Testing the iPhone 7 Plus in Japan

I recently upgraded my iPhone and broke with tradition, going with the iPhone 7 Plus which is the larger device with the double-lens camera. I've used my phone occasionally for photography but the results are always somewhat disappointing compared to my normal equipment, which isn't surprising given the optics that can be crammed into a phone. There has always been a lot of hype about the 7 plus camera capabilities so I was keen to try it out. I was hugely impressed with the early shots I took in terms of the clarity of the images, so finding myself in Japan this week I've been doing doing my tourist 'thing' on the new phone/camera. Earlier in the week I was down in Osaka and heading out for dinner when I had the chance for the image below as the evening light was starting to go. I was pleased with the image on the phone, but I thought I'd get it onto my computer where I could post-process it and zoom in a bit better to look at the details.

Now bringing the image onto the computer and in front of a bigger screen highlighted an immediate problem - converging verticals. It's a common problem shooting buildings that you get some barrel distortion that makes vertical lines 'pull in' towards the top of the picture. The good news is with something like Adobe Lightroom you can quickly apply corrections to straighten things up. The distortion correction did crop the image though and we lost some foreground detail, although nothing to worry about. After that I pulled some detail out of the shadows, raised the contrast a little and boosted the colour vibrancy to give the image more 'punch'. To be fair those are adjustments I make to most images regardless of the equipment used to shoot them. Here's the finished processed image:

Lastly here are the before and after shots side by side. I'm very impressed with this new phone/camera and what it can do out of the box. I don't know if I can fix the converging verticals by adjusting the image on the phone itself yet, but the rest of the adjustments I know I can do so it should be possible to get similar results to the above from the phone itself ! Awesome !