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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There are 2 things to note here:
Field of view is the maximum angle that the camera (or your eyes) can see. If you use a wider lens, then objects get stretched more and more as you get closer to the edge of the picture. Phones have software compensation to minimize this effect, but it is just a natural consequence of the lens design. Phones have wide fields of view by default, with some having ultra wide lenses as well, capturing more of the scene, but more distorted. You naturally see some of this distortion with your eyes and your brain considers it normal, that’s why a zoomed in photo feels squished, because the natural distortion is missing.
The second, color reproduction, comes from multiple things: The lens could have a subtle discoloration, the sensor might be more sensitive to certain color tones, the compression that creates the JPEG file also distorts color slightly. The main reason smartphones have unnatural colors though, is because people in general prefer more vivid and brighter scenes, even if they are not as realistic. Because of this preference, the easy to use automatic camera mode usually brightens and oversaturates the input from the camera. MKBHD’s blind camera test shows this perfectly, it’s worth watching. A way to have more realistic results is by either taking the time to set the camera up in manual mode, or by making it save the uncompressed raw image along with the JPEG. These raw files look weird as well, but they can be edited to bring out detail that the JPEG would lose during compression, and also to have realistic colors.
The tl;dr is that people usually prefer dynamic and bright photos, so phones are adjusted to fit that. The minority that prefers realism can achieve it, but it takes longer
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