Get the Best Out of Your Phone Camera

My earlier feature on getting the best out of your digital camera was a guideline to some elementary photography techniques, but when it comes to phone cameras the game plays a bit differently.

To begin with phone cameras contain a weaker CMOS sensor instead of your digicam’s CCD. The CMOS sensor is extremely efficient when it comes to size and energy consumption, but it gets a bit fussy on the image clarity front. Though the tips mentioned in the digicam article are still applicable here, there are a few other things you can do to get some great shots from your phone camera as well. Without further delay let’s start with —

Use ample lighting
The CCD sensor loves light. Give it a brightly lit setup and it will happily click good pictures for you. But once the light level becomes less than adequate, your image will be plagued with noise.

Daylight is a phone cam’s best friend

Shooting outside in bright sunlight will definitely give you the best results from your phone camera. When shooting indoors, make sure all the lights are turned on. Don’t limit your phone camera flash (If it has one), to only night shots, any extra lighting will improve the quality on the image.

Picture taken in less indoor lighting

The same picture shot using phone cam flash

__PAGEBREAK__
Discover your phone camera
Phone cams have a lot to offer these days. A lot of mid and higher-level phone cameras have features that rival some consumer digicams. Simple features like black and white and sepia mode can change a picture to an art-form.

Night mode will help increase visibility in low-light shots, but as we mentioned in the previous point, it will also add digital noise to the picture.

Digital noise is higher in photos shot using Night Mode

For best results the image resolution should be kept to the highest setting. Same goes for the image quality. Sure if you select the highest megapixel count and super-fine settings the file size of the images will be higher than usual, but the improvement in quality is worth it. Remember, its about getting the best out of your phone cam.

Set your phone cam to the highest quality settings

__PAGEBREAK__
Set the White Balance
The auto white balance mode on a digicam is usually optimized to automatically adopt to most light settings, but auto white balance in phone cams is not really as intelligent. If your phone cam has a white balance option, make the most of it.

Using a white balance preset helps remove certain color overlays that may be distorting the original colors of an image. For example using ‘fluorescent light’ negates the excessive green color that’s normally found in a room lit by fluorescent tubes, just as the ‘tungsten light’ preset will cancel out excessive yellow in environments with yellow lighting.

Picture shot using a flourescent tube as lighting

You can even experiment with white balance settings for some unique results. Like using the ‘cloudy’ white balance preset will add a warm yellow feel to any outdoor shot.

__PAGEBREAK__

Don’t use digital zoom
Though all phone cams support some level of digital zoom, I strongly recommend you skip that and cover the distance up yourself. Digital zoom simply stretches the image to compensate for a real zoom functionality. This method is highly infamous for making the resultant image blurry and visibly lower quality; in fact stretching the image manually on your PC would give you a much better result than what most phone cams do.

Picture taken using digital zoom

Instead of using zoom, just walk a bit closer to your subject. In fact it is recommended to click subjects in close proximity for better results, not only in quality but also when you consider the overall composition.

Don’t zoom, just move up close to your subject

Shooting from close range also helps cover up complex backgrounds and surroundings that the phone camera may unsatisfactorily capture.

Distant shots are not a phone cam speciality

__PAGEBREAK__
Touch it up
Besides what I already mentioned in the digicam article , with phone cam images it’s a lot more important for you to fix the images, because of their tendency to get the colors and levels wrong. Of course you could always use tools like Picasa for a one click solution to your problems, but if your picture needs some specialized attention, you could always check out Digital Camera Enhancer 1.3 .

Digital Camera Enhancer is a free utility that works pretty well in increasing the brightness, black levels and also reducing noise from phone camera pictures. By simply tweaking the sliders in its interface, you can get a cleaner, sharper and an overall more presentable image. Just give it a shot.

That’s it for now, look out for more such helpful guides and features on Tech2.com. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Note: All photographs used in the article were shot using the Sony Ericsson K750i mobile phone cam.