Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Will a phone ever be anywhere as good as a DSLR?

I think most of the people with iPhones (and android phones) get their pictures backed up to the respective cloud, so nothing really ever gets lost.
On iPhones at least, this happens automatically, without they even noticing or perhaps knowing

Last Edited by Noe at 05 Nov 08:40

Yes; Apple do the backup very well. Very seamless (except for apps no longer in the shop). Android does it in a clumsy way which sometimes works, usually not properly, and app config is usually lost when you restore to a new phone. It tends to work for the mundane stuff like contacts and calendar, but not for e.g. SMS and assorted data folders (there is no config in android for what to back up explicitly). I have never worked out how the google drive backup actually works. However if you root the phone you can use Titanium Backup to get a 100% perfect copy.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Archie wrote:

I’d be interested to hear what you expected instead?

Not sure exactly, (as I don’t fully understand every bit of the hardware software combination) but the picture is not how a sensor records an image, it should look horrible if it was the raw data.

1. The contrast looks normal, a sensor typically records an image with a linear gamma (contrast if you like), unlike how the eye perceives light and needs a correction applied before viewing, JPG and many files have the correction baked in, not sure about DNG, but fairly sure it supports different image gamma automatically. The ‘engine’ in lightroom will most likely be linear under the cowling, for a number of reasons. Suffice to say what you see and what you need to store/process are different things.

An image with a linear gamma will look dark, the shadow area especially.

2. It’s probably been Demosaiced , unless the camera has a foveon type sensor.

3. The colorspace looks to be same between the two photos, so the data has been adjusted to fit the same colorspace.

All/some of these adjustments could have been applied by lightroom, I don’t know.

The end user is not typically interested in viewing the raw data, hence some/all of these corrections are applied somewhere in the pipeline. However where and how these adjustments are applied, does make a difference to the final result.

The point I tried to make earlier, is that once this stuff is treated by the hardware and software with the same ‘seriousness/detail’ as in a DSLR it will be ‘same’ just with the ‘imperfections’ of that device. It’s very possible that your IPhone7 and software is following the exact same ‘steps’ in the processing pipeline as you might expect for a DSLR, and hence an apples to apples comparison, but if it’s not a later version certainly could, as it is essentially the same technology, with the same fundamental capabilities.

Last Edited by Ted at 05 Nov 11:54
Ted
United Kingdom

Just a follow up as my partner has a Samsung S6, so I was intrigued about it’s “RAW” file capabilities.

I was able to confirm a few things, the files are stored using DNG, with a linear gamma, or at least close, so very likely the same values as the sensor recorded (or close enough), it hasn’t been Demosaiced or debayed either.

I used Rawtherepee to display the image, it had a camera profile that someone had created for the phone, built into the program, as there was none attached to the file. This profile resulted in the image looking pretty good, basically the equivalent of what archie posted.

But what you see is not what is stored in the file or what the sensor records.

Last Edited by Ted at 05 Nov 22:59
Ted
United Kingdom

I ended up not doing much with the RAW out of my S6 because it would have needed a fair bit of processing and I didn’t know how to create a template for photoshop or lightroom. Currently, my use of LR is confined to processing RAW from the Pentax K1 and once those are imported they look pretty well spot-on and those taken on land are normally directly usable as regards colour etc and just need the usual stuff like cropping, shadow and highlight adjustment, etc. Those taken in the air need some Blacks. And on anything taken at ISO 500 or above I do a bit of de-noise because there is no point in encoding very fine noise since you just get a huge jpeg (I export with the “95%” quality setting); this works ok till ISO10k or higher. And the S6 has been sold on Ebay now.

However I sussed out how to do RAW on the S7. It is simply using the “pro” mode (which I use anyway when I want to tweak exposure). And like the S6 it saves the image only to the internal memory, not the SD card (a stupid Samsung “user satisfaction optimisation” thing, because internal is much faster). I took a rather boring pic but one which is quite challenging for any camera, and the files are here The “ex-dng” jpeg is from lightroom, and the other two are the pair produced concurrently by the phone. Anyway – 1:1 zoom:

Original jpeg:

RAW:

Those two are closer than they were with the S6. OTOH the S7 has a much better sensor (bigger pixels). I reckon the phone in this case just does an unsharp mask and ups the contrast a bit.

I should have taken the pic with the K1 too but it’s too late now

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I opened the DNG file, you posted and got the same result using rawtherepee, as it has a suitable profile installed i.e. similar result as archie posted. Both those phones do not have an attached profile, in their DNG file. What I suspect happened in your case is that if you used lightroom with the S6 files then it could not find a suitable profile and the result was poor, probably applying a default gamma, so the photo would look dark. A quick google suggests that there is no suitable profile for the s6 in lightroom, but there is one for the s7.

If you want to mess about you can use a tool like dcraw, to do various conversions, for example dng to tiff leaving all the raw data it looks totally unusable. It might only be 10bit but I gave up trying to figure it out.

This is what I think the sensor saw:

Anyway after 5 mins I get a much more pleasing result using the raw file, than your jpg, as this is a good example where it would help.

All of this electronics/software is comparatively easy to fix/improve, what is difficult/impossible is dealing with physics associated with a lens and sensor at such small scale.

Ted
United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Hmmm… I don’t think so. Jpeg is totally timeless, with pics from decades ago being totally compatible with all software.

Well, look what happened to the headphone jack. Apple made the bold move… 1 year later Google follows suit. At least Apple have made the HEIC/HEIF implementation backwards compatible for now, as anytime you take the photo out of the iPhone, it presents it as a JPG.
I think the biggest improvement aside from live photo’s etc., is the change from 8bit to 10 bit color. I think soon we’ll see HEIC/HEIF support appear in all kinds of photo software.

Last Edited by Archie at 06 Nov 22:59

Ted wrote:

sensor typically records an image with a linear gamma (contrast if you like)
I can follow what you say here, and it must be that Lightroom displays a “default/accepted” interpretation of the RAW image. Would that matter though? In other words why not?

Nevertheless, apparently iPhone captures true RAW without the demosaicing etc. you mention. See this link:

Whenever an image is captured, the raw pixel data from the camera sensor is usually put through a battery of image processing operations such as dead pixel interpolation, demosaicing, white balance, noise reduction, tone compensation and sharpening before you ever get near it. See Advances in iOS Photography – WWDC 2016: Session 501 for a full explanation. In general, this is a good thing, and most efficiently done while the pixel data is still in memory, and before the image is compressed. However there are situations where you would prefer to receive the raw pixel data direct from the camera sensor in a virtually unadulterated form, so that you can choose to do with it as you wish. RAW capture delivers exactly this: sensor pixel data with an absolute minimal level of pre-processing.

FYI, I saw there is an app out now that allows you to shoot in LOG Gamma and also flat on iPhone.

Last Edited by Archie at 07 Nov 02:32

Archie wrote:

I can follow what you say here, and it must be that Lightroom displays a “default/accepted” interpretation of the RAW image. Would that matter though? In other words why not?

It’s normal, in fact essential that the raw image is interpreted for display, for example among other things, regardless of what colorspace (essentially unique to that camera), it should be transformed into the colorspace of the display equipment which is very likely sRGB for display. What is difficult/impossible, is to actually see what is contained in the raw data just by looking at that interpreted picture, which is why I suggested that your example was not valid as it didn’t tell us much. The raw image, for example could have been in 8/10/12/14 or more bits channel. The fact that data has not been demosaced is also a clue that no sharpening techniques have been applied.

Archie wrote:

Would that matter though?

Yes is the short answer, your link about LOG gamma is one good example, that shows that even storing 16bit integers per channel is not enough. Peter’s phone for example stores 10bit per channel (could be wrong) and his DSLR probably does much better. BTW LOG gamma is digital’s way of storing data, that is ‘similar’ to how the plastic stuff with the holes in the side does it. I only have a good understanding of parts of it, as it’s a complicated area with a lot more too it, but hopefully provided some insights, probably makes topics like engine leaning seem very simple…

The phone manufactures are clearly starting to take this stuff more and more seriously.

Last Edited by Ted at 07 Nov 11:08
Ted
United Kingdom

The iPhone takes 10-bit color images within a wide color gamut (Display P3). That’s why they’ve internally gone to HEIF/HEIC format as JPG is limited to 8-bit color, which can lead to color banding etc.

Interesting point that is made is that more than 40% of pro-football jerseys are outside of the sRGB color space…

Last Edited by Archie at 08 Nov 10:18
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top