How to take better selfies, in the order that makes a difference

Find the light before anything else

Every other item on this page is worth less than this one. Before you raise the phone, look for the largest single source of light in the room and turn towards it.

Indoors in daylight that is a window. Stand about a metre from it, face roughly 45 degrees towards the glass, and you get a soft gradient across the face, no hard shadows, and a catchlight in each eye. Eyes with no catchlight look flat, and adding one afterwards is one of the few edits that genuinely cannot be faked well.

Then turn the other lights off. A cool window on one cheek and a warm bulb on the other is a mixed-temperature scene, and a single white balance cannot correct both, so the skin reads as patchy however good the camera is.

Where to hold the phone

Extend your arm fully. Distance is the one thing you can change about the geometry of a selfie, and every centimetre helps. A phone at thirty centimetres enlarges the centre of the face noticeably; at sixty it is much less pronounced.

Keep the lens slightly above your eye line, angled down a fraction. Above the eye line narrows the jaw and opens the eyes. Below it widens the jaw and shows the underside of the nose and chin, which is why a phone held at chest height is the least forgiving position there is. Slightly above, not dramatically above: a phone held far overhead foreshortens the body and produces its own recognisable look.

Brace. Tuck your shooting elbow against your ribs, or steady the wrist with the other hand. Indoors the shutter speed is slower than you think and a fair proportion of disappointing selfies are simply not sharp.

Use the volume button as the shutter. Reaching for the on-screen button with your thumb twists the phone at the exact moment of capture. The volume button lets you keep a stable grip, and holding it down fires a burst.

Chin, shoulders and eyes

Three adjustments, all of which feel wrong and all of which photograph well.

Chin forward, then down. Not up. Pushing the chin towards the lens and then dropping it a fraction separates the jaw line from the neck and defines the edge of the face. Lifting the chin does the opposite and shows the underside of the nose.

Turn the shoulders, keep the face. Rotate 20 to 30 degrees away from the lens and bring your face back to it. Square shoulders in a tight frame read as a passport photo.

Look at the lens, not at yourself. This is the one people do not realise they are getting wrong. Watching the preview means your eyes are aimed at the middle of the screen while the lens sits at the top, so every frame shows you looking slightly past the viewer. Use the preview to find the position, then move your eyes to the lens for the actual frames.

For expression, timing beats instruction. A real laugh peaks with the eyes half closed and decays over about two seconds, and the frame you want is in the decay. So hold the shutter down through the reaction rather than trying to produce a face on cue. The posing guide covers the body version of all of this.

Front camera, or turn the phone around

The front camera is a wide lens designed to cover a face at arm's length plus some background. Held that close, a wide lens renders whatever is nearest it largest, which is the whole reason a close selfie looks different from a photo somebody else took of you from two metres away.

So the single biggest upgrade available costs nothing: prop the phone, turn it around, use the rear 2x, set a timer or a remote, and stand back. Two metres is enough to remove the effect almost entirely. The self-portrait logistics page covers propping, focus locking and remotes, and the why a lens flatters page explains the geometry in more detail.

When that is not practical, the front camera with a fully extended arm in good light is perfectly good. Shoot in the stock Camera app rather than a third-party one, because Apple's app gets the full computational pipeline on the front camera and third-party apps frequently get a slightly worse frame, particularly indoors.

For which apps are worth having after that, the ranked list is on the best selfie app page. The short version is that the editing happens afterwards, in Snapseed or Lightroom's free tier, not at capture.

Selfies after dark

Low light is where selfies fall apart, and the rear-facing flash is almost never the answer, because it is a small hard source a short distance from your face and it produces the flat, shiny, washed-out look everybody recognises.

Find a source instead. A shop window, a streetlight you stand beside rather than under, an illuminated sign, a lamp on a table, the light spilling out of a doorway. The rule is unchanged: something larger than your head, off to one side, with nothing else competing.

The front camera's screen flash is a genuinely different thing from the rear flash and worth knowing about. It turns the whole display white, so it is a comparatively large source at very close range, which makes it soft. Its weakness is direction: it lights you from exactly where the camera is, so the face has no shadow at all and goes flat. As a fill alongside a found light it is useful; as the only source it is not.

Two settings that help. Keep Night mode on and hold still for the full exposure, bracing against a wall if you can. And if the scene has a strong colour cast from sodium or neon, leave it rather than fighting it, because a corrected night photo often looks less like the night than the uncorrected one does.

Why the result looks wrong to you

Almost everybody prefers their reflection to their photograph, and there are two separate reasons, only one of which is about the camera.

The first is familiarity. You have seen your face reversed in mirrors thousands of times and un-reversed only in photographs. Faces are slightly asymmetric, so the reversed version is the one you know, and the unreversed one reads as subtly unfamiliar. People shown both generally prefer the mirrored version of themselves and the unmirrored version of their friends, which is a neat confirmation that this is about habit rather than about how you look.

The second is the lens, covered above. A close wide lens does not render a face the way a person standing two metres away sees it.

On an iPhone, Settings, Camera, Mirror Front Camera decides which version gets saved. Switched on, the photo keeps the flip you saw in the preview, which feels more like you and makes any text in shot come out backwards. Switched off, you get the version other people see. Pick one and be consistent, because a feed that mixes both is quietly unsettling.

Ours, so discount it: ShutterAI has a Mirror Mode that makes that choice explicit at capture rather than burying it in a settings screen. It is not released. It arrives on iPhone this fall, free to start, and there is an early list.