These have both been taken with the exact same camera from the same location. The one on the left is with the OnePlus camera app, and the one on the right is from a community modification of the Google camera app to work on the OnePlus 12. The Google one looks a lot better because they use super-resolution from multiple short exposures automatically.
The Google camera app does not usually look better without zoom (in my short time testing) and also has a harder time focusing.
Is the paper white or tan though? The right picture is sharper, but I’m assuming it’s also the wrong color.
White balance is hard, probably Google made a different decision or something as simple as something (another person) blocking some light on one pic vs another.
I bet if op white balances both to the same they will look more similar.
This was the auto white balance, and these images are only very lightly cropped. The paper is fairly light but the lights are warm, so it’s slightly arbitrary which is better.
That’s true. They’re test images.
White balance drives me crazy when I take pictures of art. That’s why i brought it up.
if you do it often, i have a great little pack of credit card sized white and grey cards… they are an absolute life saver for fixing white balance in post
Of course, light cards! I completely forgot that was a thing. Thank you for reminding me
Yeah, white balance is very fixable in post tho so that doesn’t seem like a significant problem.
to a degree, but it’s much better to get it right when you’re shooting… you lose dynamic range if it’s off
I’m surprised that it loses dynamic range. White balance is actually built into the camera hardware?
at its core you’re still recording a number from 0% to 100% brightness in the image… if an image is more yellow, you’re adding some extra brightness to those channels, which potentially loses you information. it might not be noticeable most of the time, but especially around clipping there’s going to be information lost
all that said, i’m not a professional - i’m just an amateur with a blackmagic camera and a decent understanding of the data format it uses filling in some blanks
I know that camera hardware does not return hdr values. So something in the actual conversion from/in the sensor (idk how cmos sensors work) would have to be affected by the white balance for changing it in the camera software to do lose a significant amount more information than changing it after the picture was taken. Unless the conversion from a raw image also is a factor, but raw images aren’t hdr either so I don’t really see how that could cause much significant difference.
If the white balance only dims colors and doesn’t brighten them then it couldn’t possibly clip anything and would have the same effect as lowering the exposure originally (with the new white balance) to avoid a clipped highlight.
I’m not a photography guy (just a computer graphics guy) so idk what the software usually does (I suspect it would avoid clipping? You could also brighten something with a gamma curve for example to prevent clipping…) but I can’t find anything online about sensors having hardware support for white balance adjustment.