Why don't cameras offer the same level of image processing that phones do ?

[Fogux]

I bought a small 350$ Canon Camera for casual photography last year mostly because I like zoomed photos and zooms on phones is bad.

It does take good natural looking photos unlike phones do but in my opinion it lacks the features of phone-like post processing :

 

Sometimes I would rather have a "fake" high dynamic range effect like phones do. There is an High Dynamic range mode on my camera, but it locks a bunch of options and the end result is not good enough most of the times I just end up using the full manual mode with bracketing at different exposure and blend back the images manually in Gimp (I need to align them first it's very tedious).

An other day, I was shocked as how easy it was for my friend to take a long exposure shot with his Iphone, he could just stand here and wiggle his phone around while the software was stabilizing everything for him.

How cool that will be if I had something like this for taking pictures out of my telescope !

I also believe some phones take multiple shots and lets you choose afterward what exposure you want, I want that,

why can't my dedicated 350$ camera do the same ?

 

I don't see any thing about image processing capabilities and flexibility of the raw format in the "quick guide to Digital Photography " pinned topic, it's only about hardware, does this just not matter to professional photographs ?

Or did I just get scammed with my 350$ and everyone has these features in their cameras ?

Or maybe camera manufacturer are dwarfed by companies Apple and don't have the money to develop their own software ?

Or do they consider that these features are premium and only included in top tier 1500$ cameras ?

 

Any clue would be appreciated

[CyberneticTitan]

First if you need software to auto align your bracketed photos, you can use software like Lightroom or Darktable.

 

Both these software also support auto align for stitching photos. i.e. you take a bunch of photos from a single spot of the landscape, and merge them all together in one large photo.

 

There are tons of software out there that try to use ML to automatically process photos for you like Google or Apple. For example, Autohenace.ai.

 

The power of your Canon camera is really the large sensor, lens flexibility. It gives you the most control over what you want to take photos with. You won't be able to leverage Google's or Apple's computational photography tools that try to give the user a satisfying photo in the least amount of time as possible, but that's really not what DSLRs and more professional photo gear is for. With these cameras, they are tools to help you create your own personal vision of what you were imagining when you took the photo, not Google or Apple is envisioning.

[Fogux]

I know, I bought this exactly to be able to have control over the look of my photos.

But there are situation where I feel just opening the shutter for a fixed duration t and printing the sum of the light to a png file does not cut it.

For the image stabilization as an example, I would happily take apple's vision of a night sky over a blurry mess.

I believe Apple does not take a blurry png file and then tries to unblurr it, it does more sophisticated stuff during the picture taking process.

 

Still, thanks for your suggestion of software for aligning my bracketed photos, I will happily try them out.

One thing I would say though is that the bracketing is quite slow (something like 0.3s between each shot), my camera also comes with a software that provides high dynamic range blending with actual controls over the exposure but when I give it my bracketed shots it does not handle well the slight misalignment due to the 0.3s delay and outputs ugly border artifacts. Maybe your suggested software can do better.

But anyway since there is 0.3s delay some shots where I have a dark moving subject will still not be recoverable, even by the finest software.

What bothers me is that this slow bracketing speed is not even an hardware limitation of the camera since the auto HDR mode doesn't have these artifacts and takes the picture in "one shot" much faster, the issue is just that I can't adjust it.

[GDRRiley]

the goal in most cases of dedicated cameras is to get a good image with as little processing as possible. To get good battery life most have lots of fixed function hardware with as little GP hardware as they can.

Many newer cameras are adding in more and more of these features. my Fuji will do film simulations right in camera and can do panoramic and I believe do the auto bracketing for HDR not sure it can do the combining

 

I get a mix of in body lens and sensor stabilization with in some modes active stabilization done via cropping like a phone.

[Fogux]

19 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

To get good battery life most have lots of fixed function hardware with as little GP hardware as they can

That's fine for me, I would happily let my gaming PC do the GP processing later, I don't need a perfect preview of the image on my camera display.

It's just that my pc needs exploitable data to do so, not blurry pngs and misaligned HDR bracketed images.

 

My camera has some kind of active stabilization mode that helps a little bit but it's nowhere near as good as Apple's optical image stabilization. Also gyroscopic stabilization won't work with stars moving in the sky.

 

[CommanderAlex]

8 hours ago, Fogux said:

I bought a small 350$ Canon Camera for casual photography last year

Are we talking a Canon Rebel series camera? That's how they get you to move up to spend real $$$ on cameras such as their R mirrorless series that bring IBIS in giving you nearly 5 stops of stabilization, better dynamic range due to sensor technology being more advanced, and eye tracking. 

 

8 hours ago, Fogux said:

Or do they consider that these features are premium and only included in top tier 1500$ cameras ?

That's really where you will find those features on cameras. Canon especially buy Sony is another good option to research as their Sony E-mount has been out for nearly 10 years with many mirrorless cameras and lenses to choose from (cheaper to get into Sony's system). Canon and Nikon had to switch from DSLR to mirrorless relatively late. Canon didn't get into mirrorless until 2018 and they had to play catchup to get on level with Sony. 

 

If you're doing long exposure shots, you should be using a tripod and turn off IS on the lens to prevent the IS from correcting shake. Some lenses may detect it's on a tripod but only heard about them doing this. I don't know the specifics of which lenses do and do not, so best to turn IS off. The HDR mode in the camera sucks as they convert from RAW to JPEG, leaving PP really limited. Canon's DPP4 software that's free with the cameras do a pretty good job for PP and I believe with bracketed exposures, you can then do HDR on your computer instead. 

[tikker]

On 1/8/2023 at 6:30 AM, Fogux said:

Also gyroscopic stabilization won't work with stars moving in the sky.

The only thing that will let you deal with stars beyond the untracked limit is sidereal tracking on a mount.