Why I’m Not Scared to Digitally Zoom to Take Good Photos With My Phone

Summary

• Digital zoom reduces image quality from cropping, but most phones have high enough resolution to not matter.

• Using your phone’s zoom can make photos more intimate, focused and less busy by narrowing the field of view.

• Zooming in can make subjects look more natural and make backgrounds more prominent.

Zooming in the camera of your phone can reduce the quality of the image, but it is an exchange that can be worth it – or completely imperceptible.

How Digital Zoom Affects Photos

Digital zoom is what is known as a destructive process because it removes data from the entire image, as opposed to optical zoom, where the lens zooms instead of removing parts of an image taken by the sensor. Essentially, digital zoom is cropping, but before taking the image.

As you zoom digitally, you have fewer pixels left in the entire image. Let’s say you have a 1200 x 600 image, zoom in 2x, you’ll be left with a 600 x 300 image. This is a remarkably low resolution image. However, most phones these days have much higher resolutions than that.

Why you should use digital zoom

At 1200×600, you don’t want to zoom in on just 720,000 pixels. However, modern smartphone cameras already have decent cameras.

Even a cheap phone like my Redmi Note 11 is only about $200, but it takes photos in 12MP and has a 50MP mode, enough resolution to zoom in without being noticeable on most platforms that have it published The images below are a comparison between zoomed and not. You can notice the drop in quality if you watch it on a big screen, but not from a phone or after compression in social media.

Why should you care about zoom on your phone though? Here’s a quick proof of concept: Compare the same two images, and it’s clear that the zoomed-in one is more intimate, focused and less busy.

Zooming in is like using a longer lens on a camera. Phones usually have a wide focal length, which can lead to bloated faces and odd proportions. It’s not close to a fish-eye effect, but it’s enough to sometimes not be flattering. My partner always tells me to zoom in on her iPhone 13 Mini so it looks more natural.

Having your subject further away and zooming in effectively reduces your FOV, making for a more natural look closer to how our eyes see things. What matters most at the end of the day? All those pixels, or how good the image looks as a whole?

How to use digital zoom to take good photos with your phone

Before you zoom in to take any photo, here are some tips you should take note of to make the most of your zoom.

1. Step Back and Zoom In for pictures

Being too close to your subject’s face usually makes their face look puffy and elongated. Instead of staying close, step back and zoom in.

On the left of the image above is the 1x zoom zooming in on my cat’s face, while on the right is one a little further back and zoomed in. Features farther from the center stretch out in 1x zoom, like his arm in the background. of the image and its ear looking elongated at the top.

2. Zoom In to Make Your Photos Mens Cluttered

Getting too close to a subject leads to distorted edges due to how slow phone lenses usually are; while stepping back will bring you distractions that enter your frame. This is especially true for product photos and busy environments.

Take this keyboard and look, for example; the environment is messy. On the right, it is enlarged to make more focus. It also makes objects straighter with less warped edges.

3. Zooming makes backgrounds more prominent

Longer focal lengths tend to make distant objects appear closer and larger. Take the two images below; the objects are the same distance in both images, but the zoomed-in image on the right makes the object further away take up more space in the image. This phenomenon is usually called “compression”, but it is only an effect of a narrow FOV.

There are many other ways to take advantage of the zoom in your smartphone camera. In most cases, the drop in quality is barely noticeable. Some phones also have an optical zoom, such as the Samsung S 24+ with 3x optical zoom, so you don’t lose quality. Feel free to zoom in and take the photos you’ve always wanted.