Eli5: why when you take pictures with your phone (for example, of a beautiful sunset) the colours and proportions don’t look as good as with the human eye?
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Most answers here seem to neglect the main reason why we can’t capture sunsets quite like what our eyes see: Dynamic Range.
Dynamic Range is basically the ability to see both dark and bright spots at the same time, and it’s measured in stops. Each ‘stop’ is a doubling of the light value of a spot. So if you have a dynamic range of 10, you can tell the difference between a bright spot that is a little more than 1000 times brighter than the dark spot.
The best cameras in the market have a Dynamic Range of about 16 (which is a ratio of 1 : 65,536), while our eyes have a dynamic range of 21. That’s a contrast ratio of 1 : 2,000,000.
So when we capture something, even with the best DSLR out there, there’s a lot of detail that gets lost that our eyes can perceive. The best example would be the moon. You can quite clearly see the moon and the details on its surface in the night with your eyes while also being aware of your surroundings. But as soon as you try to take a picture of the moon and the landscape with your phone, the moon just morphs into a bright blob on your screen. That’s because the moon is really bright, much brighter than anything else that’s usually lit in the dark, even in a city full of street lights.
And the reason for that has nothing to do with our eye lens or the camera lens, but the image sensors themselves. Camera sensors just aren’t as sensitive as the cells that capture light in our eyes.
Then there’s the problem of screens themselves. Most LCD screens only go up to 10 stops, which is about 1 : 1000. TV’s go up to 1 : 4000. So you have to further compress the details in order to show them on a screen, losing details that live between those stops further.
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