Profiling a cell phone camera?

Software darktable
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When I don’t have my real camera with me, I sometimes take photos with my phone. Currently, this is either JPEG or a JPEG+RAW mix.

However, my Android phone, a OnePlus 6T, doesn’t have any special support in darktable. This is probably true for all (or at least most) phones.

Has anyone successfully profiled their phone? It would be nice to have lens fixes applied and be able to use the improved denoise (profiled) module.

I have:

  1. OnePlus default camera
  2. Open Camera (from f-droid)
  3. A hacky Google Camera port (aka: “gcam”)

All three can output DNGs. Would it be best to opt for using Open Camera for this task?

Are there any gotchas when profiling your phone?

FWIW: I’ve tried doing noise profiling, but it stops at “List profiling input RAW images”, as if it didn’t find my DNGs with various ISOs. I have yet to attempt building a color profile using my Color Checker Passport and need to take some snapshots of various buildings and use Hugin to make the lens distortion profile.

Obviously, it would be best to use a real camera (and I have a few), but it’s not always possible to bring one along. I’d imagine several others in this form also take photos with their phone in addition to their real cameras too.

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Is there evidence that OnePlus botched the embedded DNG color profile?

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I’m more concerned with the lens distortion & vignetting correction and would love to use the improved profiled denoising (versus the generic noise reduction modules).

I’ll put some effort into profiling my phone soon. The noise reduction profiling didn’t work, however. I’m not sure if the script couldn’t detect the DNG files outright or if it refuses to work on phone cameras (perhaps due to the tiny sensor or some weird metadata).

I’m leaning on my phone for photography for the next week, as I didn’t have enough room for the camera on this business trip, so hopefully I’ll get it sorted enough. (If not this week, then retroactively, perhaps.)

Concerning color: it’s certainly more muted than my Fuji or Canon raw files. Boosting the saturation in color balance helps though.

Also, if anyone has tips about using Open Camera, I’d love to hear it. (Is there a way to have it attempt to underexpose to preserve highlights? DR is not so great on a phone camera versus a regular camera, so this would really help. Meanwhile, I’ll just try to be mindful and use manual settings and the histogram. :wink:)

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