How to unleash your camera phone’s full potential

About 10 years ago, no professional photographer would have probably thought that a camera phone could replace a professional DSLR in quality and usability.

Camera phones were far too basic in features and it lacked the imaging power compared to DSLRs. But with the most recent technologies in phone photography, I would say it is now very possible or even true that camera phones are slowly replacing those heavy and bulky cameras.

Shot with my mid-range smartphone and processed in Adobe Lightroom

I have been a photographer by profession and I also have been teaching photography in several universities in the country for the past 11 years. My DSLR was my main tool, but that changed last year when I bought a midrange phone and used its RAW feature for shooting.

For this article, we’ll check out some ways to maximize your phone’s camera settings and turn ordinary snaps to upload-worthy photographs.

Flexible settings

If you ask any photographer, a DSLR is the ideal tool for different reasons. First is for its full manual control, next is its capability to interchange lenses, and third is its RAW shooting format.

Pro mode is pretty common for smartphones these days

So how can phones replace DSLRs? A lot of smartphones today — even budget phones — have DSLR-like full manual control in Pro mode that lets you control ISO, White Balance, Focus, Metering, and Shutter Speed from up to 30 seconds – 1/4000 of a second.

You also have several focal length options that vary from ultra-wide, bokeh (prime lens), macro, and a telephoto (zoom) lens. You can pick and choose from these lenses depending on what the situation calls for.

If you find yourself traveling in a foreign land and you want to capture the landscape, an ultra-wide-angle lens would prove useful. If you want to focus on one subject up close, go for macro. When you need to zoom in on something, the telephoto would prevent loss of detail, and so on.

A sample of a phone’s multi-camera setup

Remember, knowing specifically which and when to use your camera phone’s features is one of the ingredients to achieving a great shot.

Although important, those are a bit given. But a feature most people are not aware of is that a lot of mid-range and most (if not all) flagship phones now have RAW format!

RAW format

So what is RAW format? A quick Google search tells us it’s basically an unprocessed and uncompressed data of a photo that can be compared to the unprocessed film negative. If your phone supports this, it can be found on the settings page when you open your camera app.

For the sake of comparison, a normal JPEG (common method of lossy compression for digital images) photo has 8-bit of data per pixel or 256 shades of color. Meanwhile, RAW contains 12-14 bit per pixel or 4,096 shades of color and makes up to 68.7 billion colors.

In other words, shooting in RAW offers a tremendous amount of exposure and color detail greatly beneficial for tweaking its settings on a photo-editing software. Color correcting and color grading a RAW file will not reduce the quality of a photo — something that JPEG formats are notorious for doing.

Here are a couple of samples I shot on RAW vs after editing them:

Dynamic Range

When shooting landscape, you probably experienced ending up frustrated when you see the skies just blown-out and simply plain white, while shadows are totally dark with no details.

This is where dynamic range (or contrast ratio) will come into play. Most camera phones now have an HDR (High Dynamic Range) feature that uses AI to pull out details from contrasting parts of the photo.

But did you know shooting in RAW format will naturally capture details in both the light and dark areas of up to roughly 12 stops of exposure? And with the use of RAW processing apps like Adobe Lightroom, Snapseed, and VSCO, you now have the ability to pull out those details directly from your phone.

This will give you the power to create stunning landscape photos full of detail and color. This is not the same story when you shoot in 8-bit HDR JPEGS as attempting to pull out details from a jpeg will end up messing up your color and texture.

Know when to use RAW format

RAW format is not recommended in every single photo you take with your phone. You have to keep in mind that the RAW format will eat up a lot of your precious memory as a single photo can use up to 50mb depending on the pixel count of your phone’s cameras.

RAW format also requires processing. You cannot simply just shoot and upload. It is only recommended to use this format if you plan to correct exposure, correct color, and color grade on photo-editing apps like mentioned earlier.

Protip: Landscape and travel photography is where you will find this most useful!

Conclusion

Now that these features are available on a phone using just one hand, I found myself using it for a number of my shoots.

Yes, a DSLR is still more powerful given its sensor size and a dedicated lens still produces better photos. But in some scenarios, it is simply a huge convenience to carry your photography tools in such a small package that fits in your pocket.

Plus it’s a convenient alternative to shoot in places where DSLRs require permits to use. The quality is already there and it continues to improve with every succeeding model. With these in mind, I truly am excited about the future of phone photography.

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realme C55 review: Redefining the C Series

04/21/2023

realme Philippines just introduced the realme C55 smartphone in the Philippines. It’s a midrange phone with a sub-PhP8K price tag but offers an array of features and capable performance. It also sports the new Mini Capsule similar to the Dynamic Island found on Apple’s iPhones.

With that affordable pricing, can it really deliver on its promises? We find out.

Unboxing

Let’s begin with the box. Not much has changed when it comes to packaging and you still get an all-yellow box and once you open it, you’ll be greeted and welcomed to the realme family.

Lifting and opening this smaller box reveals the usual manuals and guides in addition to its included jelly case if you want to add some sort of protection to your device.

What’s left in the box is the realme C55 unit and digging deeper will introduce you to the power brick and USB-C cable that supports SuperVOOC charging. More on that later.

Design

For the device itself, the realme C55 has a sleek and modern design with a well-designed back that’s available in two colors – Sunshower and Rainy Night. Even though the back panel is made of plastic, it still exudes that premium look and feel thanks to its rounded edges.

What we have here is the Rainy Night color and just like its name suggests, the back has these textures and patterns that look like showers of light rain pouring at certain angles. Looking at it could get trippy.

The phone feels comfortable in the hand, and the buttons are well-placed and easy to reach. All the buttons are on the right side with the volume rocker sitting above the power/lock button that also doubles as a fingerprint scanner. There have been a few fingerprint misreadings during our time but overall, it has been quick and responsive and had no major issues.

The left side houses its dual SIM tray and microSD slot for storage expansion. Meanwhile, at the bottom, you have an audio jack for wired headphones, its USB 2.0 Type-C port, and a speaker grille.

As for the rest of its back panel, there are two prominent camera sensors at the back namely a 64-megapixel main and a secondary 2-megapixel depth sensor. We’ll expound on the optics later on.

Display and multimedia

In terms of display, this phone comes with a 6.72-inch FHD+ IPS display with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 pixels. The display is bright and vibrant, and the colors are accurate. There’s a bit of chin at the bottom but the rest of the bezels are pretty thin but still a bit noticeable.

The realme C55 also features a 90Hz refresh rate, which makes scrolling and navigating through the UI feel smooth and fluid. I always turn set my phone’s refresh rate to the highest since scrolling just looks very fluid even though it depletes the battery faster. That’s what its fast-charging tech is there for, at least for me.

Using it when watching videos on YouTube or streaming TV shows and movies on Netflix, its large display makes for easy viewing. Although I would appreciate it better if it had stereo speakers rather than just one bottom-firing grille. But of course, that would bump up the price.

Camera

As mentioned earlier, the realme C55 has a dual camera setup on the back, which includes a 64-megapixel main camera, and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. Having the same main sensor as the realme GT Edition, the camera performance is impressive for its price point, with good color accuracy and detail in well-lit conditions.

Photos have a generally cool tone to them and dynamic range is actually good as it preserves details both in the dark and light areas for each shot even with HDR turned off.

One of the things I noticed, though, is that it sometimes struggles in focusing when taking photos of subjects up close. Usually, this is where a macro feature would come in handy, but that’s not present in this phone. Night Mode also works well and is able to get needed light into its sensor for a clear image at the expense of holding still for about 3 seconds on average.

Something that I missed shooting with a realme phone is its Street Mode which automatically applies Kodak-approved filters to produce more of those street-style vibe photos. But, this is the entry-level C series, after all, so we’re not complaining.

Video recording maxes out at 1080p at 60fps which is good enough for shooting reels. But since this phone isn’t meant to specialize in videos, we don’t have any complaints.

The phone also features an 8MP front-facing camera, which takes decent selfies. One of my observations, though, is that its night mode has the same long shutter approach so it wasn’t the best thing to use in low light with a large group of people unless they’re willing to keep still for about 3 seconds while the selfie camera lets more light into its sensor.

Performance

This midrange phone is powered by a MediaTek Helio G88 chipset paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage. This is the first time that a model from the C series comes with this RAM and storage combo.

In terms of daily usage, switching between apps is effortless and its realme UI 4.0 based on Android 13 makes navigation intuitive. The phone, in general, can handle your usual social media apps and even video editing software for creating short videos on TikTok or IG Reels, for example.

The phone also features a Mali-G52 GPU, which is capable of handling most games and apps. I did experience some frame drops when playing resource-intensive games like Genshin Impact. It’s quite understandable but I was still able to enjoy playing on the device and lags were not something I experienced on a regular basis.

Special to this phone is realme’s Mini Capsule feature that appears on top of the screen to show useful notifications. As of writing this review, it just displays the battery status that pops up when the battery is running low, charging, or fully charged. It can also alert you of your data usage when you’ve consumed more than 90% of your daily data usage limit.

realme says it will still add more features to the Mini Capsule via downloadable updates in the future.

Battery life

The realme C55 has a 5000mAh battery, which provides impressive battery life. The phone can easily last for a full day on a single charge with moderate usage and we were even able to use the phone as our wireless display for our DJI RSC 2 while shooting our video reviews.

The phone also supports 33W SuperVOOC fast charging, with claims that it can charge the phone from 0 to 100% in about an hour. This proved true during our experience and even just charging the phone for 30 minutes already yielded around 50% of battery life from empty.

For context, previous iterations from the C series could only charge up to 18W with their Quick Charging feature.

Price and conclusion

The realme C55 has a starting price in the Philippines of PhP 8,999 for the 6GB and 128GB model while the 8GB and 256GB variant that we have is at PhP 10,999.

Overall, the realme C55 is a solid midrange smartphone that offers good value for money. The phone has a sleek and modern design, a large and vibrant display with a high refresh rate, powerful performance, and a capable camera system.

The phone also has excellent battery life and supports fast charging. So if you’re looking for an affordable smartphone that offers good overall performance, the realme C55 definitely reinvents offerings from the C series and is well worth considering.

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