Solving shadow light of photo taken by a cellphone camera

Question

I’ve a problem with my photos. I take my photo with handphone camera [Samsung galaxy-3MP]. There are some shadows of the light in the object. How to solve this [maybe some technique of digital imaging or any tutorial in blog maybe]?

Sample image that describes the problem

Thank you so much.

Answer 1

Such a halo around a light source is caused by dirt on your lens. Dust and grease tends to stick to an unprotected (or even protected) phone camera over time. Try cleaning the lens.

Note that even cleaning might not completely remove the halo. Optics on a phone are usually not perfect to begin with, and micro scratches will only make it worse over time. On regular camera lenses, coatings are used to fight such internal reflections; coatings on your phone camera might be damaged or missing from the start. Avoiding shooting directly at light sources would avoid the halo as well as probably give better exposure to your subjects (which usually look like dark monsters around the bright light).

This is really a problem that should be resolved during shooting; I don't think there's any easy way to fix the halo in post processing.

Answer 2

If that's what it looks like to me, the camera module on your phone is physically broken and is letting light in directly to the sensor. There's definitely nothing you can do digitally to fix it. A hardware fix is probably to replace the camera module, but unless te phone has deep sentimental value that's probably not worth it. Time for a new phone!