Here's the best way to make every photo you snap beautiful — on any device

This is a great exposure if I want to focus on people's faces and don't care what's out the window.

If I were only interested in seeing out the window, this would be a good option.

Left to its own devices, my smartphone opted for a middle ground that didn't expose anything particularly well.

But that situation is actually pretty rare. You can find it in the shade on a sunny day, or on very hazy days, like the one in the shot above.

I shot the image above at an improv show in a dark shed with ad-hoc lights — and way under-exposed it. Thanks to a powerful camera sensor and the magic of Photoshop, I was able to bring light back in after the fact. But the result is off-color, dingy, and processed-looking.

When not enough (or too much) light hits your sensor, the resulting image will never look quite right.

This image was much better-exposed in camera (though still not perfect). Here, the mid-range of the image matches the light coming off the subject's face so I didn't need to do much editing. With less editing, every part of the shot — from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights — looks more real and natural.

You'd think noon on a sunny day would be a great time to shoot — there's light everywhere.

But depending on the angle of your subject to the sun, you can easily under-expose an image. With bright light shining into your lens but faces in shadow, your camera will struggle to properly expose the image on its own.

In this image I ignored the bright sky and beach and exposed for the red glow of the boardwalk off my subjects' faces.

In this case, I exposed for the right side of the man's face — stepping it up just a bit so the left would also be visible. As long as that's nailed, the dark shadow of his jacket or bright glare off the wall don't matter much.

In this shot, my camera thought I had exposed way too bright — letting too much light in. That's because of the spotlights shining right into the lens. Left to it's own devices, it would have gone way darker. But I knew the woman's face was most important, and it was in shadow.

Many cameras — and photographers — make the same bad judgement when exposing for darker skin. They apply the norms of properly exposed white skin to people with darker skin and end up erasing a lot of the richness and tone from their subjects' faces.

There's a lot to say on this subject, but the short version is: try to expose for how your subjects look in real life, not the flattening average your camera aims for. An exposure nudge up or down can real whole new levels of color or depth across the spectrum of human skintones.

These cheerleaders twirled around on the field for a long time, but I couldn't make an image I liked. Then I saw them headed for the only beam of direct sunlight around and hurriedly lowered my exposure to match it. When they passed through it, I snapped, and suddenly they contrasted nicely with the background in rich sunset tones.

There was a lot of light shining off the pool during this swim lesson. I lowered my exposure until the bright water showed up as a midtone, then got this interesting silhouette.

Here's an album cover I shot for a Chicago musician in the middle of the street on a sunny day. Exposing for the side of his face in the sun's shadow, I blew out the bright background — drawing all the attention to his expression.

I notice a harsh floodlight reflecting off this football player's face. Exposing all the way down, I caught just the floodlit details and blacked out the rest of the scene.

This keeps over-exposed shadows from looking grainy.

As long as the important parts are properly exposed.

If you want to understand manual controls to fully master exposure, check out this guide.