Crop (Don’t Zoom) for Better Smartphone Pictures

With our camera-equipped smartphones, most of us are snapping more pictures than we ever did before. And while not quite the same as working with a digital single-lens reflex camera, the cameras on today’s smartphones can take amazing pictures.
Among the many features they now have, most smartphone cameras offer a zoom function. Nice to have a zoom, but you shouldn’t use it. Why? Unfortunately, smartphones don’t have fancy lenses. This means they have a digital zoom, not an optical zoom. When you use a digital zoom, the camera is “extrapolating” what is really there. Essentially this means the firmware on the camera is guessing the details of the image because the tiny smartphone lense can’t zoom in optically.
Digital zoom is nice in theory, but practically speaking, it doesn’t work very well. If you have used zoom on a smartphone you will have been frustrated with blurry pictures. How do you avoid this problem? For better zoomed in shots, just take the picture without zooming in and crop it later with your digital editing software. Most smartphones have a resolution that is high enough to allow you to crop and enlarge portions of your smartphone pictures, especially if you are only posting things on the web.