For some people, the main reason they have a phone is to take selfies.

Does your selfie game need work? Today, we’re featuring the top 5 tips and tricks today’s selfie experts are using to put their best face forward online.

6) Face Towards a Soft Lighting Source

One of the most important selfie tricks is to find the right light. Of course, the same could be said for general photography – but this is an article about selfie tips.

In any case, selfie cameras (outside of Snapchat and certain newer phones) don’t have front-facing flash. Even if your smartphone does have a flash, it’s probably not very flattering anyway.

Face towards a soft, diffuse lighting source (i.e. a light source that isn’t too bright and spreads its light around a general area instead of focusing on one spot).

Face towards the soft lighting source and avoid harsh light from above (it makes your forehead and face look shiny) or bright light from behind (it makes it tough to distinguish individual features).

5) Download Snapchat for Front-Facing Flash

Do you want a front-facing flash but don’t have a flash on your camera? Snapchat has a decent flash mode that works by lighting up your screen. You don’t need to actually share anything on Snapchat – you can just take a picture from within the Snapchat app and download it.

Download Snapchat, open the app, and switch to the front-facing camera. Look for the lightning bolt flash symbol on the top of the screen, then tap that so it’s activated.

Take a selfie as normal, and the screen will light up with a flash as soon as you press the button.

If you don’t want to share it on Snapchat, then you can just press the download button at the bottom of the screen, which saves the photo to a folder on your device.

It’s not great quality (especially since Snapchat is notoriously bad-quality on Android) but it’s better than a dark selfie.

4) Wide Angle Mode

Certain Android manufacturers – including Samsung – have a wide angle selfie mode you can use to capture a surprisingly wide group of people. It’s incredibly useful if you don’t have long arms – or if you’re trying to squeeze everybody into a picture.

Alternatively, if you have the default Google camera, there’s also a wide-angle or fish-eye mode you can use to replicate the wide angle effect. We’re still hoping for a wide angle selfie mode to appear in the new Android 7.0 Nougat camera.

3) Tilt your Head and Find your Angle

This tip doesn’t pertain specifically to selfies or even Android photography. Nevertheless, finding your perfect angle is always important.

We have psychological proof that tilting your head makes you look more attractive to the opposite sex. It’s also a great way to hide the fact that you don’t have perfectly symmetrical features (most of us don’t).

2) Use Selfie Apps to Make Yourself Look Perfect

Android users have access to dozens of free photo editing apps that are literally categorized as “selfie apps”. These photo editors let you tone, filter, and adjust your selfie to find the perfect look.

Some of the most popular selfie apps and photo editors include:

-Retrica (Free Download)

-YouCam Perfect – Selfie Pro (Free Download)

Both of those apps have been downloaded over 500,000 times. YouCam Perfect- Selfie Pro might sound like a scammy app designed to steal your information, but it’s actually great at beautifying your image.

1) Use Samsung’s Beauty Filter

Samsung has had a beauty filter since the Galaxy S3. However, Samsung enabled their beauty filter by default on the Galaxy S6. This filter softens your skin tone, smoothes out wrinkles, and is a guaranteed way to make you look more beautiful.

To enable this setting, just go to your camera, switch it to front-facing mode, then look for the “beauty” icon at the top of the screen. You can adjust the scale of the beauty filter from 0 to 8. If you set it to 8, you kind of start to look like an alien. 2 is the default, although I think 3 looks best – it’s a good mix between your natural appearance and a beauty filter without quite enough touch-ups to make people suspicious.

What are your favorite selfie taking tips?