“Fantastic photos!!! What camera did you use?”

There are more New Zealand photos and text to come (see previous New Zealand posts), but the first batches generated some comments and questions like this one from reader Nikos: “Fantastic photos!!! What camera did you use?”

Thanks! This was actually my first major trip were I didn’t pack a standard, self-contained,”prosumer” camera. I took only my current smartphone; a Galaxy S10.

I leave its HDR mode on by default, and mostly otherwise let the camera adjust its own settings from there. I’ll happily take credit for the timing, framing, lens selection, and cropping, but I confess the rest is mostly the camera’s built in software.

It works pretty well, as you’ve seen, especially when nature cooperates with a moment of fleeting, perfect lighting.

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But the shots you’re seeing here aren’t the original, as-captured shots. They’re actually thrice-compressed, down-resolution copies edited, processed, and stored on plain vanilla, free Google Photos.

I mostly leave the original, as-captured jpgs on the phone; the initial jpg compression is pretty good visually, but the amount of compression is unadjustable and undocumented. I’ll do some basic yea/nay (eg keep/discard) editing, plus simple cropping and straightening on the phone, using the otherwise forgettable Samsung Gallery app. If something needs additional work — say, I’m working on a portrait or a photo I’ll give as a gift — I’ll use additional tools such as Google’s excellent (and free) Snapseed for more serious on-phone editing.

But for most shots, after simple straightening/cropping, I upload them to Google Photos, and share away , as you’ve seen.

Google Photos does its own extra processing and compression atop the camera’s original JPG compression. But even after the extra processing and compression, Google photos still have sufficient resolution for good-quality sharing on phones, tablets, and laptops.

The images do fall apart if you blow-them up to TV-size, or try to print them too large. But for basic sharing, they’re fine.

But there’s another step: Uploading here, to a WordPress-based site, adds yet another level of processing and compression.

But even after three levels of processing, the as-delivered quality is still surprisingly good. See for yourself, in this side-by-side comparison:

First, right-click/open-in-new-tab this triply-compressed (jpg/Google Photos/Wordpress) 642 KB pic of a perfect-moment hdr sunset shot:

Now right-click/open-in-new-tab the 2.85 MB original jpg (I’m using a link to bypass WordPress’s automatic compression).

You can toggle between the tabs to compare the images; you’ll see there are significant differences in the fine detail. But all in all, the additionally-compressed version isn’t bad at standard phone and portable-device screen sizes.

So, I use Google Photo’s infinite free storage for my smaller-format sharing and for set-and-forget automatic photo backups. I save the “original” on-phone jpgs for more-detailed work or later printing. (I’ve never had the need to work in RAW or other uncompressed formats.)

I have a lot of storage on my phone, but I also periodically offload the original jpgs to a local external hard drive for redundant/archival storage.

I really like the S10’s cameras. But I’ve also ordered an S20 (the Plus, not the insane Ultra), and am looking forward to its even larger sensors and stronger optical (lossless) zoom… plus the 5G and all the rest.

It’s entirely possible I’ll never carry a separate, self-contained camera ever again!

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Previous S10 camera coverage:

Smartphone cameras have come a long way

Update to: “Smartphone cameras have come a long way”

Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=4305

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