This! My close to 10 year old DSLR still outperforms the latest and greatest on any phone for this reason.

Similarly sometimes I just want to apply whatever ai magic elixir my phone does to the raw image from my DSLR.

Messing around in lightroom etc is just not worth it for hundreds of shots I take per day sometimes.

So true. Not only that, but pulling out my phone and quickly snapping a shot is often better than quickly pulling out my non-phone cameras - especially in challenging lighting conditions.

I absolutely can get better shots with my non-phone cameras, but they take more work.

I understand carrying and taking shot with a DSLR is much more involved than pulling out a phone from a pocket, but have you ever used compact cameras with 1" censor like a Sony RX100 or Canon G9x ?

They both fit in your pocket and startup as fast as you can activate the camera on your phone. Out of habit I usually reach the power button inconsciently when grabbing it from my pocket and the lense is usually extending while my arm is moving in position so it is usually immediately ready to snap a picture.

If you are in a setting where you are almost certain to take picture, a micro four third format also works great and depending on the lense are usually small enough if you are the kind of guy who wears small shoulder or sling bags.

Well now we're getting into the old adage, whatever camera I have with me. I always have my phone and many times have my Z5 or d7100. There isn't much space to add another camera.

The trick is to not take 100s of shots per day, and failing that, filtered out 70-95% of what you shoot, before editing.

I find the best photo before editing is often different than the best photo after editing. Granted that’s probably a skill issue on my part.

you can bulk edit with your adjustments taken from one image and apply to a set of images taken in same lighting, etc

That somewhat depends on three main things: your photography style, your equipment quality, and your skill. If you shoot landscape photos, you almost certainly don't want to be taking 100s of shots per day and should spend more time and effort on composition. If you shoot wildlife action (e.g. birds in flight, especially fast ones like swallows) you'll be taking hundreds to thousands of shots per minute of action (30 shots/second from a high-end body like a Sony a1 or Cannon R5 means 1800 shots per minute, even mid-range bodies take 10 shots/second). If you've got good enough equipment and skill that most of those shots are usable, then there's going to be a lot of sorting to find the ones worth editing.

I don’t use it, so I don’t know, but doesn’t Google Images offer do this to any photo you upload?

If you're making the same or very similar edits to a lot of shots by hand, you don't have to do that. You can create a preset from one shot's edits, then apply it to as many others as you like in a single step.

Yeah, Photoshop has actions too. See, photographers have been doing computational photography too, this whole time. It’s just that we prefer to put it together with a general purpose tool, rather than what formula Apple or Samsung has decided would be best.

Which is the point I failed to touch upon in my smartassed earlier comment about the macro rig. We use most of (maybe all) the same transformations in a tool like Lightroom, but prefer to compose them by hand precisely because the assumptions made by phone camera ISPs are not at all guaranteed to hold over the range of raw images we use our cameras to produce. (They don't even hold over the range of raw images people use phone cameras to produce!)

My old DSLR has a RAW+JPEG setting which will do both, I use it all the time.

My favorite setting as well, I can edit the best shots from RAW, but can share any shot as a JPEG. And those are usually not too bad anyway, sometimes I just stick with the camera JPEG. Only exception, and rarely enough, continous high speed shooting. Even in JPEG Fine, the buffer never runs full. In RAW it does so after appr. 10-13 shots.

Yea, I also do RAW+JPEG, Some times the JPEG turns out just fine and I won't bother with darktable, other times I use the JPEG as a sort of "what would the camera have done" reference, like, for inspiration for the direction I could develop it.

I recently started collecting a few of the digital cameras I lusted after as a kid. It made me realize there's a huge population of cameras out there that would produce incredible photos if not for small details. Details like not having readily available batteries, or an odd cable or memory card limitation. The biggest one for me personally is CCD degradation in cameras that don't have a built in pixel mapping function, so every photo they produce has the exact same set of bad pixels. Sadly as far as I know there's no way to set up automated photo editing where you can just select all the files and hit "fix defect set for Camera A".

I have used a program called Pixel Fixer which can learn a profile of each of your cameras and directly process out the dead pixels in the RAW files in a batch operation.

It hasn't been updated in about 8 years so it doesn't necessarily support anything too recent, and is not open source, but I had some success with using it.

Does it support jpegs? Most of the cameras in question don't support RAW output but the problems are individual stuck pixels that are identical between every shot.

Unfortunately it looks like the author only listed the possibility of future JPEG support, but it was not implemented.

Dang. The only thing I've found that comes close is a program called PixelZap, but it hasn't been updated since 2002 and the functionality to purchase the paid version probably just sends your credit info to Russia.

I don’t know what I’m talking about. But, I recall the Unity3D folks talking about a camera calibration process that involved photographing a dozen full frame images of a flat neutral gray surface, averaging all those images to average out the sensor noise and being left with an image containing the per-pixel bias of that particular sensor.

This is called flat frame calibration, basically all cameras sold today will have that auto applied to your raw data even. I had to implement it here for processing raws from a very old camera: https://blog.maxg.io/reverse-engineering-the-sinar-ia-raw-fi...

The workflows for someone using a DSLR/mirrorless are entirely different too. Most people edit their photos on a computer in "post production" (this isn't always true, I myself use Fujifilm's built-in JPEG processing features heavily), whereas phones are typically doing very light edits if anything.

Even if SNR isn't really the issue with the tiny sensors (it is), the minuscule lenses used by phones almost certainly don't come anywhere close to the detail fidelity of a lens 300x the size.

Not to mention that those giant honking lenses are where half the fun is.

Yep, I forgot the name of the settings but my Sony mirrorless has some modes which are in the same spirit of the typical smartphone camera - sort of like an enhanced Auto mode. Though In my experience, definitely less aggressive than what my pixel does.

Camera manufacturers definitely are at a disadvantage when it comes to AI/ML expertise, infrastructure and data compared to Google or Apple. So I do think these big cos. do a better job on average from a purely technical viewpoint. On the other hand, there's no accounting for taste - stylistically, I do agree with many others that they are often too heavy-handed.