I recently bought a Fairphone 6 running on e/OS. Generally it works fine but sometimes photo seem to be ‘corrected’ in such a way that they look terrible, as if they are fake renderings. Surfaces of brick building are reduced to flat orange planes, tree branches just become noise, white parts are over saturated, etc.
Has anyone come across this problem? Is it a setting? It seems to me as if some filter or correction is applied to an extreme extend. Like playing with levels, contrast and brightness in photoshop but far too much.
Below two examples. The photos look like some fake watercolour filter was applied to them!
I know the camera can make decent photos but every now and then something like this happens.
If you have any advice I would be very happy to hear it.
Smartphone photos need to be heavily post-processed by the camera app, after all smartphone cameras are very, very limited (just compare the optics with those of a standard SLR camera!). The trick in camera post-processing is to make the result look good, yet natural. The cheap & quick method is, just crank saturation way up, increase contrast a little, sharpen the picture, and that’s it, it’s ready for Instagram.
Historically Fairphone camera software was far from the breathless marketing claims that it is the pinnacle of camera technology. To their defense, making a really outstanding phone camera software is very difficult, and we all know software isn’t Fairphone’s strong point.
My point is, don’t put your hopes too high and if picture quality is really important to you, check alternative camera apps. There are several serious ones (Gcam (aka Pixel camera), or OpenCamera), and choosing one is a question of personal preference since none is perfect: As I said, it’s not easy to do it right, and even less if it isn’t fine-tuned to the underlying hardware.
It’s really helpful to hear this, and know there’s not some miraculous fix I’m missing! I was starting to think I was going mad noticing it’s flaws when no-one else seemed to report it!
Probably because nowadays a lot of people have more pressing concerns about their Fairphones than camera quality…
Back in the day when I bought my FP4, its software was a lot more stable, nearly bug-free (!), and people indeed had time to worry about how to improve their rather unimpressive picture quality. There were several very long threads about it, which by now are probably totally outdated (we’re talking 2022-23). The gist was, use a different camera app. On which is the best one opinions diverged, as they all have/had their strong and weak points.
For the record my favorite was Open Camera, if only because it’s a hassle-free download from the Play Store (or whatever app store you chose to use), unlike the Pixel camera app clones which require some hacking (in the noble meaning).
