Don’t Let Software Define Your Aesthetic

(Source: Somsom/stock.adobe.com; generated with AI)

Published May 6, 2026

The first time I picked up a “real” camera, I thought it was going to be a shortcut to stunning photos. I put a fresh SD card in the camera and went around my living room trying to get dramatic National Geographic-inspired shots of my cat. What I got was a series of blurry and underexposed shots. How could this have happened? My smartphone could have taken better photos, but the hefty camera around my neck had a better sensor and optics.

The difference is in the software, not the hardware. Smartphones are tiny computers with powerful CPUs, GPUs, large caches, and advanced computational photography abilities to make taking photos nearly foolproof. And with the camera being one of the banner features of each new smartphone generation, computational photography becomes more advanced with every new smartphone release. In the seconds between hitting the shutter button on your phone and seeing the final image, the phone will identify and focus on the subject, snap multiple photos at different exposures to ensure everything is properly lit, apply color correction, and remove sensor noise.

The result is a processed, polished photo that defies what should be possible with such limited hardware. But as advanced tools and artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements become a bigger part of the computational photography workflow, it’s possible to get images that are better than reality.

When Photorealism Surpasses Reality

In 2020, Samsung introduced Space Zoom on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. With a mix of clever optical engineering and computational photography, Space Zoom promised 100x zoom capable of photographing celestial objects. This is an extremely impressive task for a phone, since professional astrophotography setups involve a tracking telescope synchronized with Earth’s rotation so the camera can take multiple exposures for noise reduction (Figure 1).

Figure 1: This astrophotography setup includes a telephoto lens that on its own costs more than a smartphone. (Source: Theocerbo/stock.adobe.com)

It turns out there’s a limit to how much you can replace optics with software. A skeptical Reddit user put a blurry photo of the moon on their monitor, then used their smartphone to take a photo of the blurry moon on their monitor. The resulting photo on the phone showed significantly more detail than the blurry source photo on the computer, meaning the smartphone was filling in details that did not exist.^[1] Before Space Zoom, we saw a similar controversy surrounding Huawei’s Moon Mode, where users similarly claimed the phone artificially enhanced moon photos.^[2]

Post-processing is not new to digital or even film photography. Ansel Adams, known for his iconic landscape photos of the American West and for being the one photographer that people not into photography know by name, wrote an entire book titled The Print in 1950, which discusses darkroom techniques. Post-processing is a key step in photography, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. But today, the degree to which photos can be edited and the ease of making those edits create a world where photos better than reality are becoming the norm.

Regression to an Unrealistic Mean

Post-processing on phones used to primarily happen in the background. While there were options for edits and filters on the finished photo, the process was a computational black box where we never really saw what the image sensor initially captured. But today’s new AI-enhanced editing features invite us behind the curtain to provide direction for significant alterations: removing distractions, opening someone’s eyes, or adding a prettier sky.

Every change the software makes to our photos is one less real, human element in that photo. You can tell your software to open everyone’s eyes in a group photo, but maybe being a notorious group photo blinker is part of what makes you you. You can remove the other tourists from your vacation photos, but the hustle and bustle was part of your experience. Real life isn’t perfectly staged under studio lights.

Beauty in the Imperfections

Imperfections tell stories, like blurry shots of a late night out or overly bright highlights in a sun-drenched scene. In response to phone cameras becoming unrealistically perfect, a growing subset of casual photographers are embracing imperfect alternatives—“film simulations” on modern mirrorless cameras, low-resolution point-and-shoot digital cameras, and film cameras with plastic lenses.

I’m one of those casual photographers. A couple summers ago, I brought a disposable film camera with me on a backpacking trip in Olympic National Park. I took a few side-by-side shots with the disposable camera and my phone. In the sunset photo from my phone, everything looks as it should (Figure 2). It’s a pretty photo, but feels a bit clinical compared to its twin from the disposable camera.

Figure 2: A peaceful sunset on the Washington coast captured on my smartphone (Source: Author)

When it comes to the disposable camera photo (Figure 3), it is technically inferior to the smartphone photo—from a purely objective perspective. The plastic lens didn’t allow adequate light to reach the corners of the photo, creating a vignette. The details are not in sharp focus, and the warm color cast from the sunset dominates the scene. But all these imperfections together create a beautiful, dream-like composition. Phone camera algorithms trained on sterile stock photos and technical perfection wouldn’t produce something so unique.

The smartphone photo captures how the sunset looked, while the camera photo captures how it felt. Guess which one is on display in my living room?

Figure 3: The same sunset seen through a plastic lens, captured on film, and digitally scanned (Source: Author)

All of this is not to say that we should stop using our phone cameras in the name of creativity. Smartphone cameras truly are impressive, and I use mine every day. Instead, I invite you to make personal edits that reflect your own relationship with your photos. These are your memories. You don’t have to let software decide how they should look. And please, print your favorites.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2019/04/26/new-huawei-camera-controversy-sparks-debate/