Latest Xperia I ii update gives us THIS!!!! By The Art of Photography

So this week the Sony Xperia one mark ii got a major update. I finally have a full production copy of this phone, not a pre-production. So if you are as excited as I am about the photography possibilities on this phone, you are really going to love this update. So I want to get into all the new stuff, but I also should mention that I have a camera giveaway going on right now, that is through the month of august, I'm giving away a 4 000 budget for the camera body and or lens or combination thereof of your choice. I will put a link-up here or if you are interested, I will put a link in the show description. You can click on that link.

All you have to do is put in your email address. There are ways to get more entries into this. It's all explained there below, but anyway, let's get into the Sony Xperia one mark ii update the review that I did was done on a pre-production phone. I finally have a full production phone and I have downloaded and installed the brand-new system update from Sony yeah. We now have raw support for all three cameras, so this is the ultra-wide the standard wide and the telephoto camera.

All of them now support raw. So why is raw important if you are interested in achieving the best quality of photos that you can possibly get out of this phone raw is absolutely essential. So, generally speaking, phones are set up to make it easy for the end user, so they use JPEG compression and a lot of stuff is done behind the scenes in terms of computational imaging. Generally speaking, JPEGs are limited to what we refer to as a RGB color space. So this is a limited color space that works great on computer monitors.

It works great on websites, social media, wherever you happen to be posting images, however, if you are trying to edit in post and your exposure is slightly off- let's say it's a little too bright, and you have highlights that are blown. Let's say right now. I have this correctly exposed, but my shirt right here is white. If this goes too bright, you lose any detail in the shirt, and so you can't get that back in a RGB format with a raw file, you get what is called a ROG file, and you are going to be able to rescue a little of highlights. Maybe a little of shadows, you have a lot more latitude in what you can define in your final image.

The reason I'm so excited about this is, I think, that Sony have given us one of the best camera systems available on any mobile phone in the market. Today, now the Apple iPhone the Google Pixel. They are incredible phones. There are a wide range of choices that we have in terms of mobile phones. Now, not all of them allow us to shoot raw, and when you think about it, we have three cameras on this phone.

Each one of these lenses has its own dedicated sensor, underneath so essentially on a phone like this, you could have up to three different cameras, all in one phone. The one thing that really makes me sad about most mobile phones now is that when you do have the ability to shoot raw format, you only have that usually on the main lens or in the case of the iPhone. Let's say it's the main lens and the telephoto lens, but you can't do it with the camera software. You can only do it in something like Adobe Lightroom, and so this puts a lot of restrictions in what you're able to do with your phone in the end. But Sony came through for us.

They give us raw support on all three cameras on this phone, so we're in Adobe Lightroom right now, and I'm going to use this image as an example. It was shot on the opera, 1 2. This is a raw ROG file. Now what you're? Seeing in this image is a really high dynamic range here, so everything in the window. We start to lose a lot of detail, because the highlights are blown.

That's where our light source is coming from sun's coming from the outside lights are off in the room, so we start to lose our shadows. I mean it's kind of cool for moody exposure, but that window is so prominent, and we're losing a lot of detail now. This is a raw image, but if it were a JPEG, what happens is when you try to rescue this highlight detail. It would kind of do this where, basically, if I lower the highlights they just kind of go muddy, and you don't get any detail back, I'm just lowering the value of what is white in this image. But, however, this is a raw image.

So I want to bring your attention to a couple different sliders over here, and this would go for any editor that you're using, so we've got exposure contrast. Then we've got highlights and shadows. These are the big ones, and so, if I start to bring back my exposure you're going to see that look, we actually are able to rescue shadow or highlight detail, and you're going to see. We can see the building through the windows in the back now. As a result, we start to lose everything, that's in the room because we're bringing our entire exposure down, I'm going to reset that for a second.

What if I just bring the highlights down, I'm going to bring those down a little, and you can see that we leave the room exposure largely intact, but we bring back a lot of detail on what's going through the window now I can balance this out a little if I bring my exposure back a little as well, we're going to start to lose the room, but again I'm really gunning for what's in through the windows there, and then, if I go down to my shadows and bring those up, I can rescue a lot of the detail. We can now tell that there's a hardwood floor, for instance, so we can really balance our exposure out quite a bit doing this. Now you want to be careful with this, because if you go too far, you get kind of that plastic HDR look, and you can balance this out a little, if you add some contrast back into the image so-and-so forth. Now I've got a moody image that just has a much better exposure, so this is something I cannot do with the JPEG, but I can do with a raw ROG file. How do you get to this raw image format? Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to be using the photo pro app that ships on the Xperia 1 mark ii.

This is an incredible app that gives you a lot more flexibility and a lot more extended range than you're going to get out of the native android camera app that ships with the phone. So Sony put this, as I said, on the Xperia one mark ii, and when you open it up what you're going to do is you are going to go under the menu option? This works just like a mirrorless camera over, on the left hand, side of the screen under the shooting menu you're going to go under file format, and we are going to select that, and you have three choices here. You can shoot raw, raw and JPEG or just JPEG. So one thing I want to share with you guys is how I work on mobile devices. Now I am in a position where I review a lot of phones, a lot of cameras, and so the best workflow for me is to actually use Adobe Lightroom and the main reason is because they have cloud services attached to any app in the creative suite, particularly Lightroom.

So what it allows me to do is install the mobile app on my phone and as well as the desktop on my computer, where my library is held when I launch the mobile app. It allows me to have the option to upload images that I took on the phone, so you're, just basically going to say, add images, and you're going to select what images they are you're going to say upload. What this does are. It will sync them through the cloud, and it will sync them across all devices. So when I come back to the desktop it's going to sync and download those into my catalog- and this is really important, because you know there's a finite amount of space that most people will probably be able to afford.

I think that adobe is still rather expensive with their cloud services. However, with any basic plan, you're going to get a hundred gigabytes of data, and so I don't store everything here, obviously in my entire catalog, but I do basically keep everything, that's on phones, and then I put them down onto the desktop, and then I can sync stuff, and basically it will still live there. So, from an overall standpoint, I think the Sony Xperia 1 was a fascinating reboot to the Xperia series, and so Xperia is a line that Sony have produced for a long time now it used to be tied in with Ericsson, they're, not new, to the mobile phone space, but it's been very clear to me that they are making a big mark on this moving forward and that they do want to succeed and this phone- and I mentioned this in my reviews- that I've done this already, but it is the amalgamation of all the departments that make up the Sony brand. So in other words, you have bra via who make televisions you have alpha who make cameras. You have the audio division, all these things, gaming, they all come together, and they are putting their best efforts into this phone in a collaborative way.

I think that is really cool, because I don't see any other company trying to do that right now. If you are a photographer, and you are interested in getting the most flexibility out of stuff that you have on a device that stays in your pocket. This is an extremely awesome option. I think, in more ways than maybe even the iPhone and the Google Pixel I'll hold it right there for just a second. So with things like the pixel and probably to an extent, the iPhone, you have to remember that they've been in this game for a long time and I think, in terms of their camera technology, they've matured, to a point where we have things like night sight.

You know you can take Castro photos on this, which is the Pixel 4a, and it's a 400-ish dollar phone. I mean it's pretty amazing. You could do things that you can't do on any other camera, because their computational imaging has had time to develop over the years now. Sony, on the other hand, are recently new to their reboot of their whole phone lineup, and so I think it's going to take some time to get it to the point with computational imaging, where you can do things like night sight and these crazy Castro shots, that's something that will come with Sony that takes time to produce. It takes engineering resources, there's a lot that goes into that and I think they will catch up to it.

What I love, though, is they have taken a very different approach in that. Well, let's create a phone that has the basic camera stuff in it, so I can do up to a 30-minute exposure on this phone. If I want to shoot something, that's in the dark or ultra long, I will need a tripod to do that. I think eventually they will catch up right now. Mark my words, this is going to be the phone lineup to watch and I know I'm super excited about Sony, and I've done several videos with the Xperia one now, but I really think that that's true- and I think that for me anyway, coming from a photography background, this is probably the most enjoyable camera phone to use of anything that's available in 2020.

So I would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below until the next video. I will see you guys then later.

Source : The Art of Photography