Dianne, I love your comparison photos. I had no idea that I could download a camera app on my iphone, so went looking just now and I may have to give one of them a try to do a comparison myself. I have shied away from taking pictures of blooms with my phone because my Canon would always take better pictures than my phones. But I have a new phone now (still not the latest and greatest), and will see what it can do.

If you want to make the colours more accurate you can use many photo editing tools to adjust the image (some are free). You can adjust each colour individually, changing the hue, saturation and brightness. You can also make the image sharper and more detailed, and make other modifications.

I do have an excellent photo editor (actually, I have three of them)... which I primarily use to crop or straighten photos I have taken, or to enhance faded details on cemetery stones. By far, most of the pictures I take are for preservation purposes - I am a volunteer with Find-a-Grave and have been documenting gravestones in rural cemeteries for many years.

But tweaking / editing the photos I take is really not the point. I would rather just take a better photo to begin with...

Which is why I am always conscious of lighting, framing, composition, scale, angles, background, perspective, and so on when I prepare to take a photo...

I would rather choose and frame the shot 'before' I take the picture (though one certainly could crop later). But I am sure we all have also seen daylily photos where the colours have been 'enhanced' to a point that, when you see the photo, you think to yourself: 'No. Way.'

And I personally dislike that sort of tweaking and 'enchancing' (of the colours of a bloom) artificially on the computer. So if I can use an app which gives me more accurate colours or a sharper image... I would rather start with that.

How cool it would be to take pictures of gravesites! I have had a love of wandering through cemeteries for many years to look at headstones and see the beautiful engravings on them. I'm going to have to check out the Find a Grave site.

I have a couple of photo editing software programs too and use them all the time to crop (I like posting square pictures of my daylilies here), but if I can get the color and lighting correct straight out of the camera, it sure saves a lot of time later.

Speaking for the people that download their pictures from 'just' a camera to a desk-top computer (there are people like that aren't there ? ) I found it extremely important, when any of my hardware was replaced, that my two monitors were calibrated properly for correct colour presentation. Before that's done many of the flower pictures show with the wrong colour hues - peach instead of pink or rose instead of red for example.

Good point, Valerie. Monitors definitely make a difference.

@adknative Very interesting article, Dianne! Like Vickie @blue23rose, I did not know an app like this is available. I just bought a new iPhone which is supposed to have an especially good camera. Now that I know apps like this are around I'll see what programmers may have developed for mine.

I miss being able to take 35 mm slides, but being able to take high-quality photos with a device that fits in a pocket is nothing I would have expected earlier in my life, pre-smart phones!

Pat

I would suppose that, depending on the type of phone you have, there may be more than one choice of apps. When I found my 'new' app, it was as simple as going to the Google Play Store and, instead of looking for a game, I typed in 'camera app.'

There were quite a few choices, so I checked for a more recent app and also the rating given by other users. (The HD camera app that I downloaded is a 2023 version and rated 4.8)

Honestly, this recently happened to me taking a day lily pic! I didn't know a camera app was available 😳. I'm enjoying this site immensely 😊 !