HTC One Photography – Punggol Waterway

After holding on to the HTC One for a long period of time (thanks to HTC), I decided to do a low light photo shoot with it. I was jogging around my estate and I thought it might be a good time to test out the low light capability of the HTC One. My other purpose is to find out if the 4MPX UltraPixel camera can do a good job of getting good images for post-processing or not.

Do note that this HTC One has NOT been upgraded to the latest firmware and I had done editing on the pictures. These are my workflow (very simple): Neat Image to reduce noise (auto profile, apply), Auto Level, Brightness/Contrast Adjust, Unsharp Mask.

I did not care about the white balancing and most of the pictures had the contrast pushed up to the way I like it. After that, it was resized and watermarked. All the pictures are not cropped (I don’t like to crop pictures) and they are taken at 16:9 format (or wide in HTC One) and I did not use any digital zoom.

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The area that I took the pictures are very dark. I can safely say that most camera phones will not survive such lighting conditions.

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A ramp.

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Under a bridge with street light (yellow) from above and the white light from the lamp posts.

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Another perspective.

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These two images are a little special as I uses the HDR mode for the camera. You need to steady hand to capture a good picture (or use a tripod) even though the HTC One has OIS (Optical Image Stabilizer). This picture was taken without any artificial light. If you strain your eyes, you can see a star 🙂 .

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Here is a vertical version when I place the HTC One vertically on the ground.

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And to prove to you how HTC One can handle low light, check out this picture. It is a construction site. The building is not ready yet. Therefore, there is no lighting at all. However, HTC One is still able to capture it quite nicely.

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Overall, HTC One did a good job in capturing these images. However, do take note that the pictures you see on the screen is usually more saturated or lively. When you transfer it to your computer, it tends to be of lower contrast.

Too bad, the pictures are in 4 MPX format. That means you cannot do much to crop them. I hope HTC can come up with a phone that has a bigger sensor and thus a better megapixels. Please let me know how you feel about these pictures.

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