We have all dreamt more than once about the wanderlust lifestyle of travel bloggers and influencers globetrotting the world.

One thing that inspires me more than the trip itself is the quality and beauty of their pictures. How they achieve it? Do they carry huge and expensive equipment with them?

Each time I travel to somewhere and take pictures with my phone, they look ok but nothing spectacular or out of a magazine.

Influencers, on the other hand, even when they photograph the most simple and basic moment of their day, such as drinking a latte or just walking down the street, their pictures look always so stunning!

We have all tried many filters from Instagram and other apps but, for myself, I have never really achieved that professional influencer-alike look.

Melanie Martins, luxury travel content creator with over 2m followers, and one of the most followed Portuguese on Instagram shares with us 3 tips to get your shots to the next level:

1. Get good natural light directly on your face or the subject of your photo.

If you are taking a portrait shot, getting slices of shadows on your face will look quite bad. Either you are totally facing the light or you are totally in the shadow. Unless you want to do some specific artistic picture and play with shadows, this should be your number one rule for portrait.

In fact this shot was taken with my iPhone. It’s natural light only. – she explains to us.

2. Get an interesting angle or composition and avoid tourist-alike shots.

The one thing you don’t want to do is simply posing, looking to the camera and smile like every tourist does. Get creative and try to get a “caught in the moment” shot where you will look much more natural and candid.

3. Get Presets instead of Filters.

Filters are cheaper for sure but they are very basic settings and you won’t achieve professional results with them. Presets, on the other hand, are powerful professionally created settings to achieve a specific look on your photos. Each Preset has a purpose and can totally transform a picture from boring to stunning!

Mobile Presets can be imported and used on the Free Lightroom app available both for IOS and Android. Once imported on the app, you will be able to apply them directly in one single click on your photos and get instant professional results. 

The first 2 advices are quite easy to follow. But where can we find those Presets?

Melanie explains that “Presets are created by Photographers and professional post-editors. They are the ones who create them. The majority keep them for themselves as they don’t want to be copied.

As a photographer and post-editor myself, I also created my very own Presets to use for my pictures and have cultivated my own style.

But following the advice of my community, I decided to release them online so everyone could use them and achieve professional results even on mobile pictures.”

I could finally understand that Presets were the make-or-break to achieve professional pictures no matter if they were taken with your phone or not.

Checking on MelanieMartinsPresets.com, her online store where she released her own Presets, I couldn’t believe how powerful and impressive is the transformation:

But the transformation was not only on Melanie’s pictures. Clients all over the world were sharing their before/After too:

All of them confirmed their pictures where taken with their mobile phone! I don’t know about you, but I know for sure what I will be using to edit my next shots!