliable poses:

• The soft claw. Fingers loosely curled, hand resting on its side. Shows the full length of the nail and hides the knuckles.
• Resting on a surface. Hand flat but relaxed on linen, a book or a folded towel. Best for the full set at once.
• Holding something. A mug, a glass, the polish bottle. Gives the hand a job, which stops it looking staged, and adds scale.
• Hand on the opposite forearm. Flattering because the skin behind the hand is a similar tone, so the nails are the only high-contrast thing in frame.

Keep the wrist straight rather than bent back, drop the shoulder so the hand is not tense, and shake the hand out between shots. For backgrounds, plain and slightly textured beats plain and glossy: linen, a knit sleeve, paper, a matte painted surface. Avoid busy patterns and strong colours, for the reasons above.

Phone settings that actually matter

• Tap and hold to lock focus and exposure on the nails, then slide down slightly to protect the shine. A blown highlight has no colour left in it and cannot be recovered.
• Use the volume button or a two-second timer. At close range, the movement from tapping the screen is enough to lose focus.
• Shoot at the highest quality your phone offers and crop afterwards. Cropping a close-up is normal, and more pixels means the crop still holds up.
• Clean the lens. At macro distance a fingerprint is a visible haze across the whole photo, and hands touch lenses constantly.
• Turn off any beauty or skin-smoothing mode. It smooths the nail surface as well, which removes exactly the texture that shows the finish.

Editing without lying about the colour

The point of a nail photo is usually the shade, so the edit has one job: make the photo match what the nail looks like in the room. Correct white balance first, using something neutral in frame, then lift shadows slightly, then pull the highlights down a little so the shine has colour in it rather than being pure white.

What to leave alone: saturation, which turns a wearable mauve into a shade nobody can buy; heavy sharpening, which puts white halos along the nail edge; and skin smoothing, which flattens the nail surface too. If the hands need anything, a light touch on dryness and redness is enough.

Finally, export at the size you need. A close-up for a feed post wants 1080x1350, and every other placement is in the Instagram photo sizes guide.