5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Photos

Capturing your car in a game like Forza Horizon has its quirks, high points, low points, and unique features. There's a bunch of strategies on Discord, Reddit, Forums and such suggesting what's the best way to capture a photo in this game. However, there's also photography principles that are applied in the real world that work just as well in this beautiful game. Let's look at a few so that you can take your photos from their potential to a commanding presence:

In game vignettes used (top/bottom) to add the illusion of added depth in the sky and pavement.

1 | Vignettes... Don't be afraid of using them right!

They are either used really well or really wrong with little in between. The purpose of the vignette slider in Forza Horizon is to help draw the attention of the eye away from the sides of the photo and instead towards the focal point of the photo. Using it well can include drawing back in cloud details, adding depth to pavement, or shading trees, walls, or parts of the photo's sides that do not need any attention. Used wrong? You see a thick black burn on the sides of the photo that screams unnatural in its placement and becomes a distraction rather than a supplement. A healthy rule of thumb: keep it intentional and subtle. If you see it, it's a bad vignette. The better 2 vignettes Forza provides are the top to bottom and left to right vignettes. The corner vignette is a bit too jarring and rarely helpful.

Light coming from afternoon light and overcast allows the hood to shine with a reasonable amount of shadow preserved on the hood for depth while even more depth is added with a full shadow underneath, emphasizing the Aventador's aggressive hood.

2 | Your light source is the conductor.

Don't fight it. The photos of cars that "feel flat" are the ones that don't have a prevalent light source illuminating the car. Embrace the light highlighting or hugging contour lines of the car's bodywork. A good habit: don't be afraid of swapping time of day and weather to see if there's a more captivating combination for your car's ambience.

Silver paint on this car, (essentially fully neutral midtone) allows the car to easily share the color of its environment, allowing the car to immerse itself more naturally in with the tunnel light while drawing the most attention to the bright tunnel end and taillights.

3 | Consider your car's color in its environment.

The color of your car can seriously complement your "capture intentions" or ruin your plans. A bright colored car may need more contrasting light and shadows to showcase it with intriguing depth. If the car is darker, a little light on the car goes a long way and it will more efficiently add depth to the car. A healthy rule of thumb: consider your car's paint material, color, lightness, and environment's brightness.

This photo embraces the darkest gray value for shadows and a carefully dialed in highlight by exposure slider. Any darker would cause very noticeable, aggressive shadows in the bottom left area.

4 | Watch the brightest & darkest areas as you dial your contrast, brightness, and exposure.

(especially if you are post-processing.) Too much shadows or highlights will cause the extreme parts of your photos to be non-recoverable for toning down or sprucing up those areas later on. A good practice for shadows: watch the darkest parts of the photo for the darkest gray to vanish into full black. For the largest gamut of pixels available, Dial brightness, contrast, or exposure to keep one notch of dark gray over black flooded areas. For highlights, watch your brightest areas (often the sky) to determine what details are worth preserving or hiding. Consider how much attention you want on your focal point vs. the background.

This was cropped to remove empty sky and pavement, keeping the focus on how the car and fence guide the viewer's eye from right to left.

5 | A Powerful Crop Might Be the Midas Touch

Often, there's an opportunity to leverage a crop to eliminate distractions. So many photos have potential to be great, but they suffer from too many details in the corners that are taking away from their desired outcome. Too much sky or pavement? Try a wider crop. I personally love 21:9 for a cinematic effect. Branches or light posts distracting on the sides? Zoom in a little bit or see if a crop is more effective. The mindset: A little pixels lost is okay if it means a clearer story is told.

Have fun with your future captures!

Vindico