Summary
- Digital zoom reduces image quality by cropping, but most phones have high enough resolution for it not to 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 on your phone’s camera may reduce the image quality, but it’s a trade-off that may be worth it—or completely unnoticeable.
How Digital Zoom Affects Photos
Digital zoom is what’s known as a destructive process as it removes data from the whole image, as opposed to optical zoom, where the lens zooms instead of removing parts of an image taken by the sensor. Essentially, digital zooming is cropping, but before you take the image.
As you digitally zoom, you’re left with fewer pixels on the whole image. Let’s say you have a 1200×600 image, you zoom in 2x, you’d be left with a 600×300 image. That’s quite a noticeably low-resolution image. However, most phones these days have resolutions much higher than that.
Why You Should Use Digital Zoom
At 1200×600, you wouldn’t want to zoom in with only 720,000 pixels. However, modern smartphone cameras already have decent cameras.
Even a cheap phones like my Redmi Note 11 is only about $200 yet takes pictures in 12MP and has a 50MP mode, enough resolution to zoom in without being noticeable on most platforms you’d post it on. The images below are a comparison between zoomed and not. You might notice the quality drop if you look closely on a big screen, but not from a phone or after compression on social media.
Why should you care about zooming in 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 weird proportions. It’s nowhere near a fish-eye effect, but it’s enough to sometimes be unflattering. My partner always tells me to zoom in on her iPhone 13 Mini so it looks more natural.
Having your subject be farther away and zooming in effectively narrows your FOV, making for a more natural look closer to how our eyes see things. What matters more 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 go zooming in to take every photo, here are some tips you should take note of to make the most out of your zoom.
1. Step Back and Zoom In for Portraits
Being too close to your subject’s face usually makes their face look bloated and stretched out. Instead of being up close, take a step back and zoom in.
On the left of the image above is 1x zoom getting close to my cat’s face, while on the right is one a bit further back and zoomed in. The features further from the center get stretched out in 1x zoom, like his arm at the bottom of the image and his ear looking elongated at the top.
2. Zoom In to Make Your Photos Less Cluttered
Getting closer to a subject will lead to warped edges because of how wide phone lenses usually are; while stepping back will lead to distractions entering your frame. This is especially true for product photos and busy environments.
