Maximize Image Quality From Your Mobile Phone Camera
Mobile phone cameras go along way towards making photography simple and easy, but as with any camera, there are a number of ways you can improve the quality of your results. Here are some of the steps I take with my iPhone 5S:
1. Control the exposure. Touch the part of the screen where you want the camera to sample it.
2. Leave HDR mode turned on. The small sensors in cell phone cameras have small pixels, so they don't gather a lot of light and don't operate well in low light. That reduces the dynamic range, of mobile phone cameras, the range of light that they can resolve detail in. In a single exposure you'll often end up with blown out white highlights or blackened shadows, but HDR mode takes multiple exposures and tries to bring detail from the lighter and darker exposures into a single image. If the single exposure works, by all means use it, but it's great to have the additional HDR result as a backup in case it handles shadows and highlights better.
3. Just like with film and DSLR photography, post-processing is important. For quick field editing and online sharing, try Google's excellent and free Snapseed app., which enables you to make critical adjustments to brightness, shadows and contrast, and you can post the results to a number of social media sites or for sites not yet supported, save the adjusted images to your iPhone's Camera Roll. For even more control once you get back to your computer, bring your iPhone images into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and adjust them on a high resolution PC monitor, using even more features such as noise reduction which can help bring your image up to a printable quality. If you don't already have Lightroom, version 5.3 is available as a free trial.
Those are just some basic tips on getting a decent image, but the most important thing in your photography is your subject, and the composition you capture it with. So for even more photographic freedom and more compelling results, exercise as much control as possible over composition, as described in the rest of this post on my blog:
www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2014/03/14/maximize-...
Maximize Image Quality From Your Mobile Phone Camera
Mobile phone cameras go along way towards making photography simple and easy, but as with any camera, there are a number of ways you can improve the quality of your results. Here are some of the steps I take with my iPhone 5S:
1. Control the exposure. Touch the part of the screen where you want the camera to sample it.
2. Leave HDR mode turned on. The small sensors in cell phone cameras have small pixels, so they don't gather a lot of light and don't operate well in low light. That reduces the dynamic range, of mobile phone cameras, the range of light that they can resolve detail in. In a single exposure you'll often end up with blown out white highlights or blackened shadows, but HDR mode takes multiple exposures and tries to bring detail from the lighter and darker exposures into a single image. If the single exposure works, by all means use it, but it's great to have the additional HDR result as a backup in case it handles shadows and highlights better.
3. Just like with film and DSLR photography, post-processing is important. For quick field editing and online sharing, try Google's excellent and free Snapseed app., which enables you to make critical adjustments to brightness, shadows and contrast, and you can post the results to a number of social media sites or for sites not yet supported, save the adjusted images to your iPhone's Camera Roll. For even more control once you get back to your computer, bring your iPhone images into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and adjust them on a high resolution PC monitor, using even more features such as noise reduction which can help bring your image up to a printable quality. If you don't already have Lightroom, version 5.3 is available as a free trial.
Those are just some basic tips on getting a decent image, but the most important thing in your photography is your subject, and the composition you capture it with. So for even more photographic freedom and more compelling results, exercise as much control as possible over composition, as described in the rest of this post on my blog:
www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2014/03/14/maximize-...