Cell Phone Photos and Lightroom

I wanted to follow up on a previous post about using Lightroom (LR) with JPG (JPEG) photos.

A friend was somewhat interested in learning about LR and she was wondering what effect LR would have on cell phone photographs. Quite frankly, that was a pretty good question since I had never used LR with photos taken on a cell phone.

Contemporary cell phones can produce images that are quite good and they do have some large files, but do they allow the kind of manipulation that our previous JPGs enabled?

My friend had a recent photo of her standard poodle that she wanted to improve. The original file is below. It is only 189 KB; not much data with which to work.


Poodle Picture before editing in Lightroom

The other requirement was to spend no more than five minutes working on the file. If you read my previous post (Lightroom for JPEG (JPG) Images), you understand that I am not a LR expert and perhaps just a bit more than a novice, but I thought I would give it a try.

I am not saying the result was excellent, but I was able to recover some detail and darken the background to allow the dog to become the focal point. I could have used a vignette, but I did not think it would render as well.


Poodle Picture after editing in Lightroom

While it may not be superb, I do think even a reduced size cell phone picture shows the benefits of being corrected in Lightroom. What do you think? Leave a comment below!

JBRish.com originally published this post

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