Mark Lyn­der­say

It re­cent­ly be­came nec­es­sary for me to cod­i­fy how I han­dle pho­tographs on a smart­phone, and it turns out it's not quite as easy as snap, fil­ter and In­sta­gram.I ad­mit to be­ing a bit of a purist when it comes to even ca­su­al pho­tog­ra­phy us­ing these per­va­sive mo­bile de­vices.

The In­sta­gram era co­in­cid­ed with the last ves­tiges of crap­py phone cam­eras, and soft­ware and the fil­ters that will now be in­deli­bly part of a large­ly un­wise mass fil­tra­tion of mil­lions of pho­tographs are go­ing to look more than a lit­tle em­bar­rass­ing and dat­ed pret­ty soon.

To­day's mo­bile de­vices sport far bet­ter imag­ing sen­sors, desk­top class cen­tral proces­sors, GPU hard­ware and a bless­ed­ly ex­pand­ing col­lec­tion of soft­ware that's de­signed to do some­thing oth­er than tint the world with rose (and acid green) coloured glass­es.

While I've come to ap­pre­ci­ate the ca­pac­i­ty to sim­ply take a pho­to wher­ev­er I am, there's a fussy com­pletist in me that's al­so de­ter­mined to take the best pos­si­ble pho­to and take it all the way through to a fi­nal form that rep­re­sents my per­spec­tive on it.

Mod­ern dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy nor­mal­ly pro­ceeds through a process of cap­ture, us­ing ca­pa­ble cam­eras, then com­put­er based post-pro­cess­ing. Smart­phone pho­tog­ra­phy is all about com­pro­mis­es and al­ter­na­tive meth­ods, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you de­cide to skip us­ing a com­put­er en­tire­ly.

The cam­era in a mod­ern smart­phone is or­ders of mag­ni­tude bet­ter than any­thing that was avail­able in its an­ces­tors as re­cent­ly as five years ago. Lens­es, made by ma­jor brands like Schnei­der and Le­ica, are bet­ter ma­chined and cap­ture more light.

Sen­sors, while still tiny, are dra­mat­i­cal­ly im­prov­ing through tech­niques like back-il­lu­mi­na­tion, which cre­ates more space on the cap­ture plane of the tiny chips which im­proves their sen­si­tiv­i­ty and dy­nam­ic range.

Still there are com­pro­mis­es. The tra­di­tion­al ax­is of man­u­al con­trol, avail­able on most phones re­leased in the last nine months, sub­sti­tutes ex­po­sure val­ue com­pen­sa­tion for ad­justable aper­ture, since cam­eras on mo­bile de­vices ship with a fixed lens open­ing. There sim­ply isn't room in the sleek pro­file of a mo­bile phone for more com­plex lens de­signs.

Those lens­es, wide-an­gle op­tics in the 27-30mm equiv­a­lent range of fo­cal lengths, have been get­ting much wider in re­cent times, top­ping out at an f1.7 lens on the new Sam­sung S7 de­vices.

Huawei took the lead in in­tro­duc­ing some light­field tech­nol­o­gy in its new P9 de­vice, rais­ing the game in com­pu­ta­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy op­tions (panoram­ics, HDR, skin soft­en­ing) that are now base­line fea­tures in mo­bile de­vices.

The biggest com­pro­mise of all in a smart­phone is its shape; it sim­ply isn't de­signed to take pho­tographs. It's first pur­pose is to be a mo­bile phone, with all the crit­i­cal er­gonom­ic de­ci­sions pledged to that pri­ma­ry use.

My nor­mal work­flow is to cap­ture in RAW+JPEG for­mat and move the im­ages to a com­put­er to fin­ish them us­ing a flash­drive shut­tle (http://ow.ly/kV3A301DvnS). These are com­mon­ly avail­able de­vices with one end of­fer­ing a tra­di­tion­al USB male plug and the oth­er a Mi­cro-USB or USB-C con­nec­tor (you can find them with Light­ning con­nec­tors for iOS as well).

Be­tween the two sits in­ter­me­di­ary stor­age in a size you choose. RAW shoot­ing de­mands ei­ther a large pri­ma­ry stor­age space or a size­able Mi­cro-SD card on the de­vice.

Work­ing on the phone it­self will call for a lit­tle in­vest­ment in soft­ware. To man­age a pho­to col­lec­tion, I like the free Pho­tos (pre­in­stalled) on iOS and Quick­Pic (http://ow.ly/IOxJ 301Dv9e) for An­droid. Both in­clude ba­sic pho­to edit­ing func­tions. To do some­thing more than that, a good place to start is with Google's Snapseed (http://ow.ly/jgL5301Dv6y, An­droid, iOS, free).

Ig­nore the fan­cy fil­ters but do make use of the pow­er­ful ad­just­ment tools.

Pix­el­ma­tor on iOS (http://ow.ly/8J1C301Dv3y) is an ex­cel­lent Pho­to­shop re­place­ment as is Pho­to Ed­i­tor on An­droid (http://ow.ly/1hJz301Dvjo), but look for the ver­sion cre­at­ed by dev.mac­gyver, since there are sev­er­al apps with the same name. You'll pay US$3 to re­move the ads, but it's worth it.

I re­al­ly liked Pho­to­shop Touch, but Adobe has stopped de­vel­op­ment and sales for the prod­uct. If you must ed­it us­ing a tool with pho­to­shop in the name, try Pho­to­shop Ex­press (http://ow.ly/9lgI301DvdF, iOS, An­droid). I find it far less ca­pa­ble than Touch and the con­stant prompt­ing to use their Cre­ative Cloud is par­tic­u­lar­ly an­noy­ing.

All of these pic­ture edit­ing tools can share im­ages di­rect­ly to ser­vices like Drop­Box and In­sta­gram, re­plac­ing a com­put­er en­tire­ly.