Smartphones are pretty notorious for producing grainy, soft-looking images. This doesn’t have to be the case though; with a few techniques and tweaks, you can get sharper and cleaner images.
What Causes Smartphone Camera Noise?
Smartphone camera sensors are objectively terrible. Due to the very small sensor sizes, smartphones often have to usecomputational photography, the use of software to make the images look how they should instead of using the image straight from the sensor.
This processing can often lead to muddy details, oversharpening, noise, and grainy-ness. The grain isn’t the type of grain you get from film either, it’s often less aesthetic, and more just poor-quality looking. Of course, smartphones try to improve this each year, and even with each major update.
You don’t always have to rely on getting a better phone or waiting for the next camera software update, however; you can always use these tips to your advantage…
Get Better Lighting
No matter what type of device you’re using, photography is always much easier when there’s a lot of light. The more light your phone’s camera receives, the more information it can work with and the less it’ll need to process.
To make the most out of the light sources around you, it’s best to face your subject about three quarters of the way towards the light. This way, the light will hit your subject where your eyes will be drawn the most, and it’ll provide the most detail where you want it.
A trick I like to do to determine whether a light source is directed where it looks best is with my hand. I hold my palm up in front of me and turn around until my palm is lit pleasingly. You don’t need the light hitting your palm straight on as that often kills details on the surface, a slight angle is great for portraits and capturing details.
While it is good to have plenty of lighting, sometimes you need to watch out forharsh light in your photosas well.
In these examples are pictures of my camera, taken with my Redmi Note 11, which has a pretty bad camera in my opinion. In the first image, you’re able to see that the letters are soft, and most of the details are destroyed by the amount of noise. In the second image, however, there is a lot more contrast and detail and less noise overall.
Lower Your Exposure
Lowering your exposure is one of the quickest ways you may reduce noise in your image since you don’t need extra light, extra features, software, etc. In most phones, you just need to tap your screen to select where you want to expose for, and then gently slide your finger downwards to lower the brightness of the image.
Lowering your exposure may just be one single action, but your phone is doing many things at once to lower the brightness of the image. Since most phones have a set aperture, it is mainly doing two things; lowering the ISO, and increasing the shutter speed. Both of which are desirable in most cases, lowering the ISO reduces the image noise, and increasing the shutter speed reduces motion blur.
In these images, I simply just lowered the exposure in the way I mentioned. You can already see the big difference in detail and contrast.
Try Pro Mode and Lower Your ISO
If you’re able to’t afford to darken your images, you can always have more control over your images by using Pro mode or an equivalent manual mode if your phone has it. It is one of the manysmartphone photography mythsto always use Auto mode on your phone, but Pro mode in knowledgeable hands can produce excellent images.
Typically, this mode will allow you to choose your shutter speed and ISO, among other factors. The shutter speed and ISO are the only two controls that directly impact the exposure and noise, however.
To use manual mode to your advantage, set the ISO to as low as you can to get the least noise possible. You can then adjust the exposure by setting the shutter speed until the image is exposed the way you like it.
If there’s not enough light in the scene, you may need to lengthen the shutter speed to the point that you won’t be able to shoot handheld. If you’re shooting at shutter speeds slower than 1/20th second, it’d be best to use a tripod.
In these images, I shot the first one at ISO 2500 and a shutter speed of 1/20th of a second; the second one was shot at ISO 50 with a shutter speed of two seconds. I had to prop my phone up on the table because it’s impossible to hold it still for two seconds. In the zoom boxes, you may easily see the ISO 50 image has way more detail and texture than the ISO 2500, the details of which are completely smoothed out by noise.
Use Noise Reduction Software
Sometimes retaking noisy images is not possible. Instead of wishing you could go back and retake them with better knowledge, you do still have one more option left: post-processing.
You can use any photo editing software you like, but if you just want an app on your phone, you could easily use Lightroom for mobile (available onAndroidandiOS). Lightroom mobile has paid features, but thenoise reductionslider is free for anyone to use.
Using noise reduction usually leads to softening other details in your image. However, you can recover some of that by using thedetailslider that pops up when you use noise reduction. While post-processing can be magical, you shouldn’t expect it to do the impossible. Some images that are too noisy will lose detail even if you use the detail slider with noise reduction.
It’s always best to get the images looking as good as you can when you take them, and only use software if you really need it.
