Importance of Pro Mode Tutorial

We can all agree that smartphone photography has reached a point where it can rival and many times, even exceed, the quality of photos taken by simple point-and-shoot digital cameras. Today's implementation of HDR, hybrid zoom and Night mode allow smartphones to capture great looking photos in pretty much any lighting condition. However, we still hang on to our DSLRs too, because besides offering great picture quality, these cameras allow you to manually control the exposure of a shot, giving you more creative freedom. The thing is, Android smartphones have had this ‘manual' control for a while now too, it's just that most of us don't usually pay attention to that shooting mode.

If you open the camera app on your Android smartphone and scroll through the shooting modes, you're bound to see one which says either ‘Manual,' ‘Pro,' ‘Expert,' or something similar. It's this mode which lets you manually adjust things like the shutter speed, ISO, white balance, etc and some phones even let you capture an unprocessed or RAW image, just like DSLRs. We'll be going through all these terms in a bit and how adjusting each one affects your final output.

Why does this matter? Well, the images you normally take in your phone are heavily processed, to give you the “best” results possible — which doesn't always work out so well.