Help the camera picture threads make me feel inadequate

[buffettgirl]

Ok, I'm looking at the camera picture threads and I simply cannot get good pictures like that. I get decent images outside, but inside, nada. I either blur badly, or I get grainy texture, or both.

I have taken my settings off auto and the graininess fixes when I lower the ISO to around 200, as I know that on a higher iso graininess can happen, but still, the picture quality is simply not what I'd call good...and/or it takes me 12 shots before I get one good one.

So, can someone give me tips on the best settings for the dInc? or tips on how to maximize the camera? Otherwise I'll just continue to feel like a camera failure.

 

[photographx]

That's because most of the photos are not being viewed at 100% resolution in that thread.

It's a trick.

 

[buffettgirl]

so are you saying that I'm not doing anything wrong?? That everyone's images look like mine (I"m looking for one I could upload that doesn't contain kids)

 

[photographx]

The photos are grainy unless you have great light.

When the photos are downsampled (made smaller) for the web, the grain (noise) becomes smaller than a pixel.

Also, the blur is not as visible when they are downsized.

The meta data indicates that a lot of those photos are being processed in Photoshop (sharpening, levels, saturation, etc...)

8x10 prints of most of the photos in that thread would look horrible.

 

[photographx]

The more megapixels a digital sensor has, the noisier it will be.

The HTC incredible has more megapixels than it needs.

Using a sensor with fewer megapixels would produce cleaner images, but most people (who are concerned with the camera) just look at the number of megapixels.

By the way, most of the photos in the thread are less than one megapixel after being resized....

 

[buffettgirl]

thank you for clearing that up. I appreciate the honesty about the other picture threads. Don't get me wrong, my last flip phone couldn't even take a picture that resembled anything, so this is a huge improvement. I just wish that indoors I could get something decent. Oh well.

 

[Woah]

The more megapixels a digital sensor has, the noisier it will be.

The HTC incredible has more megapixels than it needs.

Using a sensor with fewer megapixels would produce cleaner images, but most people (who are concerned with the camera) just look at the number of megapixels.

By the way, most of the photos in the thread are less than one megapixel after being resized....

So instead of shooting at the full 8mp you could drop it down to 5mp and it would produce clearer images?

 

[lunatic59]

So instead of shooting at the full 8mp you could drop it down to 5mp and it would produce clearer images?

In theory, yes, but the problem becomes how the image is downsampled. You see the CCD chips are a fixed resolution, so even if you set a 8MP sensor to save at 5MP, it still takes the image as an 8MP image and throws away 3MP.

If clear pictures are your concern the best would be to set them to maximum resolution and highest quality (I doubt any phone saves a RAW image) and then adjust them in Photoshop. The downside it that the file size becomes larger and it takes longer for the phone to save it.

 

[photographx]

So instead of shooting at the full 8mp you could drop it down to 5mp and it would produce clearer images?

It would really require replacing the sensor with one that has fewer "pixels." Cramming so many pixels onto a small sensor produces the noise.

However, to your question, resampling the image to a lower resolution reduces the size of noisy pixels. If you make the image small enough, the noise is lessened. This is why it is not as apparent on the low res JPGs posted to the web.