Midday photos have a look, and it is not a good one. Eyes vanish into shadow under the brows, a hard line cuts across the top lip, the sky is flat white, everybody is squinting.
That is not the phone failing. It is the light. At noon the sun is a small, extremely bright source almost directly overhead, which is the least forgiving arrangement there is for a face.
You cannot move the sun, but you can move yourself, and that turns out to be enough.
Why noon is the hardest light of the day
Two things make overhead sun difficult. The first is direction. Light from straight above lands on the tops of your features and leaves everything beneath them dark, so your brow shades your eyes, your nose casts a shadow onto your lip and your chin shades your neck.
The second is contrast. The sunlit part of a scene can be many times brighter than the shaded part, and a sensor records only a certain range of brightness in one frame. iPhones fight this by merging several exposures, which recovers a surprising amount, but there is a limit. Past it you get a white sky with nothing in it, or shadows that turn to grey mush when you brighten them. This all eases as the day moves on, so if the schedule is yours, shoot nearer the ends of it.
Open shade, and the kind of shade to avoid
The simplest fix is to step into shade, but not all shade is equal. Under a leafy tree you get dapples, hard patches of full sun scattered across a dark face, which is worse than either extreme on its own.
What you want is open shade: the shadow of a building or a wall, with a clear view of open sky to one side. The block above cuts the direct sun, and the bright sky in front becomes the source. It is soft, it arrives from the side rather than straight down, and it fills the eye sockets instead of hollowing them out.
Stand just inside the shade line
Find the edge where a building's shadow meets sunlit ground and stand a step inside it, facing the bright area. Direct sun is off your face, but the sunlit pavement, sand or wall in front throws back a large, soft, slightly warm light. It is the closest thing to a free studio outdoors.
Doorways, awnings and archways
A doorway does something an open shadow cannot: it blocks light from every direction except one. Stand just inside one looking out and light reaches you only through the opening, so it arrives from the side and wraps across your face.
Awnings, arcades and bus shelters work the same way. Stand close enough to the opening that your face is lit rather than merely out of the sun.
Turning your back to the sun
If there is no shade, put the sun behind you. Your face falls into its own shadow, lit by whatever bounces off the ground, and the sun edges your hair and shoulders with a bright rim that separates you from the background.
The catch is that the camera now sees a bright background and a dark face, and left alone it exposes for the background. Tap your face on screen so it meters there instead. The sky will get lighter than you might like, which is the better half of the trade.
Bright ground helps: sand, pale pavement and light stone throw light back into a backlit face; grass and dark asphalt do not.
Setting exposure yourself instead of letting the phone guess
The camera has no idea which part of the frame you care about, and tapping tells it. A tap sets focus and exposure on that point, and the sun slider beside the yellow box pushes it brighter or darker. Press and hold instead and the camera locks both, so moving slightly will not send the brightness jumping around.
In harsh light, err slightly darker. Highlights that clip to pure white contain no information, and no editor invents it back. Shadows still hold data, and lifting them later costs noise but not detail.
What can be fixed afterwards and what cannot
Once the photo exists, work in this order: exposure, then shadows and highlights, then colour, then anything stylistic. Lifting shadows and pulling highlights down softens the contrast, and warming the image counteracts the blue cast open shade leaves on skin. What you cannot repair is a blown highlight, a black shadow or a squint.
Harsh light does suit some treatments. Deep shadows and strong shapes are what black and white photography was built around, so a mono conversion can turn a difficult shot into a deliberate one. Sweet Selfie's Mono and Fade filters hold up on high contrast light, and its one-tap studio lighting can even out a face the sun has carved up.
Quick answers
Why do my eyes look like dark holes in sunny photos?
Your brow sits above your eyes, and light from overhead cannot get past it, so the shadow lands exactly where your eyes are. Tilting your chin up slightly, or standing where the light arrives from the side, puts light back into the sockets.
Should I use flash outdoors in the middle of the day?
It can help, because a flash fired in daylight fills the shadows under the brows and chin without changing the background much. The limitation is range: a phone flash reaches a few feet, so it works close up and does nothing across a plaza.
Can editing bring back a white sky?
Not if it is fully clipped. When an area records as pure white the file holds no variation to recover, and pulling the highlight slider down gives flat grey. Detail does return if the sky is merely very bright, which is why exposing a little darker is a good habit.
There is no shade anywhere. Now what?
Turn your back to the sun, meter for your face, and use anything pale nearby as a reflector: a white wall, a light shirt, a towel held low and out of frame. Failing that, look down for a few seconds before the shutter fires so your eyes are not already squeezed shut.
Where to get it
Sweet Selfie: Camera & Editor covers the outdoor side of this well: one-tap studio lighting for faces the sun has treated badly, a beauty mode that keeps skin texture, eight filters including Mono, Fade and Instant film, nine frames, a self timer, a framing grid, 1x to 3x zoom, and exports at square, 4:5, 9:16 and 16:9 with no watermark. It is free on the App Store.
Next time the sun is overhead, take one step into the shade first.