Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Can a $100 Smartphone Camera beat $900 Flagships?”.
I want to prove a bit of a point in this article. This right here is the galaxy s7, which cannot be had on eBay for about $ 100, and this is the pixel 3 excel at $ 900, but still considered by many to have the best smartphone camera on the market. I’M going to show you just how close you can get in terms of picture quality by just editing the photos in a few key ways. Here are two photos on the Left. We have a shot from the 12 megapixel camera on the s7 and on the right. One from the 12.2 megapixel on the pixel, the difference is night and day.
The pixel has more clarity, better colors, a greater dynamic range and more, but a little bit of tweaking can turn this on its head. Let’S start with this side-by-side, the s7 gets blitzed, not least because all of that detail on the sky has pretty much disappeared, so we’re gon na open up in Lightroom, and the first issue we need to address here is this overexposure. It’S probably the biggest issue with photos taken on cheaper phones because they try and properly expose the darker subjects in a shot. The light to sky often becomes a blown-out mess.
It’S not ideal, but Lightroom lets you target the brightest white parts of your image and bring them down, which means that, although you have lost detail in that overexposed area, this will exaggerate what details you do have remaining after fully tweaking the image. This is what I managed to get and when I put these two side-by-side and asked people which ones they preferred the opinion shifted from 100 % for the pixel to actually 80 %, preferring the galaxy s7. One immediate takeaway here is shoot in RAW. You do need a compatible device, because shooting uncompressed files needs a firm that can save a lot of data very quickly but at the same time a lot of fun support it and it makes a massive difference, whereas with a standard JPEG image where all the processing Is happening at the moment when you take the photos, the contrast and the white balance is all being preset with a raw photo. It’S really the phone capturing the pure information in the scene, so because your phone is no longer trying to figure out itself with sharpness and which color settings to use with a raw image, you can tweak it your own way from scratch.
Let’S take these two shots and again clearly pixel three takes the cake, but a bit of color adjustment is going to make a massive difference. The first important thing is vibrance and compared to just increasing saturation that would just boost every color on screen. Vibrance only boosts the more muted ones. Lightroom also has a setting called clarity which increases contrast, but, unlike actually just moving the contrast, slider up, it only targets the mid-tones so like the vibrance setting, maintains the core essence of the original image, but just enhances it.
Low-Light is a very real problem on budget or even older flagship phones, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid blurring and noise and obviously your photos are going to suffer versus the pixels excellent night sight mode, but there’s still quite a bit. You can do about it. Firstly, on auto mode, your budget phone is going to do its absolute best to make sure the image is bright, and this comes at the cost of green, so step. One is to go into manual mode and turn the ISO down which will darken the image, but also improve the quality. In the end, it’s OK for the image to be dark. It’S meant to be a dark environment. Now from here, there are three main tools we’ll be using the first to counter the grain is noise reduction, this essentially groups together, similar pixels, giving them a more even tone and it’s very effective, but it can make your image softer, which isn’t ideal when you factor In that, it’s probably already gon na be pretty soft because of the low light so to counter that I’m gon na combine clarity with the sharpness feature, but we can only use this in moderation, otherwise, it’ll work against the noise reduction and reintroduce grain.
Lastly, we need to change the color temperature. 20:19 flagships have become much better at compensating for shots taken and really warm soft lighting. But sadly this is not a gift present on cheaper or older phones.
So, by making the temperature cooler and by bringing up vibrance a tad, the s7 shot very quickly starts to look almost indistinguishable in quality from the pixel. A lot of Google’s advantage comes from its color processing, which is another way of saying it does a lot of the edits that we’ve been doing manually, but just automatically every time you take a photo Google’s algorithm, boosts, vibrance, adds high dynamic range and employs a powerful Noise reduction, but a lot of this is stuff that a good third-party editing tool can compensate for so the takeaways and the first one is that you can get a very capable camera phone for not a lot of money. Number two color processing is something that the pixel phones do really well and it’s important and useful, but a lot of it can be done yourself. So this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker underexposing.
An image is better than overexposing one. When you underexpose most of the details, are preserved and you’ll get a dark looking picture, but then you can manually raise the shadows in Lightroom and the fourth thing is that so long as your phone supports it and you’ve got enough, storage then shoot in RAW. It just gives you a whole lot more information in your shots, which means that pretty much as soon as you whip out an advanced editor like Lightroom you’re gon na have a lot more information to play with all right guys. Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you learned something and if you did don’t forget to subscribe for more videos like this, my name is Aaron. This is mr. who’s, the boss, I’ll catch you in the next one. .