On this post I will be talking about how my IPhone 4 became an immediate substitute to fill in my hunger for photography, alas, with the help of Adobe’s new Lightroom 3 for post processing.
Of course, the IPhone camera, or any mobile phone camera, captures less impressive photos as the image above. But with the help of it’s additional modes and quick post-processing work, you would probably get the hang of it adjusting your photograph’s final output result.
The photo below is the same photo as above, the difference is, this was taken in IPhone 4′s normal mode, and it is really messed up. Face features unrecognizable, low tones emphasizing the grainy noise texture, highlights unbalanced, and the colors are a disaster. *laughs* By the way, this photo was taken at the busiest intersection of Shibuya, Japan, fronting the Hachiko exit of Shibuya JR Station.
And here comes IPhone 4′s HDR mode to the rescue. During the dawn of Apple IPhones, you will always have to get those HDR applications to get your photos fixed (well, at some point, I guess), but in the new IPhone 4, the HDR feature has been integrated together with its 5MP camera. And this image below, my dear readers, is what you get:
Good thing Normal and HDR photos are saved altogether (for those who don’t know yet, you can set this via Settings > Photos > and set “Keep Normal Photo” to “On”. Now that’s a quick tutorial).You see, everything’s quite (or at least) better now. Those three Japanese boys on top together with that lady in pink got the their facial features right, and colors are getting better. I must say,Apple did a pretty good job on image development in their IPhone product.
So maybe that will be it for our quick tour with IPhone 4′s Camera. Now let’s proceed with Lightroom 3. I’m really not sure when Adobe released this major version update of LR (or Lightroom for that matter). Probably around mid or late 2010. And the good news, they let you try it out for free! This third version, was added up with some more presets, and color and photo processing options. Just try out sliding some sliders and you see results right away (much faster than Photoshop, though). One thing I really liked is it’s improved Noise Reduction feature, giving you more accurate editing of those noisy pictures (yeah, just like the two immediate images above).
From the HDR image above, I fed it up to Lightroom, adjusted some color and contrast stuffs, slid some sliders, and slid some more, until I got the image result that I think suits my taste (yes, the largest image above this post). This is probably not the best though, but these stuffs on HDR and LR really did helped a lot. You can see the image below for the side-by-side comparison of the three results we just had.
This might probably be not the best post processed photo that I can have, but I hope I have showed to you how to make use of what you have to capture the photo you ever wanted even with just a simple mobile phone camera. Just like what a friend told me once before; “Do not chase over new cameras. Instead, let those complex and high-end DSLR cameras chase your photography skills.” I hope this also inspires all those aspiring photographers out there.