Capturing Sky - iPhone vs DSLR

[ketan]

Hi,

During my travel to Armenia recently, I took some photo with my iPhone Pro Max 13 and with my new Canon R6 Mark II.

I noticed that iphone captures sky quite beautifully with clouds and colors while sky captured with R6 appeared quite washed out. Of course, with LR we can bring back some details and colors but still it can not match the eye pleasing sky of iPhone.

While capturing if I reduce exposure on R6 then it makes subject bit dark while bringing out sky details. But with iphone I get good (saturated and detailed) sky with well exposed subjects.

Am I missing something here?

Thanks

Ketan

 

[SquarePeg]

The dynamic range is impressive on most of today’s phones. It’s a “smart phone” - I believe the iPhone’s technology detects the sky and processes the jpeg accordingly, sort of a built in hdr mode. Of course the end result looks good on a phone but is fairly low res and isn’t really usable for anything else… unless you shoot in raw with your iPhone in which case you’re in the same boat as you are with your dslr - shoot in raw and don’t blow out the sky and you can edit the photo to have a high res version that’s better than what your phone did with the jpeg.

 

[SquarePeg]

I frequently take an iPhone shot along with my camera photos when I’m shooting a good sky. Here’s an example of the iPhone photo unedited and a raw file of the Fuji xt2 edited in Lightroom. These photos were taken 10 minutes apart. This was the closest example I could find. Sky was changing rapidly but you can see how much more detail the camera picked up vs the iPhone.

 

[bulldurham]

Well, you are comparing apples to strawberries, if nothing else in MP and Raw vs JPG. Sort of matching Sonny Liston to your average cage fighter.
Try printing an iPhone image at 40x60. And good luck!

 

[Ysarex]

Hi,

During my travel to Armenia recently, I took some photo with my iPhone Pro Max 13 and with my new Canon R6 Mark II.

I noticed that iphone captures sky quite beautifully with clouds and colors while sky captured with R6 appeared quite washed out. Of course, with LR we can bring back some details and colors but still it can not match the eye pleasing sky of iPhone.

While capturing if I reduce exposure on R6 then it makes subject bit dark while bringing out sky details. But with iphone I get good (saturated and detailed) sky with well exposed subjects.

Am I missing something here?

Thanks

Ketan

Yes, you're missing something.
The iphone and it's software are designed for people who are not photographers.
The Canon R6 is designed for photographers. What you're missing then is the photographer.

The exposure difference between the sky and foreground is as old as photography. Landscape photographers working back in the 1850s using glass plates typically took two photos of a landscape, one for the sky and one for the foreground and then combined them together when making a print. We have it easier today but we still have to address that exposure discrepancy.

The iphone does it for you (using software) because it assumes you don't know what to do. The software in the iphone from the typical user's perspective is sophisticated and helpful.

Canon could put similar software in the R6 but they're designing the R6 for a different user and given the added capability of the R6 adding similar software to what's in the iphone would be a daunting task. If the kind of software that's in the iphone were in my cameras, unlike the typical iphone user who finds that software helpful, I would find it intrusive and disabling and if I couldn't turn it off I wouldn't own the camera. Canon, Nikon, Fuji, etc. have to make design decisions that target their user base -- tricky. Apple is doing the same.

When I take a photo I don't want the camera second guessing me and I really don't want software in the camera interfering. I'd be happy with an R6 because I could control it -- I'm a photographer.

 

[wfooshee]

As said in most of the replies already, phone cameras default to an HDR mode, wherein they balance the exposure values they see in the image to compress the exposure values to a dynamic range that won't blow out the highs or reduce the lows to all-black. HDR (high-dynamic-range) is really nothing but compression of the extreme highs and lows so that the range of the image is limited to what can actually be produced on the screen.
Your eyes compensate for that dynamic range as you look at things, so your perception by eye is not what the camera sees. When you look at the bright sky, you pupils contract, and when you look at the dark areas of the ground, you pupils expand. The camera can't do that, as it has to take in the entire scene, and when the scene's light-to-dark value ratios exceed a given level, the camera can't help but render overexposure as blown-out white areas, and under-exposure as black. The photographer has to decide what he wants to prioritize in the exposure, and can also take multiple bracketed exposures and do the HDR in software on the computer.

 

[Ozzie_Traveller]

G'day Ketan

another thing I have noticed in many fone pix is that the fone maker pre-sets image contrast up by 25% to 50% (scene dependent) to give the appearance of better IQ and sharpness.

Phil

 

[kapaah]

The phone cameras will get better and better overtime, but they can not beat physics.. unless they got bigger sensors, phones will allways be behind.. but the truth is that the better camera is allways the camera that is with you, and nothing beats the phone in that regard

 

[Soocom1]

There is another factor that few are aware of.

Once the image in any camera system is taken, its basically static at that point.
So shooting in HDR mode in a camera (pre set or otherwise) will render the image in a specific aspect.

If you take that image and start playing with in in any process software, and compare the same type of adjustments in a raw image from the Canon you will see two totally different results.

As previously stated, the iPhone is literally designed for dummies in photography and not those either practiced or desiring to adjust.

The RAW images typically capture pretty much all the data and leaves the post process to you.

 

[ketan]

There is another factor that few are aware of.

Once the image in any camera system is taken, its basically static at that point.
So shooting in HDR mode in a camera (pre set or otherwise) will render the image in a specific aspect.

If you take that image and start playing with in in any process software, and compare the same type of adjustments in a raw image from the Canon you will see two totally different results.

As previously stated, the iPhone is literally designed for dummies in photography and not those either practiced or desiring to adjust.

The RAW images typically capture pretty much all the data and leaves the post process to you.