PureView “Creative” vs “Auto” Settings (low light)

Saturday, 01.06.2012
My favourite football club "FC Basel 1893" won the Swiss championship!
I took lots of pictures at the huge party that went on all night long.

While my first few pictures with "Automatic" settings weren't that great, adjusting the "Creative" settings in the 808's camera interface made a real difference.

Here are a few low light pictures and tips and tricks, based on my experience last Saturday.

Automatic (Scene) mode

I turned off the flash, but otherwise choose the default automatic settings for the first few shots.

As you can see, it shows a lot of details, sharpness is alright and it is not too dark. The 808 captured a decent amount of light here.
What is messed up, is the colour. The purple/pink tint of the picture does not reflect the real life (dark red/orange) scene.

As a side note, my brothers photos taken on a iPhone 4S, turned out to look very similar (more blurred than mine, but the colours are almost identical).

Creative Mode

Luckily the 808 offers highly customisable "Creative" settings, allowing me to adjust the camera for the scene and actually take some decent pictures. Here is the result...

Those are the settings I used:

• Resolution: 5 MP (16:9)
  I choose 5 MP, so I have enough pixels left for the "PureView" oversampling. Important for colours and noise reduction.
  
• JPEG quality: Superfine
  If you are in the creative settings, always use this option ;)
  
• Colour tones: Vivid
  To be honest, in this scene it didn't really make much of a difference. But after two test shots, I decided to go with that.
  
• Exposure Value (EV): -0.7
  This, in combination with the "Cloudy" scene mode, is actually what fixed the colours!
  
• Scene mode (white balance): Cloudy
  I guess what you see on the picture above could be considered a "cloudy scenario" :)
  It was just an idea to use this option, but it worked out very well in combination of altering the EV.
  
• ISO: Automatic
  Using the automatic settings, the 808 choose values of 64-80.
  Playing around with the ISO settings can be helpful in low light, in this case it was not necessary.
  
• Flash: Off
  Since the object was a crowd, there was no point in highlighting the back of the heads directly in front of me.

It may looks like a lot of effort, when put into words, but I applied these settings in only a few seconds.

With a beer in one hand and the 808 in the other, it didn't occur to me at that moment, but looking back, I could have done better.

Adjusting Saturation and Contrast, choosing a different focus mode and maybe manual ISO settings could have made a difference too. I was just aiming for the correct colours, after I achieved that, I didn't look any further for even better settings... I suggest you do, if you are aiming for perfect low light photo's of your own ;)

DSLR

I don't own a DSLR, so I borrowed a picture from gallery.fcb.ch for my comparison.

(Source: FC Basel Bilder Gallery)

Obviously the guy who took this picture, had a better position and camera ("Canon EOS-1D Mark IV") than I had :)
But as far as the colours and contrast goes, I think my 808 did pretty good too.

Conclusion

I hope you liked this little "Automatic vs Creative" settings comparison.

You can not expect that the settings I used for this scene will work for all low light scenarios.
Every low light situation has different light sources, distances, etc... but I hope this gives you an idea of how to handle low light situations like this.

Comments are welcome about my results and of course your own experience and tips and tricks ;)