I’m still amazed how viewable and good looking a pretty crappy picture is on a small screen like the iPhone’s. The following shot of the moon over Richardson Bay was taken handheld on my iPhone, then imported into Lightroom, scaled down to 480×320 and cropped for this blog post. I also took a screenshot of the image at full resolution in Lightroom.
Moon over Richardson Bay, taken with an iPhone. The image on the left looks pretty good. In the 1:1 Crop, the blur induceded by hand-hoilding and the terrible color and luminance noise are very visible
While the scaled down version looks pretty good, the 1:1 crop shows all the flaws in the image: excessive grain noise, blur due to handheld long exposure, overexposed moon and almost no detail in the low-lights. To rescue it, I would take this image into Lightzone, use their ZoneMapper first to darken out some of the noise followed by their Grain Remover to remove the noise and then Relight to bring some of the image back. I’m not even sure how much could be rescued here given the poor quality of the initial shot. Going small might indeed be the best option to mask the lack of quality in the initial shot taken with the iPhone camera.
This is one of the situations in which you wish to have a DSLR with you. But I happily settle for my iPhone compared to no camera at all.
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