March 2017

As drones become increasingly popular for serious photography, DxO Labs decided they deserved to be reviewed for image quality the same way it reviews camera sensors for its DxOMark site. I was fortunate enough to be able to help them write a comparison review of several of the most-popular drone camera sensors, which you can read here. The review also highlights the limits of testing just the sensor for drones. In future broader reviews that include stabilization, optics, lag, video, and other capabilities that are important for many applications.

Until now, HDR capture on smartphones has been an under-the-covers merging of several frames in a fairly simple way by the phone itself. Now, Lightroom Mobile offers pro-grade HDR for supported phones. The app’s camera mode will analyze the scene, decide on the needed bracketing, capture the images in RAW mode, and then combine and tonemap them into a 32-bit floating-point DNG RAW file – allowing full HDR editing. This is pretty amazing when you consider that typically a similar workflow involves bracketing on a high-end camera, and the use of specialized software applications to do the merge and tone mapping. It works on the Apple iPhone 6s and later, Samsung Galaxy 7 and 7 edge, and Google’s Pixel family of phones. For users of other phones, there are still some goodies packed into the new version of Lightroom mobile: