Auto and Pro mode different results with similar settings

[gtt1]

So I was recently on a trip and it bothered me that the colours in my images while looked okay were not what I was seeing.

Decided while out walking today to take some shots with pro to see if they would be better.

As can be seen the auto shot is much brighter than the pro shot. What is interesting is the only difference in the settings is the speed for the pro shot is 1/181 .006 faster than the auto shot at 1/187. If you go into manual speed settings you only have a few choices close to the setting used 1/125, 1/180, and 1/250.

Auto

Pro

 

[VidJunky]

What everyone sees is different because of how we might be viewing, monitor, laptop, mobile, but to me the Auto picture looks better. I guess with the increased brightness it just looks like there's more detail. The photo setting I'm curious about is Raw. Do we have Raw on the S22 or is our Pro its equivalent?

I usually just take pics and get what I get and don't say... Well the things I won't say only apply here. Although I know what you mean by the pic not matching what I'm seeing. About the only setting I do change is Nightshot, or is it Night Shot, anyway I turn it off a lot. I mean I still would like to give the impression that it is kind of dark out. Nightshot always makes things look like daytime with little to no indication that it isn't high noon.

 

[gtt1]

So some one on Reddit gave me a possible explanation. HDR. It used to be an option when S22Ultra came out and they took the option out and made it auto in the auto mode. So it seems we are getting HDR whether we want it or not. But its obvious to me that if you took a picture in Pro using the settings produced in auto you get a darker picture in the light I was in.

 

[Mooncatt]

Typically manual modes (what Samsung calls pro mode) are not going to look identical to auto mode right out of the gate, even with the same exposure settings. Auto mode not only sets the exposure values, but is likely applying additional edits to enhance the image based on whatever the developer believes to be optimal. I.e. Adjusting shadows, highlights, contrast, etc.

Manual mode is for people that want more control over the entire process, not just the basic exposure values. There's nothing you could have done in manual mode to get the same image as auto without further editing. For example, the sky is about the same in both photos, but the manual mode has the ground level fairly dark. If you were to slow the shutter or increase the ISO to make the ground brighter, the sky would become over exposed.

What you need to do in a case like this would be to use the histogram to help you set the exposure to get the sky bright without over exposing it. As the exposure goes higher, the histogram graph shifts to the right. You need to avoid crushing it right up against the right limit, which basically means those pixels are now pure white and lost all detail. The live preview can also help judge the overall exposure. After you take the shot, you then need to use a photo editor to balance the rest of the image. It may just take some adjustments to increasing the shadow brightness and contrast, but sometimes hard to say until you actually get into it.

"Pro Mode" doesn't mean better images. That depends on the skill of the user.

 

[gtt1]

All I want is a phone that takes good reliable point and shoot photos. As a flagship top of the line phone this is what I expect but sometimes point and shoot don't give great results. I am seeing results that unfortunately don't always look good from one shot to the next. I noticed on a recent trip that the colours were not accurate although to anyone looking at the photos on social media they were great. For example I was at a quarry and took a photo in portrait of the nice colour of the water and again in landscape seconds apart. Blue sky with great light and the landscape photo shows the water as blue instead of green/blue very different.

 

[Mooncatt]

All I want is a phone that takes good reliable point and shoot photos. As a flagship top of the line phone this is what I expect but sometimes point and shoot don't give great results. I am seeing results that unfortunately don't always look good from one shot to the next. I noticed on a recent trip that the colours were not accurate although to anyone looking at the photos on social media they were great. For example I was at a quarry and took a photo in portrait of the nice colour of the water and again in landscape seconds apart. Blue sky with great light and the landscape photo shows the water as blue instead of green/blue very different.

Such is the drawback of auto mode. The phone and its sensor don't see what the eye sees. It just records photons as electrical signals and interprets that based on whatever algorithm it has to work with. A lot of photography is subjective, and there's no way for it to know what the image should look like to you. It's easy to say "I just want an image that looks true to life," but not so easy to accomplish. That's especially true with highly contrasted scenes and tricky lighting.

So it's either use auto mode and get decent to high quality shots in most cases with the chance at a dud, or use manual mode and learn to edit to recreate what you were seeing or wish the viewer to see.

 

[L0n3N1nja]

Auto has the phone tweaking the image in multiple ways to match what Samsung has it programed to do, which is produce photos people like based on their focus groups. It will apply HDR, increase saturation, boost exposure, etc. Their focus groups show people prefer a bright and colorful image so that is what the AI will produce.

Pro mode doesn't do any of that, you get a jpeg and RAW image to adjust how you like. Unless I need HDR for a shot I've usually stuck with pro since my Note 5, probably why I don't have all the complaints about Samsung cameras that some of our forum users do.