TIL color correction of bad smartphone photos is hard.

[Ash_Kechummm]

 

So I've been interested in photo editing (especially color correction) for a long time, and have been usually fixing white balance and the tint of images clicked by my sister on her canon rebel t6i (called a 750D here in asia) because she always messes them up somehow.

 

Then I decided to test these "skills" I thought I had on bad smartphone images I clicked with the inbuilt camera app of my ageing xiaomi redmi 4 (RAW was out of the question, because the phone doesn't support the camera2api I need to click RAW in open camera {BTW shoutout to open camera, the best free camera app I've seen on android hands down})

 

Long story short, it was a nightmare to fix, and still doesn't look accurate enough to what I saw with my own eyes when I decided to click that picture (that is usually my reference when I'm editing images, because although I'm not good at naming stuff, I'm pretty good at remembering colors). 

 

I first tried to use rawtherapee on PC (like I do for everything else), but I just couldn't fix it.

 

In the end, I had to manually paint onto the picture with the temperature brush tool in snapseed (making the sky mostly grey from an ugly blue-green, and the building the peachy orange it was supposed to be from whatever the heck out looked like in the original picture). 

 

How would y'all fix the original picture? I'm curious to know that. It might influence my editing style and make me better. Plus I just like interacting with people on this forum, so I'll keep asking stuff here, mission critical or not.

 

Edited March 26, 2021 by Ash_Kechummm
These typos are gonna be the end of me

[emosun]

If the phones censor is actually a cheap/old sensor , then it's literally not capturing the color correctly and will always yield an image that you have to paint over

You really should not HAVE to know how to color correct for a bad sensor or image. It's not really a skill that should be needed and I know it seems like it'd be an interesting challenge but you'll only develop skills for scenarios that shouldn't happen in the first place.

[Ash_Kechummm]

9 minutes ago, emosun said:

..You really should not HAVE to know how to color correct for a bad sensor or image....

That is true, but I have to use this phone for god knows how many years till it finally stops working, so I must know how to edit out such faults so that I can keep at least some memories from the years I've had this phone for. So it isn't really a skill that's not needed imo (I need it a lot, for example)

Edited March 26, 2021 by Ash_Kechummm
I'm making wayyyyy too many typos, i should sleep

[emosun]

Thing is you can buy better digital cameras with better sensors than that phone has for like 10-20$ used.

 

My first digital camera I used around 2010 I bought used at a goodwill for 6$. It ran on 2 AA batteries and was a simple little brick camera that at least had an optical zoom and it honestly was amazing. 

 

If I were you. Save like 10-15$ and buy a used sony cybershot so you have the base for an image that can be color corrected without painting. As of right now the camera on that phone is not going to yield images that are even correct to begin with.

[badreg]

29 minutes ago, Ash_Kechummm said:

still doesn't look accurate enough to what I saw with my own eyes when I decided to click that picture

A camera is not an eye, and a sensor does not see color, so whatever expectation that you have for a camera to capture an image the way that you see it is completely unfounded. It doesn't matter if you are using a 10 year old phone, or a $50,000 medium format back.

 

Unless you are properly calibrating every step of your workflow (profiling the sensor, measuring the color temperature of the scene, profiling your display, profiling your printer), you are essentially guessing. Your eyes are subjective, and you're not going to be able to reliably tell the difference between ±250K or dE ±2. Measurement devices are objective and will be able to give you precise answers about what a color actually is.

 

Beyond this, you need to understand that a camera captures a scene once, while your brain constantly adjusts for brightness and color temperature changes as your eyes scan the scene. Going from direct sunlight to shadow changes the color temperature by around 2000K. In a photo, this is an massive difference, but it is not something that you see in real time.

 

Color correction is not just moving the temperature and tint sliders around until it looks correct. When there is mixed lighting, every part of a scene has a different color temperature, and it needs to be accounted for.