Camo is hard to photograph, and not for the reason you think! (Main cam vs Selfie cam colors)
Camo is hard to photograph, and not for the reason you think! (Main cam vs Selfie cam colors)
First up yes I'm a camo nerd. Metal Gear Solid 3 awakened something in me! Anyway every now and then I take different camo patterns into the woods and take photos as a reference to help people choose what works best for them. This one, Pencott Wildwood looks way too brown in most photos. Check it out!
But with the selfie cam it looks a lot closer to how it does in person
Maybe it's just the phone software that's only used in the main camera? I've messed with some of the settings with no luck. Here's a closer view of the pattern to show you what it's like up close
Any theories?
- phone cameras generally default to auto white balance which is good for snapshots, not so good for color accuracy
- trying to get raw files out of phone cameras is not completely impossible, but the images are almost always processed into JPEGs
- the main camera is going to boost saturation and contrast (make your image “pop”)
- selfie camera is going to focus on “flesh tones”, so less saturation boost (or you look sunburnt) and less contrast boost (smooth out wrinkles and acne)
- if you really want to focus on color accuracy over perceptual color, get hold of a gray card or color checker and plan on doing post-processing in something like Lightroom, Darktable, digiKam, RawTherapee or the like
Thanks for the rundown! I tried to adjust all the settings to get a basic unenhanced image but I understand that my use case isn't what a lot of cell phone cameras do.
Good news is most of the time I don't take photos with my phone but a dedicated camera so I'm curious to see if that has similar results or not
Could be the rear camera having a higher dynamic range and when it gets processed down to a lower dynamic range the extra information presents as higher contrast? Contrast is the enemy of camo I imagine. Just guessing, though.
My phone camera has the option to save and view the raw file as well as the processed jpeg, and when you do that you can see that the software is doing a lot of work by default to sharpen and add contrast and color enhancement. My guess is the selfie camera may be tuned to reduce redness in particular to smooth skin tones? Or it's just a smaller sensor not collecting as much color info to begin with.