We asked, you told us: Most of your photos get touch-ups before you share them

Over the past five years or so, the photo and video capabilities of smartphones have taken center stage as the star feature of any new device. That’s been great for consumers, as cameras on phones have gotten better and better. However, are they good enough that you don’t need to do any smartphone photo editing?

That’s exactly what we intended to find out with one of our recent polls both here and on Twitter. The final results are below, but we’ll spoil it a bit for you ahead of time: not very many of you are sharing raw, unedited pics.

Smartphone photo editing poll results

According to the two sets of poll data, just under 3/4 of our readers do some form of smartphone photo editing at least some of the time. Only 25.11% of readers avoid any touch-ups at all.

Related: 5 smartphone photography tips guaranteed to get you better results

Interestingly, only about 11.51% of our readers do what they would consider heavy editing of their photos. Now, this is pretty subjective, so we wouldn’t be surprised if what one person considers “heavy” is what another person considers “light.” Regardless, just over 34% of our readers claim to edit nearly every photo they take, either heavily or lightly.

The largest segment of our results is filled with the in-the-middle users who perform smartphone photo editing only some of the time. Honestly, we thought this segment would be larger, but hey, these polls are always full of surprises.

Some of your comments

As usual, the poll results only tell part of the story. Below are some selected comments and tweets connected with the smartphone photo editing polls. These should help clarify how at least some of the responders approach their pics.

Richard Durishin
Yes. I shoot with an LG in RAW and work to get the colors realistic instead of the automatic oversaturation that most phone cameras deliver. Thankfully, LG also lets me control the color balance and saturation of the screen itself so I can adjust that for a real-world look as well.

MM_Rafez
For social media, I kinda try to edit if the phone isn’t Samsung-made. Because no matter how you say others are more true to life, but among the million photos in social media, yours will look duller compared to others if they have true to life touch and not sharp enough. Look at those high profiled photographers’ accounts. Almost none of those great photos have true to life colors.

Gumbopudding
Always. That’s why I don’t care how dull or punchy the auto camera makes the pictures as I don’t use that mode. I shoot in manual and do all the coloring etc my self.

@ilyyaszn
Stock OnePlus 6 camera. Why edit when the stock photo is already good?

@Flash85484173
You actually don’t need to if you have got a decent camera.

There you have it, some passionate statements from our readers. If you do find yourself doing some smartphone photo editing, you might want to check out our roundup of the best apps with which to do it!