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When you get into heavy postprocessing, the dynamic range of the phone can't hold a candle to that of the camera, though. It's just night and day. There's no w

When you get into heavy postprocessing, the dynamic range of the phone can't hold a candle to that of the camera, though. It's just night and day. There's no way you could retrieve this much detail from a phone sensor: https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/ https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/

CamperBob2 6y ago
The top version of the photo is really nice. It could easily have come from a good phone camera. The bottom version... OK, my phone can't do that. If it did, I'd take it to the Apple store to see if they could fix it.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback.
- miahi 6y ago
  I would say your phone can do that, it's just that you did not enable HDR. The thing is, because of how our eyes and brain work (huge dynamic range plus postprocessing), the actual viewed scene was probably closer to the second photo than the first, but with a higher contrast (the camera HDR emulates the eye but you also need a huge dynamic range display to show it right, otherwise it's "compressed" to low contrast). So you can choose the contrast (first photo) or dynamic range (second photo) but not both.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    That's not very accurate because the colors in the clouds were inverted in this photo, but you're right that reality is a bit more contrasty, though not as contrasty as we think (nowhere close to the "after").
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    My comment came out sounding somewhat mean, which wasn't my intention, but the truth is that I'm not a big fan of HDR and related artificial effects. These effects don't look anything like the imagery perceived by my eyes and brain; they're just different ways to ruin a good photo. In this case, a very good photo.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      Non-HDR isn't anything like what your eyes see.
      - CamperBob2 6y ago
        Once dynamic range is lost by rendering something on a phone screen or computer monitor, you can't recover it without making the image look weird and artificial. It's like mixing 24-bit audio for playback through an 8-bit DAC. You can play all sorts of games with dynamic range expansion, but at the end of the day you've done a bad thing. Then there's the fact that a lot of problems people try to solve with HDR are actually gamma correction issues. Of course, I may just not be taking the right drugs...
raziel2p 6y ago
That is a really cool picture. However, it does stray so far from reality that I wonder if you couldn't just as well get someone skilled to spend a couple of hours in photoshop achieving the same effect even without the added range. Probably tweaking sliders in lightroom is more time-efficient, and there's an argument to be made for using the camera as an artistic tool and not just a lens to capture a still picture of your surroundings, but I don't think this is a great example of what isn't possible without a "real" camera.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I guess maybe something like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg

CamperBob2 6y ago

The top version of the photo is really nice. It could easily have come from a good phone camera. The bottom version... OK, my phone can't do that. If it did, I'd take it to the Apple store to see if they could fix it.

StavrosK 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback.
miahi 6y ago
I would say your phone can do that, it's just that you did not enable HDR. The thing is, because of how our eyes and brain work (huge dynamic range plus postprocessing), the actual viewed scene was probably closer to the second photo than the first, but with a higher contrast (the camera HDR emulates the eye but you also need a huge dynamic range display to show it right, otherwise it's "compressed" to low contrast). So you can choose the contrast (first photo) or dynamic range (second photo) but not both.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  That's not very accurate because the colors in the clouds were inverted in this photo, but you're right that reality is a bit more contrasty, though not as contrasty as we think (nowhere close to the "after").
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  My comment came out sounding somewhat mean, which wasn't my intention, but the truth is that I'm not a big fan of HDR and related artificial effects. These effects don't look anything like the imagery perceived by my eyes and brain; they're just different ways to ruin a good photo. In this case, a very good photo.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Non-HDR isn't anything like what your eyes see.
    - CamperBob2 6y ago
      Once dynamic range is lost by rendering something on a phone screen or computer monitor, you can't recover it without making the image look weird and artificial. It's like mixing 24-bit audio for playback through an 8-bit DAC. You can play all sorts of games with dynamic range expansion, but at the end of the day you've done a bad thing. Then there's the fact that a lot of problems people try to solve with HDR are actually gamma correction issues. Of course, I may just not be taking the right drugs...

raziel2p 6y ago

That is a really cool picture. However, it does stray so far from reality that I wonder if you couldn't just as well get someone skilled to spend a couple of hours in photoshop achieving the same effect even without the added range. Probably tweaking sliders in lightroom is more time-efficient, and there's an argument to be made for using the camera as an artistic tool and not just a lens to capture a still picture of your surroundings, but I don't think this is a great example of what isn't possible without a "real" camera.

StavrosK 6y ago
I guess maybe something like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg