| ▲ | majormajor 6 days ago | |
The biggest real differences between iPhone and whatever ye-olde-good-standalone-digital-camera are sharpening/edge enhancements and flattening of lighting. If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly. The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing. Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones. The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image. But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment. (Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.) | ||
| ▲ | sundvor 6 days ago | parent [-] | |
Yeah I like to take photos of my cast iron cooking with my S25U, on a black induction glass surface - and I find myself swapping to Pro mode all the time as the colour temperature is often way too warm and or oversaturated. It's a great camera in automatic mode most of the time, but not for that scenario. | ||