Pixel 6a cell phone JPEG gives paint-by-number effect

[rjlittlefield]

I was recently reminded of why it's a good idea to shoot RAW, when pushing the envelope of my cell phone's capabilities.

This was shot at close focus in the camera's "2X" mode, which really means crop-and-expand. It produces a "12 megapixel" JPEG of size 3024x4032 pixels, but when I retrieve the underlying .dng file, well, that's only 1496 x 2000. The expansion process, at least in this case, was a little heavy-handed.

Here's the whole frame, as recovered from the .dng file using Adobe Camera Raw and Topaz Sharpen AI:



Now here are snippets of that result, compared with the in-camera JPEG (on the right, if it's not obvious). The .dng result has been Photoshop resized to match the pixel count of the JPEG.

At 100%




At 200%



--Rik

[WojTek]

Hi Rik,
Very interesting!
Does your phone save all the pictures as dng?
My phone has a high resolution mode but only in jpg
Best, ADi

[rjlittlefield]

Does your phone save all the pictures as dng?

It has a switch, RAW+JPEG versus JPEG only.

In RAW+JPEG mode, it seems to save all single-exposure still images in both formats.

Multi-panel images that are stitched in-camera, such as panos and photospheres, are stored only as JPEG.

Night Sight images are stored as .dng also, though I hesitate to call those "raw" because they too have been assembled from multiple exposures.

The sensors on Pixel 6a are only 12 megapixels (8 for front-facing), and as far as I can tell it has no multi-exposure mode to increase the pixel count.

What type of camera do you have?

--Rik

[WojTek]

Hi Rik,

My mobile phone is a bit older, but still good enough for holiday photos:
viewtopic.php?p=272046#p272046

Best, ADi

[MarkSturtevant]

I rather like the painted effect of these pictures.