The best camera is always the one you have with you. But did you know that your smartphone and tablet can do more? The integrated camera app that comes with your smartphone and tablet only does JPEG. However, the camera sensor can do more. JPEG images are only 8 bits, but the sensor can do 16 bits with a colour depth of 14 bits. These 8 bits mean 28 = 256 colours can be displayed. Whereas the sensor can capture 214 = 16384 colours. This means that data is used very wastefully. Once data is lost, it can no longer be recovered. So get the maximum out of your sensor, I'll show you how.
The solution to the problem
The integrated camera apps are kept slim for cost reasons. The situation is different with the Lightroom app from Adobe. Here you have a fully-fledged image editing programme. If you take photos from it, the raw data from the sensor is saved first.
The best thing about this Lightroom app is that it's free. If you already have a Creative Cloud subscription, you also get a few extras. But you can already do a lot with the free app.
To take photos, open the app and three icons will appear at the bottom of the screen: Gallery, Lightroom and Community. Briefly tap the Lightroom icon and a new screen will open with a camera icon in the bottom right-hand corner. If you tap this camera symbol, the camera display opens with all its setting options. Feel free to play around with these controls, you can see what they do on the display. As soon as you have the right setting, tap the shutter release button.
But if you think you already have a finished picture, you are mistaken. You only have the raw data of the image. The image has been saved as a DNG, which is Adobe's raw data format. You have to develop this in Lightroom. Go to the app's gallery and tap on the image to open it. If you tap on the Edit icon, a menu opens where you first click on Light. Six sliders then appear; leave the Exposure and Contrast sliders alone for the time being. To do this, drag the Highlights slider to the left to darken the bright areas. Then drag the Depth slider to the right to lighten the dark areas. This is usually not enough, so drag the White slider to the right to make the image even clearer. If the picture still looks a little dull, you can drag the Black slider to the left. With these 4 sliders you can adjust the image more precisely than with exposure and contrast. There is still a lot to discover in this section, the image is only finished when you have saved it. With the process just described, you bring the information into the image that would have been cut off during processing by the image processor in a JPEG.
The finished image can be sent directly from the app to social media. Have fun trying it out.
