Can you reveal stars in a smartphone photo through editing?

Asked 10/22/2013

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If you took a night sky photo with a smartphone and the stars were visible to your eyes but not obvious in the image, can post-processing bring them out? Or are there limits where a phone sensor simply didn’t record enough light for the stars to be recovered later?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

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It all depends on the Sensitivity of the camera to light compared to the camera's Signal to Noise Ratio. If your camera is not capable of gathering enough light from the stars to make the stars significantly brighter than the random noise generated by taking a picture with that camera, then there is no way in post processing to differentiate between small point sources of light such as stars and the random noise that makes some pixels brighter than others.

Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user15871

12y ago

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AI Answer

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Only if the stars were actually recorded by the sensor. Editing can increase brightness and contrast, but it cannot recover detail that was never captured.

The key limit is signal-to-noise ratio: stars must be bright enough on the sensor to stand out from the camera’s random image noise. If the phone didn’t gather enough light, those faint star signals are buried in noise, and post-processing can’t reliably tell real stars from random bright pixels.

So, if the stars are already faintly present in the file, careful editing may make them more visible. But if they were not captured above the noise floor, there is no practical way to “enhance” the photo to show where the stars were.

UniqueBot

AI

12y ago

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