How does the iPhone 6s camera compare to other iPhone generations?(snapsnapsnap.photos) |
How does the iPhone 6s camera compare to other iPhone generations?(snapsnapsnap.photos) |
The iPhone's metering is suspicious. It seems to average all areas of the frame equally, resulting in underexposure when the background's exposure is different from the exposure you'd use the capture the subject. Of course this will always happen with any camera, by my A7ii seems to be very good at picking a correct exposure. (Of course it has exposure compensation and manual mode, so I can always override its choice, which is all I really ask.) You can see this demonstrated in the "backlit" photo with the article, I think the exposure could go up a little bit more to get some more detail from the shadowy clouds and the boat, with the only side effect of blowing that cloud out more. (It's already gone.)
I also think the iPhone's sensor is capable of collecting more light data than Apple allows it to. It is amazing how much dynamic range modern sensors pick up. When I first got my A7ii I put it into auto bracket mode. By default it does something like -1/3, 0, +1/3. This adds no data. After some more testing, even at +3, 0, -3, you can still recover the other two exposures from any one of the others with no significant loss of detail. So I don't bracket anymore and I've never had to throw away a picture because of the exposure.
That said, that is all with RAW files that capture data that can't be visible in the JPEG. The iPhone tone maps all that data to make a JPEG, and its tone mapping works differently than how I'd manually do it in lightroom. The RAW files off my camera capture so much data that you can ridiculously under- or over-expose and still get something that looks nice on the computer screen. (Not as perfect for the pixel-peepers as the correct exposure of course, but something that would look fine on your wall at 8x10 or shared to G+.) The iPhone's JPEGs are unfixable in Lightroom, the data isn't there and all you can do is make bright stuff brighter or dark stuff darker, which you almost never want to do.
Finally, based on EXIF data, I've found that the iPhone chooses some oddball exposure settings, using overly-fast shutter speeds at high ISOs when it could use a fine shutter speed at a fine ISO to get the same exposure. But I'm sure that's optimized for how people normally use their phone's cameras, not for whatever I happen to be shooting at the moment. I know the interplay between ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Most people just want a picture of their friend eating dinner. And to be fair, the A7ii on auto-ISO + P mode will choose oddball exposures too. 1/8000s at ISO 32000? Back in my day, we were happy when we had ISO 400 film :P
So anyway, the iPhone camera is disappointing on a technical level, but the best camera is the one you have with you, so I can't complain. I'd rather have an imperfect picture than no picture at all.
That said, I do wish it were possible to save raw images in the Camera app.
Not really RAW, but at least you get all the bits you can.
Which would be useful to see how the scores have improved or not improved, much like how this article is demonstrating the progress of the iPhone camera.
It's 100% valid and perfectly clear to not include "the best Android phone cameras" as that is not the goal.
also for fun there's a behind the scenes on the same link that shows how the shots came together.
How is the lens attached to the iPhone? How is the focus controlled?
http://androidcommunity.com/android-flagships-may-have-margi...
tl;dr first time it doesn't beat them.
Thanks, this was my first crack at doing something with Canvas! For last year's we did it in CSS animations but with it never had great performance.
http://www.lynda.com/Lightroom-training-tutorials/450-0.html
Watch the first 3 videos I linked, play with Lightroom, and then come back and watch again. You'll learn more now that you're familiar with the tool.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLllFqBuTM0WI0fC_PujkG...
I watched the first three videos and it actually turned me off to lightroom a bit or at least the workflow that was demonstrated. For example, when the author used the clone stamp tool it was painful to me that he just left those duplicated clouds in the final image without attempting to merge them in more gracefully. The final post-processed images look really amateur to me - overly artificial but not in a tasteful way. But all the youtube comments seem to be very positive so take my comments with a grain of salt.
I always assumed lightroom was used primarily to correct mistakes made by the photographer in exposure settings but it's use here seemed more artistic in nature... more like a fancier version of Adobe Elements. For example, one of the final steps in the author's workflow is to select a Camera Calibration which essentially applies some filter to the entire image like "Vivid" - which I thought negated all the effort to manually adjust all the individual colors, contrast, saturation, etc.
Anything you can achieve in lightroom you can achieve in photoshop. So why lightroom?
Firstly, it's optimised for the type of things you want to do to photographs (compared to the scope of what's possible in all of digital image manipulation i.e. photoshop). Editing functionality, UI and additional tooling/features are all focussed (pun not intended) on this, so it's a much more pleasant experience when working with hundreds (or even tens!) of photos
Secondly, lightroom is as much about editing photos as it is about managing collections photos. You might want to tag photos, rate them, search for "photos taken in this date range, with this lens, rated above 4 stars". You will have a hard time doing this by other means.
Don't dismiss it because you know photoshop, or because you don't like that guy's style. Shoot RAW, give lightroom a go, you'll be surprised how much you can recover photos which would otherwise go in the trash if shot as JPEG. Lightroom also has lens profiles built-in, so it knows how to correct vignetting, distortion etc for each lens
Try shooting RAW + JPEG and see the differences between the pics.
Personally, I believe that doing the post-processing myself is part of the experience of photography, and I find it fun to tune each photo according to my tastes. But I do understand that's not for everyone.
If you're in the studio creating scenes, you aren't going to use your iPhone, so it doesn't really matter. If you're going to buy a camera to carry everywhere, you're still not going to use your iPhone. So it's really an academic theoretical issue, in my opinion.
Meanwhile, your DSLR is sitting at home in the closet. Guess which picture wins.
Here are two pictures I took recently, one with the iPhone, when the light was amazing, and one with my DSLR much later in the day, when the light sucked: https://goo.gl/photos/cnMFQaeUNHcBQdVG7
The clouds in the iPhone photo look amazing, and there are no cars in the street cluttering the view. But zoom in and see nothing but sensor noise and blurring from compression and generally poor technical performance of the camera.
Then look at the one taken with my DSLR. You can zoom in far down the street and read signs perfectly. But there is nothing interesting in the picture at all.
The iPhone phone camera sucked. The iPhone photo wins.
(Honestly, the iPhone camera almost ruins the picture, it would have looked amazing with the DSLR. But it was at home on my shelf. Not very useful there.)
Ever heard of medium format? (and there are other options too).
I find this modern preoccupation with crazy ISOs (which one would never use in the film era) a red herring. Especially for landscape work, it's a non issue. What you want there is excellent dynamic range, which those offers.
And there are some such as these that are quite the monster: Pentax 645Z.
And it'd be mostly irrelevant anyway, because it ignores all the other advantages of using a DSLR.
I expect noise to get lower and lower and low light performance to increase, leading to sharper (due to less noise reduction) and less noisier images in the coming years, though, due to the small available physical space and small sensor probably always a step behind larger sensors (like the ones one would find in larger cameras).
Maybe it will be possible to close that gap? For many situations that gap is already quite small when, e.g. comparing many typical image viewing situations with images made under good lighting conditions. On close examination images from cameras with larger sensors would typically still be sharper, though, mostly due to them being able to have a higher resolution with lower noise (though, as I said, in many typical viewing applications those differences are, always depending on the photos and in which context it was made, sometimes imperceptible).
What will not be possible are zoom lenses, interchangeable lenses or, really, any kind of freedom with the lenses at all. Probably also unrealistic is a variable aperture and a sensor size that would allow one to play with depth of field in the first place. That is a fundamental difference that cannot be overcome within the physical envelope of a smartphone that is still recognizable a smartphone and not something else, some weird smartphone camera hybrid.
All that DSLR wankery is kind of pointless, though. The goal here is to make the very goddamn best camera that the physical envelope allows for and smartphones have done an astonishingly great job at that. Those are awesome cameras, no ifs and buts about it. Given what they have to work with they are unabashedly awesome.
DSLRs and other large-sensor cameras are fundamentally different beasts. Comparing them or even holding them up as some sort of great goal for smartphone cameras seems kinda … dumb? … I don’t know, pointless? … short-sighted? to me.
While true, also false.
Take something like the Sony Nex series; mirrorless digital system camera. Not much larger than a (big) smart phone. Sure, bigger than an iPhone. But it might not be that difficult to fit the "rest" of a smart phone into one of those. In fact, it probably have all the parts: battery, (touch?)screen, microphone, wireless radio (not cellular, but that could be changed), speaker (maybe needs to be added).
But a better way to go would probably be some kind of light-field technology. I think that holds more promise for better pictures in a similar form factor, and the possibility of ease of use.
The device itself can obviously be very, very small. Obviously. No one is disputing that. But the lens is the issue if the sensor gets larger and a smartphone with Sony Nex sensor size (APS-C) is impossible.
There is nowhere to go with the available space. Not if you want to keep the smartphone actually smartphone sized.
Also worth noting is that Sony cameras already run a customized and locked-down version of Android, though you wouldn't know from using it.
I think that taking a classical digital still image on a tiny sensor is probably soon going to hit an "ISO-wall", but so far we haven't started doing much trickery with the images apart from simple noise/sharpness/toning treatments.
I think smartphones will lead the development of "cheats" to get better images. Imagine taking a portrait of 3 people in low-light by exposing a 1 second film (maybe including a couple of flashes). The processor then works (very hard) to build together single frame in which everyone's eyes are open, the moving subjects are frozen and sharp, and the shadow detail is pulled from the dark background by averaging out the noise from the thousands of frames.
I think the accelerometer should be used to trace the movement during this exposure, which can be used in combination with the anti-shake blur removal algorithms which are being introduced into various programs now.
Add to this some other technologies like deep learning that can be used to "guess" what's in a region of an image where we have noisy, obscured or OOF data.
I'm optimist, I think we will see not better classical images, but just better images. There will be lots of crazy "three-eyes"-artifacts produced by this, just like we see when programs try to stitch panoramas. Also, it will upset photography purists to no end. It will question the entire notion of what a photograph is.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/28/apple-granted-two-...
And then there's the option of having multiple cameras taking the same shot, with different focal lengths (whether fixed or zoom) on each. You're still limited in dynamic range by the photosite size, but as we're seeing now, that's often not so huge a problem in many scenarios. One startup working on such a principle is Light:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2015/04/18/photo-startu...
It seems like the opposite of short-sighted to me; to look beyond the limitations of today's technology and find ways to make the impossible incrementally more achievable over time.
Where we are now is the "nowhere to go" of not long ago.
I had a Kodak DC-1. The notion of "a digital camera the size of a sugar cube" was laughable. Now we've got something even smaller taking pictures most people can't distinguish from a DSLR.
I expect the next breakthrough will be using the display itself as a platform for a phased-array "light as electromagnetic waves" sensor, allowing a software-defined virtual lens for a large-format imager (and oh so much more).
Nowhere to go? We've done amazing things with that nothing for the last 30 years. We're not gonna stop.
The lack of interchangeable lenses, manual control, and RAW files will always limit the appeal of camera phones for pros and more advanced amateurs.
The time it takes between me pressing the shutter button until the camera records the shot as usable data -- this is the important factor. This is what is holding phones back. On phones, I have to wait sometimes up to 0.25-0.5 seconds or even infuriatingly more between the time when I tap the software "capture" reticle and it records the image. This is what is unacceptable in modern phone cameras. By that time the cat has moved, the play is over, my hand has shaken.
On dSLRs this is refreshingly fast. I half-press to focus, complete-press and now I have the image, nearly instantly from a human perception of time, even given the mechanical slowness of the mirror movement. I know the limiting factor is for all practical purposes my own reflexes. For the phone, I know it's crap hardware/software.
Every year I get a new camera (along with new features) from Apple for the cost of $200-300 (New Contract Free Price - Selling my old phone used). That is nearly impossible to do with my SLRs.
For serious travel photography, I enjoy using my 5D2, but there really is no comparison between using my full kit, and using my iphone.
I prefer my iphone.
http://www.kurtmunger.com/sony_nex_20mm_f_2_8id345.html
Sure, we're definitely talking something bigger than a standard iphone. So maybe not possible in a general market smart phone (I'd love to have the possibility of changing lenses on my phone, even if it wouldn't quite fit in the smallest pockets any more...).
The only other option would probably be some kind of lightfield tech, say a grid of 8x10 VGA resolution cameras that feed into a single software or ASIC processing unit...
* 30x optical zoom
* optical image stabilization
* tripod mount
* flash hot shoe
* 58mm filter mount
* good ergonomics & no touchscreen
* RAW files
* scriptability of shooting e.g. for thunderstorms (camera triggered by lightning)
* replaceable battery
* removable storage