[glimcat]

RAW is good, but you can still get some benefit in crappy cellphone JPGs.

I've had to make batches of personnel photos taken with an iPhone look presentable for a web page on several occasions. A few seconds to set the white balance and normalize the orientation and scale makes a significant difference. It doesn't make it into a great photo, but nothing short of going back with an SLR is going to do that.

Also part of why I think claims about the awesomeness of the iPhone camera should be taken with a pound of salt. It's a fairly nice cell camera, but it's still a cell camera.

[ugh]

Sure, there is some room to play but with JPG it’s possible that some photos are not recoverable. If you get the raw output auto white balance is basically completely irrelevant (beyond convenience). No matter how badly the white balance screwed up, it’s always possible to recover (since it’s all software and you are working with the original input data).

But I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. Even a budget DSLR that is perfectly capable of shooting raw should have great auto white balance: Most people don’t want to endlessly tweak photos. Better auto white balance means better photos, even if theoretically everything could be fixed in post.

Oh, and just because smartphone cameras are nowhere near as good as DSLRs doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to compare them with each other, doesn’t mean one can’t be much better than another one.

[glimcat]

"it’s always possible to recover"

Only if the initial exposure was good.

[ugh]

See, I wanted to mention that but completely forgot about it while writing. (Still, you might have been a little more charitable with me. I think the context made it pretty clear what I was talking about.)

I was only talking about color, not exposure. (Of course there is only so much white balance can do – but if you get the raw data you can do just as much with the color as the camera, heck, you can even throw more processing power at the problem than the camera ever could.)