Don't trust your mobile phone camera, because your photos will never be 100% original for this reason
For a few years now, we have been witnessing a battle between the three major smartphone brands, Samsung, Google and Apple, to see which of them can position one of their phones as the king of mobile photography. Initially, they did it by increasing the megapixels of the sensors, but now the battle is focused on which manufacturer can achieve the best image processing using artificial intelligence.
This means that the photos you take with your mobile cameras are not 100% original, and we will explain why below.
First of all, you should keep in mind that the phones with the best cameras on the market belong to manufacturers who specialize in software development and what Samsung, Google and Apple are doing specifically is overcoming the physical limitations of sensors by using “computational photography” to process and improve images.
In this sense, these brands use different computational photography techniques to enhance the images taken with mobile cameras. Some are as simple as automatically adjusting the color or white balance, but others go beyond simple image editing.
One such advanced technique is so-called “Stacking,” a function in smartphone camera software that takes multiple photos in just a few milliseconds, each taken at a different focus or overexposure setting, and combines to create a new image with high dynamic range, stronger (but unrealistic) colors, and less motion blur.
This stacking technique is used, for example, in the so-called night mode to get a brighter night photo without having to apply a long exposure time, as this would cause motion blur and other problems that would affect the image quality.
Computational photography has a clear goal: to get good photos with modest hardware, and without a doubt, we can testify that it has achieved this. But, on the other hand, the photos obtained through these techniques are unrealistic and unnatural because they do not really reflect what a mobile phone camera captures.