Gadgetory

hey guys it's Michael with pocketnow.com now the key to taking great photos with the Samsung Galaxy s3 is to be a professional photographer that's the key to taking great photos no matter who you are but I'm not a professional photographer I envy them but I'm not one so this video is not about technique and it's also not about apps the Google Play Store has many apps that will enhance the functionality of an android phones camera but the galaxy s3 offers a lot of functionality in the camera app right out of the box and often the way to take a great shot with the galaxy s3 is just to drill down into that camera app and see all the options there are I'm going to take you on a guided tour and we'll find out how to take great photos with the Samsung Galaxy s3 so basically I want to run down the features of the galaxy s3 is 8 megapixel primary camera here and see what they're all about and show some sample photos from each shooting mode and we'll take a look at all the options or most of the options the camera offers Samsung is thrown in more options with this camera phone than I've had on some standalone cameras there's almost too many options you'll see what I mean ok so the first thing you or any mobile photographer needs to do obviously is to open the camera app there's no hardware key on the galaxy s3 which is a shame but thankfully the TouchWiz skin that Samsung is built allows for this to happen pretty easily you can place a camera shortcut right down here in the lockscreen dock if you want to and you can just swipe up to open the camera that way or if you want to you can enable the advanced motion gestures that we've talked about in another video and from the lock screen you just press and hold a thumb on the lock screen and rotate the phone to landscape and it launches the camera that way Adam lean just mentioned in his AT&T galaxy a3 review he finds that pretty cumbersome I like it but different strokes you have you have options is the point so once we're inside the camera app here on the right we've got the shortcut to the gallery here shutter button here and the toggle to video mode up here we're going to leave that alone for now because we're only doing stills in this one on the left where all the action is up top is that hoggle for activating the front-facing camera a lot of people use this camera for self-portraits but remember it's a much smaller sensor up here on this lens it's only 2 megapixels are really only 1.9 compared to this 8 megapixel monster on the back so there's also no flash so it's performance won't be nearly as good really it's best used for video calling only so you're probably want to leave that one alone the next one down here is the flash toggle this lets you set the galaxy s3s flash manually off manually on or you can set it to automatic I do not trust it like most phone cameras the auto flash is a little aggressive the phone will use the flash at the first sign of dimness so I tend to find that the flash on phone cameras tends to wash out the photos so I tend to avoid the flash whenever possible and I leave it off the middle option here is where things get interesting this menu allows you to select the cameras shooting mode which is where I've had the most fun playing single shot here is pretty self-explanatory you just set it there you get focus and then you take a single photo that is the default shooting mode burst shot is something I first played with on the HTC One X if I can select it there and it's very very awesome the deal with burst shot is this when it's enabled holding down the shutter button will snap up to six frames every second for a total of 20 individual frames this is nice if somebody's sliding into home in baseball or those annoying shots when you can't get a fluttering flag to behave in the wind and within burst shot is this best shot feature up here in the corner which you can barely see probably there a little bit of focus issues there we are and when that is enabled you can it'll take 8 shots in one blast you see the counter down here changes to 8 and then the software will sort of decide which one it likes best these are always going to be hit or miss situations the phone isn't nearly smart enough to get this right all the time but it is a fun novelty item the third one down in the shooting mode menu is my favorite HDR stands for high dynamic range and it was first popularized in consumer camera phones by the iPhone for what a camera shooting HDR does is takes multiple pictures at different exposure settings then it stitches those shots together into one photo this means greater detail very often it's very useful in shots with both dark and light areas without HDR the darker regions appears is just kind of a dark shadow with HDR you can see the color it's not always a magic ticket you have to hold the phone more still than you ordinarily would to reduce blur in fact Samsung gives you a warning about that very thing right there which is very very nice and sometimes it results in more artificial appearance in the shots but I use HDR mode more often than not and I'm happier with my photos more often than not smile shot is the next one down and it is just ridiculous with smile shot what it does it waits for you if your the the pictures subject to smile before it takes the photo so you've got you know somebody's face in the shot and you you line it up like this and you need an assistant you hit the the camera button tries to focus and it waits for the subject to start smiling before it will take the photo it's not going to do it with with with Rick Astley here because I can't maintain focus because I'm shooting this video all by myself but I tried it a couple times I tried to fake it out it's pretty good at telling when you're smiling it works pretty well it's gimmicky it's funny it's weird I want to next here I want to skip right to panorama mode because it's kind of it's the last what I'll call legitimate shooting mode panorama shots with the galaxy s3 are okay I mean you're basically asking a handheld computer to do a lot of computing to stitch multiple photos together so it's nice to have this feature at all and we can thank Google and Ice Cream Sandwich for that you just need to be really really sure to keep the camera steady and on an even plane while you're taking the panoramic shot otherwise it's going to come out crooked and if there's any moving objects in the shot you're definitely going to get blur and ghosting so you want to watch out for that beauty shot and cartoon shot are more toy like well they're fun you're not going to get great shots out of them beauty mode according to Samsung is there to hide facial imperfections but people in these Beauty shots come out looking like they've just got a whole bunch of pancake makeup on this mode basically just eliminates texture on the face making you look like an Android and cartoon mode is kind of fun but nothing you couldn't achieve in a cheap or free photo editing application in fact you can apply almost the exact same effect using Samsung's free photo editing suite for the Galaxy s3 so that's all the shooting modes let's hop into the less often used categories focus mode and settings now I don't use focus mode terribly often because auto focus works well most of the time on this device but while we're here let's talk about that the galaxy s3 like most modern smartphones allows you to choose where you want the camera to focus just by tapping on the area you want so if you want to take a long shot while focusing on something in the foreground you can do that just by tapping on the part of the photo you want the camera to focus on if you want to focus instead on the distant part of the shot you can do that if it's too close or if the camera just for whatever reason can't focus you get a red reticule and it it you don't get the satisfying focus beep you can still take an out-of-focus shot if you want but it'll be out of focus if you know you're going to be taking up close photos you can set the autofocus to macro mode auto focus will do this for you though in normal circumstances so I don't use this too often face detection is pretty clever the galaxy s3 can detect faces in photos anyway but in this mode if it detects a face you can double tap on the face to zoom in that said zooming on a device like this that doesn't have optical zoom isn't really the best of ideas you can do it in a couple ways you can pinch to zoom to zoom in and a photo or you can use the volume keys on the bottom here to decide how far you want to zoom in zoom may not be available depending on what resolution you're shooting in but it's digital zoom it's digital zoom so what that means is it's not moving a lens mechanically there's no optics here moving in and out and I actually magnifying the image it's cropping well I did that it's cropping the shot which you could do later and an editing program and even right on the phone here you can do it an editing program get the same results so there's really no reason to ever zoom in when you're taking photos on a smartphone with no optical zoom you can always crop the shot later let's hop into the settings menu here one of the great things about the guy cs3 something I didn't know until I started researching for this video is you can set what shortcuts you want to appear alongside here so if you want say for example you want your white balance settings to appear instead of the flesh you can just drag it over here and replace that that's really really really nice your experience is customized so some of this in here in the settings menu is going to be duplicate functionality let's take a look at scene mode now there's no description for this in the user manual but what it looks like this is doing is giving you some options to change the white balance subtly and maybe the shutter speed a little bit in night mode for example the shutter speed is noticeably slower and the color in the shot is noticeably warmer and the opposite is true in something like sports mode truthfully there are so many options in scene mode and they're buried so far down in the menu system I don't have the patience to select it ahead of time most of the time phone cameras are so much better these days but they're still primarily used for quick shots so if you have the time to set up and wait for like a bird to come line at your bird feeder or if you know you'll be at a party with harsh incandescent or fluorescent lights or if you're going to be shooting some fireworks these modes might be useful to you if you think of them and they're great to have especially backlight which is handy for those awful situations where you have no choice but to shoot it into the Sun but not using scene mode isn't going to ruin your photos keeping scene mode set to automatic is or none rather is usually what I do and it's not going to hurt you at all let's check out the manual settings like exposure value using this manual slider here is is handy for situations where you haven't selected a scene auto focus or auto exposure isn't working well and you you just need to tone the brightness down a little bit or you know tone it up a little bit the same is true for the ISO setting here most of the time because it's very good camera software auto will do your just fine but sometimes it's helpful to manually select these levels but it's the sheer number of options that are going to weigh you down here I mean look at all this stuff seriously you know how you spend time setting up your home screen when you get a new Android or a Windows Phone you should sit down and spend at least that amount of time getting to know the camera on the galaxy s3 in order to take great shots in addition to all the other stuff we've got GPS tagging white balance settings metering Auto contrast toggle anti shaken and so on there's just so much now this can be quite an intimidating array of features so my best advice is this start using the phone camera with the out-of-the-box default settings and then tweak them as you move forward and gradually experience different usage scenarios and different requirements here's how I set mine up out of the box after a little bit of learning in settings I've made sure that my flash is set to OFF I don't trust auto so I turn it on when it needs to be on I keep the scene mode set to none I leave exposure alone focus alone no effects I ratchet up the resolution to maximum 8 megapixels because I have a lot of storage space in this phone and I want the highest resolution possible my white balance I leave set to auto except in extreme circumstances like crazy fluorescent light I leave ISO on automatic as well except in tricky lighting situations typically dark ones where I need to amp it up a little and I don't want to use HDR for some reason I leave metering Center weighted anti-shake Auto contrast and guidelines are all usually set to off and I set my image quality to superfine that's fine out of the box I don't notice much difference but if your resolution junkie you know what to do they're super fine I don't tag my photos with GPS that's personal preference you do what you want there and I prefer to keep my storage on the memory card so I'm not using up my phone memory that is not set that way by default so just a word of warning there because I like quick access to what's important I like my shortcuts along the side here to be as follows I like the camera toggle for front and back camera but I don't use the front camera of like ever so I ditched that in favor of exposure value I leave the flash toggle where it is and I definitely leave shooting mode where it is because remember that's our gateway to the really interesting useful HDR and burst shot features and so on and because auto focus usually does the job well for me I got rid of that in favor of the guidelines I can turn those on and those help my composition sometimes but most of the time they don't of course those settings are there for you to play with these are just my personal settings for getting the most out of my Galaxy s3 now in most situations the automatic functions will see you through I mean the phone does a very good job of choosing for itself what it needs to do to deliver good pictures but if you're in a specialized scenario like shooting fireworks or shooting a soccer game the few seconds it takes to drill down into the menus and find these options will probably yield a setting or a mode that fits your needs exactly and that is a little look at how to shoot great photos with the Samsung Galaxy s3 I'm Michael with PocketNow follow us on Twitter at pocket now twits follow me on Twitter at captain two phones that's captain the number two phones share with us your best practices for getting great photos from the galaxy s3 hop on over to pocket now and leave a comment on this post over there throw us a like thumbs up if you like this video here on YouTube and stay tuned for the next one as usual it's coming sooner rather than later thanks a lot for watching and we'll see you next time you