Gadgetory

hey PocketNow pals one here to answer a viewer question this is actually a question we've gotten a couple times in regards to smartphone photography we thought we'd make a video just to address the issue and unfortunately we're dealing with one of these situations where we're talking about something that's a feature and not a bug so I got this tweet from a viewer who writes does your 1+3 overexpose and blow out areas not in focus when you tap to focus to demonstrate this issue he shares a picture of himself in bed I can only assume that he's been kidnapped by Kathy Bates misery style and he goes on to have a conversation with a couple other Twitter people who are all facing the same issue on their 1+3 now this comes down to metering and that's how a camera makes a decision as to how bright or how dark a photo should be when you tell it what's important for you to capture specifically the 1+3 uses spot metering and that means every time you tap on the screen to focus you are telling the camera this is the most important thing that I want to capture in this photo or video so I want you to pull the focus onto this subject and I also want you to make sure that this item is properly exposed for now in the past a number of smart phones used a different style of metering usually some kind of average where it didn't matter where you focused the camera would try and scan the entire shot and come up with some sort of happy medium between the brightest and the darkest areas of your frame and a few phones used a center weighted style of metering where it didn't matter where you tapped on the screen it would pull its exposure information from the middle ish of your frame and say well that was most important oftentimes when you're focusing on something you're trying to focus on something in the middle of your frame so we'll pull the lighting information from there there are certainly pros and cons to different styles of metering but spot metering has taken the lead of late because again we're telling the camera this is what I'm focusing on so this is probably what's most important in the shot of course if you're not expecting it that change in exposure can cause some confusion and it's most apt to rear its head in really high contrast situations if you're focusing on a really bright subject with fairly dark background conditions then you're going to underexpose that background and vice versa if you're focusing on a really dark object and there's sort of a brighter area around it well then you're going to blow out the rest of your photo so what are some solutions we can point to to help rein in some of these more extreme exposure situations well on a number of cameras we can adjust the exposure after you tap to focus there might be a slider where you can make the scene brighter or darker in that moment the camera is still basing its exposure off of where you focus but then you can dial in some finer adjustments of course you can always shoot full manual dial in the exact shutter speed and ISO that you would want to capture the scene as you see it and depending on your phone HDR might be an option theoretically HDR should take samples from the brightest parts of your photo and samples from the darkest parts of your photo and merge them together for a happy balance of lighting and color this is also a perfect situation to look at raw capture when you save a raw file from your phone it's saving a lot more information in brighter and darker areas of your frame so you should be able to walk back some overexposing or boost up some underexposing to help balance out some of those contrast issues lastly a few phones will actually let you change the metering options for your camera if you don't want to use spot metering you can sometimes shift over to a matrix average or center-weighted style of metering which again the camera is going to make other lighting decisions for you not related to where you tap for the focus on your subject unfortunately for this conversation specifically the oneplus 3 does not give you that option so folks I hope this discussion has been able to help illustrate and luminate what is going on with your camera when you think it might be making some wacky decisions on lighting depending on where you tap on the screen again we're talking about a feature not a bug as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more fun tech tutorials like this one and to help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for PocketNow i'm juan carlos bag now you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video I mean the dude uses a picture of Putin as his Twitter profile pics all I know I didn't want to ignore him won't do anything to piss him off