A Landscape comparison of the iPhone with Canon APS-C and FF

Image set 2

I went for a small hike on Monday and brought my gear with me to do further testing. This next series of images includes both highly shaded areas as well as some sky and clouds to test the useful dynamic range of the sensors. I avoided doing any HDR bracketing for the raw captures (instead choosing an exposure to just avoid clipping in the white clouds). The iPhone default cam used HDR algorithms by default.

This is the raw capture of the 5D of the scene (with default LR tone curve, daylight WB and default sharpening) for comparison.

I processed the 5D image to taste, using all of the tools available in ACR to adjust the colour and tonality throughout the image.

I repeated the same process with the 7D (which is unfortunately zoomed in a bit too much, missing a bunch of the sky and clouds). I was surprised how well the 7D did here, noise in the shadows looks ok and the sky recovered fine. Masking the sharpening helped keep the blue sky tones to a low noise level. The river shadows are not bad as well.

The iPhone wide angle lens (26mm equivalent) when captured in raw is struggling a bit more in this image. To bring the shadows up to a similar level introduces a fair bit of noise that has to be aggressively removed with NR in ACR.

The default iPhone camera applies an HDR algorithm that does a great job, with clean shadows, but has a lot of compression in the highlights. The clouds in the sky look good, and the sky brightness is ok (although the tone is off slightly). The bright sunlit foliage is ok, but is a bit mushy because of the highlight compression, where the processed dng shows a greater range of tones. I think the phone did well for itself here. I would be curious to do a manual HDR bracket set with the LR raw dng capture to see how well i could improve the results.