Comparison with photos from my camera and my new iPhone

[72moonglum]

Hi all you reapergraphers!

So he's my question: 

I just got a new cell phone, the Apple 12 Pro Max, after having the same phone for about five years. I just finished a miniature and took pictures with the camera I always use, and then I went and took the mini with my iPhone.  Here they are to compare:

 

Old Camera:

 

and here is the same miniature with the iPhone:

 

 

I think the second one looks better, but I also worry, am I somehow cheating, as I think the iPhone is correcting the exposures rather nicely to show the miniature in a very positive "light".

 

Is this in any way dishonest, or does the new camera simply take a nice picture?  Opinions very welcome!!!!!!

[strawhat]

Cheating?

 

I'm not sure how.  Cameras advance with the advances in technology (more pixels, better image processing, etc.).  You're just using a more advanced tool is all.

[72moonglum]

1 hour ago, strawhat said:

Cheating?

 

I'm not sure how.  Cameras advance with the advances in technology (more pixels, better image processing, etc.).  You're just using a more advanced tool is all.

I wonder if my new iPhone has made my camera obsolete?

[Cicciopiu]

I don't know I like the first pic more; Yes the iPhone one have crisp details but the camera one have more natural colors. The iPhone one looks over exposed and over saturated. It's your background light-grey dark-grey or black? I mean the background looks totally different in the two pictures.
Also, if you look at the mini, which photo resemble more the real colors on it?

[72moonglum]

3 hours ago, Cicciopiu said:

I don't know I like the first pic more; Yes the iPhone one have crisp details but the camera one have more natural colors. The iPhone one looks over exposed and over saturated. It's your background light-grey dark-grey or black? I mean the background looks totally different in the two pictures.
Also, if you look at the mini, which photo resemble more the real colors on it?

So the background is a piece of black paper, but depending upon the light and day it either shows up as uniformly black or black with a grey line above it. What I have always had to do with my camera is lower what I think the exposure is because the photo is always too light, so there is a scale where I had to lower the exposer to -1 so it doesn't show up with too much light in a uniform sense and I really don't edit the image much more than that.  With the phone I just took the picture and this was the first version of the photo it gave me, even though I know it's doing some kind of auto-editing because before the photo shows up it shows the original photo for a tenth of a second where the colors are a bit more washed out.

 

Of the two photos I'd say that the actual miniature colorwise comes in the middle somewhere.  not as muted as the first photo.  However, the second photo brings out the whites better that I have on the miniature, which sometimes is a pain with my metals because even though I'm highlighting up to white with the photography I've been using you don't quite detect the white spots.  

 

I think I'm going to have to continue comparing different versions of photos for future miniatures.

[strawhat]

23 hours ago, 72moonglum said:

I wonder if my new iPhone has made my camera obsolete?

 

It may well have!

 

I am in permanent custody of my mother's old iPhone (X, I think), and it blows my (admittedly old) bridge DSLR out of the water.  The DSLR has the slight edge in pixels and telephoto/zoom capabilities, but the iPhone takes everything else.

 

Now, if I knew (or even had a basic idea) of what I was doing with the camera, I could probably squeeze some performance out of it.  But, then again, I could do that with the iPhone as well.

[72moonglum]

12 hours ago, strawhat said:

 

It may well have!

 

I am in permanent custody of my mother's old iPhone (X, I think), and it blows my (admittedly old) bridge DSLR out of the water.  The DSLR has the slight edge in pixels and telephoto/zoom capabilities, but the iPhone takes everything else.

 

Now, if I knew (or even had a basic idea) of what I was doing with the camera, I could probably squeeze some performance out of it.  But, then again, I could do that with the iPhone as well.

I'm kind of in the same boat, I have no real technical expertise with cameras or phones or anything. I've had my actual camera probably for four or five years already. It's the second "nice" camera I've owned, a Nikon Coolpix L110, but I've got very limited understanding on how it is used. It has a macro setting for close stuff, like miniatures and then I have to reduce the exposure to it's not too light and washed out.   This is why this iPhone has been so nice, I literally just pushed the button and the photos came out like they did. I then just crop them and adjust the size but that's all.

And in any case, it's much better than my first photo I submitted to the forum so many years ago:

 

 

I can't even remember what camera this came out of.

[WhiteWulfe]

I'd say it isn't cheating at all.  Computational algorithms as well as HDR are rather handy, especially for wanting a quick no fuss picture that looks good.  Phones also have the benefit of typically having a larger depth of field, making the acquisition of a fully focused mini arguably easier.

 

For me though, I'm not really a fan of the oversharpened and saturated look a lot of mobile phones tend to have, and I much prefer the skin and metal tones from the camera photo.  I am also the kind of guy who likes having quick, easy access to almost all of my settings on dials though, and my camera is a lot easier to deal with different lighting situations (my mobile phone tends to assume everything is daylight, which generally messes a few things up)

[Cygnwulf]

First - I never consider it cheating to use a tool that makes the job easier.  If you're happier with the cell phone photo, go with that.

Second - actually comparing the two photos, both could use a bit of an edit.  And in this case I mean global edits, which photographers never consider cheating either.  Global edits are things like exposure, white/black point, contrast, saturation, etc.  So long as you're not masking part of the image and only making the changes there you're making global level edits that are actually expected.

 The Iphone photo is overexposed. Probably because it over adjusted for the black background.  This is somewhat compensated for by a slightly sharper image, but I feel like it could use a tweak.  Any basic photo editing software should let you move your overall brightness, and maybe lower your black point so your background looks darker.  You might try using the same software to bring up the brightness and saturation on the old camera photo too and see if you can make it look similar.  I think your sweet spot would be somewhere between the two, the 

 

 

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by Cygnwulf