LG G6 Go-to manual camera settings for low light?

[bobdob]

Re: Go-to manual camera settings for low light?

Aperture is fixed on cell phones.

Duh. I am an id10t, that makes perfect sense. But, count me in the group that thinks a camera makes a better camera than a phone does anyway. At least for now.

 

[Jezza819]

Re: Go-to manual camera settings for low light?

Never digital zoom. Maybe if emergency, like you see Elvis in a UFO and it's taking off.
Crop afterwards.

I'm curious about this. What exactly are you cropping and how do you do it? How does cropping make up for zooming? And I might not be asking that question correctly. I don't have Photo Shop but I do have Ifranview and have used that to alter some images in the past.

But I've learned my lesson to never zoom unless I'm a lot closer to something and then to take a shot without zoom just to have a safe backup. Apparently it's the same for video too.

 

[Mike Dee]

Re: Go-to manual camera settings for low light?

Aperture is fixed on cell phones.

Makes me want to say broken

 

[bobdob]

Re: Go-to manual camera settings for low light?

I'm curious about this. What exactly are you cropping and how do you do it? How does cropping make up for zooming?

Start with cropping. Let's say you have a picture of a bird. The resolution of the picture is 1000x1000 pixels and the bird looks half as big as you would like it to be. So, you cut out a 500x500 section of the picture and make it double the size so it is back to 1000x1000.

The simplest way to double the size is to take each pixel and replace it with a 2x2 block of the same color. But of course that doesn't look very good. And in general you might want to make images larger in other than a 2:1 ratio. So image editing software has other algorithms to try to make things look the best, which uses interpolation and other methods to smooth the enlarged image.

Now, with digital zoom, the process is the same, but it's done on the fly in the camera software.

The reason to do it in software afterward is that you're stuck with whatever the camera software decides to do (it will be an algorithm optimized for speed, not quality). Whatever algorithm it has is what you get. And the pixels outside the zoomed in frame are lost forever.

If you keep the full image and crop it later, not only do you have your choice of software (most of which will result in a nicer zoomed image) and image resizing algorithm, but you can make a more-informed decision about the exact composition of your final image (amount and location of the crop).

 

[LeoRex]

Re: Go-to manual camera settings for low light?

I'm curious about this. What exactly are you cropping and how do you do it? How does cropping make up for zooming? And I might not be asking that question correctly. I don't have Photo Shop but I do have Ifranview and have used that to alter some images in the past.

But I've learned my lesson to never zoom unless I'm a lot closer to something and then to take a shot without zoom just to have a safe backup. Apparently it's the same for video too.

Video is different.. quite different (i'll explain a bit later)

Well, cropping is a post function.. something you do after you take the picture. You can use Ifranview, or Paint.net (another awesome free editing tool). But you can also easily do it in Google Photos, or your phone. If you go into Google Photos, for example, either web or app, and click on the edit button (a little pen icon on the app), you'll see some controls pop and the crop icon will look like this



Here, you can rotate, or crop the picture, etc...

That's the thing with digital zoom... when you zoom in and take a pic, you are taking the full size pic and the software goes in and crops the picture to match the image you see on your screen. Now, for stills, digital zoom is evil... it is trivially easy to go in and crop the picture after the fact.

For videos, well, it is a completely different story. First off, cropping video is a lot harder to do and most people don't have the software tools to do it. Even simple video editors can be overwhelming to non-technical users. And then you have to deal with output formats, and CODECS, etc. And, just as important, video is not taken at the sensor's full resolution... even at UHD (which is slightly lower than true 4K), it is taking video at 3840x2160 where the sensor's full resolution is 4160x3120. FHD recording, which is what most use, is 1920x1080... which is 1/4th the size of UHD.

So.... if you are planning on taking a zoomed in video, take it in UHD.... hmm... actually, I smells me a post... I'll write up a more detailed tip explaining...

 

[evanborkow]

Great info and explanation. Thank you.

 

[flyingkytez]

Re: Go-to manual camera settings for low light?

Aperture is fixed on cell phones.

Noise is horrid. Grain is beautiful. Big difference between the two.

Never digital zoom. Maybe if emergency, like you see Elvis in a UFO and it's taking off.
Crop afterwards.

Autofocus on this camera is not the best, especially as the light drops off. Just have to know that and know what expectations to have for this.

Agreed. Only zoom if you don't care about image quality. The 16MP sensor should be able to capture the details in the pixels very well from far away. An advantage of higher MP sensors.