How to: Make more from your smartphone snaps

[slitchfield]

In a tutorial for beginners, and with plenty of real world examples, I look at some practical photo-taking tips for your multi-megapixel smartphone when conditions are less than perfect... and I explain that adjusting the photo later in software is cheating - but often helps a lot!

Read on in the full article.

[krisse]

Cropping, not zooming

I used to think huge megapixel counts were a waste of time for those who store images digitally, because you'd never really need more than 1 or 2 megapixel images on a computer screen.

However, then it was pointed out to me that just because you take a 5mp or 10mp picture, that doesn't mean you want to keep the whole thing. If it's just a small portion of the image that interests you then high megapixel images give you the option of cropping while still maintaining a pretty high picture quality. Lower megapixel images don't have this option.

Fixing images is not cheating. If you create prints from film then adjusting brightness and contrast, dodging and burning were a natural part of the process. These have simply been brought over to the digital format. And besides, these adjustments are also all applied in camera anyway, to provide what the manufacturers see as the best acceptable quality without requiring any post processing. Without that we would all have raw files and would have no choice but to tweak them afterwards. So, you either accept what the manufacturer thinks is the best, or you decide for yourself. It's not cheating either way.

Good tips, though. Not sure about number 4, though. It's very over-exposed. You could try dropping the exposure compensation down a couple of notches, then you might capture some of the sky as well.

[davidmaxwaterma]

Interesting to hear that they have focus lock using a half press of the 'shutter button'.

I wonder if there's a way to lock the exposure too, or does it do both?

I wonder what the exposure 'map' is for the sensor. Usually, they are very heavily biased towards the centre. While focus will often focus on the nearest thing, the exposure can still be wildly off. The most common scene where this happens is when taking a picture of two people, one on either side of the centre, where the camera exposes for the background between the two (often much brighter).

Hi Steve, I did a quick run over on you article. And it is really nice. I find myself with two additive remarks left to make;

- Crap in - is Crap out: Digital image processing can not add information not present in an image. It can only improve the viewing quality remove useless data (croping, rescaling/removing-of-unused intensities, removing noise). Taking the best shot possible is still the most important one there is. In this case, proper focus and preventing over or under exposure of your subject. As shown by Steve above, making such a picture sunny and bright is easily done.

For most pictures lacking definition 2 processing tricks are very practical:

1) Rescaling of the histogram to the actually relevant maximal and minimal image intensities.
2) Adaptive contrast filtering (i.e. a unsharp mask filter of 50% and at least >60 pixels radius), cropping.

Both would most likely improve your bridge picture. I'll sent you an example by e-mail.

snoyt.vox.com