How to improve phone pictures?

djsilver666666

Is their some way I could increase the quality of pictures that were taken by my phone? They always turn out bad:

wxwax

Not sure how much better you can expect the average phone camera to be. That being said, the demo shots I saw from the (quite large) iPhone looked pretty good.

djsilver666666

wxwax wrote:

Not sure how much better you can expect the average phone camera to be. That being said, the demo shots I saw from the (quite large) iPhone looked pretty good.

I was trying to ask if their was some methods I could use to increase the quality.

Jeffro

djsilver666666 wrote:

Is their some way I could increase the quality of pictures that were taken by my phone? They always turn out bad:

Ummm, buy a camera. It's a phone for petesakes...

colourbox

The only way to improve them is to think like a photographer. A camera phone is like a point-and-shoot, only worse. Yet a good photographer can make point-and-shoot pictures look great. So to improve camera phone pictures you should first identify what specifically is wrong with the picture and then fix it.

Resolution: Not much you can do about that if the phone camera is already set to the highest setting.

White balance: If the phone does not give you any control over this, shift it in your image editor.

Exposure. The hospital picture has clipped highlights. On a point-and-shoot, I would have turned down the exposure. If the phone does not give you any control over this, you're stuck with what you get.

Motion blur: On a point-and-shoot, this is prevented by a higher shutter speed, made possible by turning up the ISO, turning on the IS, etc. I'll be amazed if the phone can do any of that...

Focus: Again, if the phone give you no control over focus, you got what you got.

There's nothing preventing phone makers from adding these features to the chipsets, if they ever come around to believing they are a priority. There may even be some out there, but I wouldn't know which ones.

wxwax

djsilver666666 wrote:

I was trying to ask if their was some methods I could use to increase the quality.

Perhaps if you nail the color balance in post, the colors might improve.

There's a lot of noise in the shot, so I don't think you can safely sharpen it and still have it look good.

With some careful curves work, you could even out the lighting.

In truth, it's a telephone camera, and it will take quite a bit of time to fix each shot. Only you can decide if it's worth the effort.

wxwax

dj, I'm guessing the image has some value to you. Here's the best I could do. I'm sure someone more skilled than I could improve on it.

djsilver666666

colourbox: I've never heard of a phone camera that could do any of that, I was asking about post-processing.

wxwax: Yes, it does mean a lot to me, the girl in the picture was a guest player that got a hairline crack on her growth plate during a tournament. Everybody on the team likes her (including me) and that is a really nice shot of her, besides the condition of the picture...

I was just hoping their was a way to improve it, because their is so much that I don't know I am continually surprised as to what people can do. Thanks for giving it a shot

wxwax

Send Rutt a PM. Maybe he can work his magic on it?

djsilver666666

I'll do that.

Thanks

jfriend

djsilver666666 wrote:

Is their some way I could increase the quality of pictures that were taken by my phone? They always turn out bad:

At least three different colors of lighting, motion blur, lots of noise, low resolution, JPEG artifacts, blown highlights. All together, an interesting challenge. Different parts of the image have to be dealt with differently and there's only so much you can do.

Here's my try at it:

BestRetoucherEver

Quick Hue/Sat move in LAB
Why not share with us what you've already tried?

J

djsilver666666

I haven't tried anything worth noting. I'm what you could call a "basic" photoshop user, almost all I do is:

• crop
• auto-contrast
• auto-color-correct
• use a sharpening technique that I read about here
• batch lower quality for upload

So I was truly at a loss as to how to improve the photos, if I could at all.

jfriend

djsilver666666 wrote:

I haven't tried anything worth noting. I'm what you could call a "basic" photoshop user, almost all I do is:

• crop
• auto-contrast
• auto-color-correct
• use a sharpening technique that I read about here
• batch lower quality for upload

So I was truly at a loss as to how to improve the photos, if I could at all.

This photo needs more complicated adjustments to fix it than global auto adjustments. It has multiple color casts in different parts of the photo that either require tricky curves or color adjustments with masks so that you can affect just one part of the image separately from another.

Likewise, it's got a lot of noise. I didn't try to remove the noise (that's hard at such a low resolution), but I did try to desaturate the noise in the shadows to just make it less visible. Again this was an adjustment that requires specific color targetting or a mask to isolate the effect.

It's also got uneven illumination with the main subject brightly lit on her face, evenly lit on her legs and the other person underexposed. Again, this is hard to even up without masking off different parts of the image in order to effect them differently.

If you are just trying to fix this one image, then ask some more specific questions about how people did their fixes and try to emulate that or just let someone here fix it for you. If you think this is going to happen again, then you need to get better illumination, probably with a flash. This is where even a basic point and shoot camera with flash would do substantially better than this cell phone camera.

colourbox

jfriend wrote:

This photo needs more complicated adjustments to fix it than global auto adjustments. It has multiple color casts in different parts of the photo that either require tricky curves or color adjustments with masks so that you can affect just one part of the image separately from another....It's also got uneven illumination

It's worth noting that the set of problems quoted above is not actually related to the phone camera at all. It's related to the conditions in the room. They would have been problems if you had the coolest, most expensive camera ever. In a similar situation in the future, if you knew in advance you wanted it to be a good picture, regardless of your equipment you'd look for and recognize potential lighting issues and do your best to address them, by flipping on lights, opening doors and windowshades, turning on the flash, etc. to try and both raise and even out the lighting levels. Brighter light should have a side effect of lowering the noise levels, since noise is worse at low light levels. Another positive side effect is that if you had one really bright source like the overhead room light or camera flash, you could overpower the multiple sources so that you would only have one color temperature to correct for.

Anyway, that's the kind of thought process you might go through.

nikos

Here's a quick an easy way to remove colorcasts when the Auto commands fail to do the trick.

First, find a neutral area that clearly shows a color cast. In this case, I sampled the supposedly white sheets below her feet.



To cancel out the colorcast, we need to get the opposite color of what we have sampled. To do this, choose the Lab sliders from the drop down menu of the Color Palette and change the signs of the A and B sliders to their opposite. In this instance, I deleted the (-) sign from the A value to make it positive and added a (-) sign to the B value. Since magenta is the opposite of green, we know that we now have the correct color sample.




Next you need to add a new layer and fill it with the new color sample. Then in the blend modes, choose Color. Below is the image with the strong magenta color cast. Looks like crap doesn't it?



Now for the magic... Simply decrease the opacity until the A & B Lab values are pretty much even (neutral) at the previously sampled area. As you see, most of the green color cast has been removed.



Now you have a better starting point to do the rest of your post processing work-flow.

HTH,
Nikos

nikos

A few more tweaks.

djsilver666666

jfriend: I did not take this picture, my Dad did. Also the only thing he had was the cell phone; I forgot to give him my camera before he went to the ER. (My Dad is the head coach, I'm an assistant coach)

I would love it if people took a shot at fixing the photo, but I would also like to know how/what they did. Learning is what I'm here for! (thanks nikos)

And just a thought, is their some way to select an area (like the floor to the left of the bed) and use some kind of averaging so that the area doesn't look spotty?

nikos

djsilver666666 wrote:

And just a thought, is their some way to select an area (like the floor to the left of the bed) and use some kind of averaging so that the area doesn't look spotty?

I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like a terrazzo floor -- the spotty texture is supposed to be there.

Nikos

djsilver666666

Oh, okay. Then how about the wall on the far right?

Noise Ninja helps with the graininess of the walls, but it brings out some highlighted outlines...

CatOne

So what's the point here, really? Yes it's possible to do some fix up on this shot.

But the question overall... how to improve phone picture... is really best answered by saying "get a better camera." Because, I think there's a particularly apt adage here, "you can't polish a turd." You can get marginal results on this photo (reasonable for a picture on the web) because you had a camera phone in a pinch, but overall you will NEVER be able to take shots with that camera phone that will compete with even a mid-range digicam, to say nothing of a SLR.

djsilver666666

True, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to make the best of the shot I got.

Thanks everybody for the help! I will try what you did on the other pics from my phone.