On a recent camping trip in the Black River State Forest, I edited some DSLR photos using my smartphone so I could share them on social media. After returning home, I edited the same images using my Apple iMac. I thought it might be interesting to compare the results.

Our campsite sat on the edge of the East Fork, with clear, dark skies above. I set up the tripod and took about 100 images of the night sky over about one hour. By combining these photos in the Light Trails app (free on Google Play), I was able to create a star trails composite in minutes.

At home, the process is more time consuming, using Adobe Photoshop to stack, align, and blend the images.

When you consider that Light Trails rendered this image in about one minute, the result is pretty good. Certainly good enough for Instagram. Its biggest shortcoming seems to be the misalignment of a few layered images, indicating that my tripod must’ve shifted sometime during that hour.

Next comes a still I grabbed at a bend in the river where someone had parked their Hydrobike on the shoreline. In this case, I used Google’s free Snapseed photo editing app to juice this image beyond recognition with a few quick strokes on the touchscreen. I tried to employ a bit more restraint at home using Adobe Lightroom.