Landscape: Always RAW enabled

by Wayne Wei on in Home

In landscape photography, it is often that there is bright sky and the bright sunlight casts shadows on the objects in foreground. To capture the details of the sky and foreground, dynamic range of camera sensor plays an important role. This is one of the major differences between full frame/APSC sensors and smartphone sensors. A small sensor has much lower dynamic range compared to a large sensor. Smartphones’ auto processing algorithms don’t work quite well on balancing the exposure since it is designed for all types of scenes and it often overexposes some parts of the images especially in landscape scenes. Shooting in single RAW image preserves all the details of the images and allows us to post-process to further extend since more details on highlight and shadow parts of the images can be recovered.

Comparison below shows RAW-edited image(Left) vs JPEG-edited image(Right).

*Drag the slider to view the difference

 

RAW-edited (left) vs JPEG-edited (right)

Here is another comparison on a sunrise scene.

 

RAW-edited (left) vs JPEG-edited (right). JPEG-edited image shows more blown out area (highlight clipping) that cannot be recovered.

There is HDR(high dynamic range) mode in most smartphones nowadays, and it is one of the ways to create high dynamic range photos. HDR mode takes 3 frames with different exposures and combines them together. This brings out the details of highlight and shadow parts of the scenes. However, there are 2 disadvantages on using HDR mode.

  1. Blurred image: Taking multiple frames means taking photos at different time, depending on the scene whether there are moving objects and the speed of smartphone camera, it might blur the final image.
  2. Post-processing is limited because the final HDR image is in JPEG format. Smartphones apply auto-processing and compress images into JPEG format to reduce file size. Since images are compressed and a lot of details can’t be recovered, post-processing capability is limited. Well, that’s fine if we don’t plan to edit HDR images further. But different phones have different auto-processing algorithms, they might not fit landscape scenes and usually introduce some artifacts into images.

Shooting in single RAW image preserves all the details of the image. Since it takes only single frame, it is less likely to get a blurred photo. Post-processing RAW image allows us to bring out the details of highlight and shadow parts by dragging highlight slider to the left and shadow slider to the right, at the same time it creates HDR effect.

Not all smartphone cameras are supported to shoot in RAW format, leaving HDR mode the only option, but most flagships/high-end smartphones have this capability, so it is good to shoot in RAW format provided.