I love the OnePlus 15 camera, and these are my tips to get the best shots

I’ve been carrying the OnePlus 15 with me for nearly a month, charting a course of over four thousand miles with it. In that spell, I made the leap of faith to push it as my primary camera for a long workation that covered everything from concerts and stargazing to writing from within an art theater. 

I won’t say that the phone has quite blown my socks off. The imaging hardware fitted on the OnePlus 15 is technically inferior to its predecessor, and the Hasselblad tuning is also gone. I had my fair share of skepticism ever since I first launched the camera app. But the phone has grown on me over the past few weeks.

It has its weaknesses, but nothing that will make you want to throw it and hunt urgently for a replacement to capture your memories. On the contrary, I’ve grown to love it by throwing in a bit of creative labor. If you’ve been eyeing the OnePlus 15 and worried about the slightly lukewarm reception to its imaging chops, here are a few tips that helped me get some stunning shots out of the phone’s triple rear camera array. 

Embrace the color filters 

As I embarked on my review journey across different landscapes and crossed cultural boundaries, I asked a few fellow travellers and cafe dwellers about their opinions on using camera filters. Some of them said they used artistic apps such as Retro Camera, while others said they head to Snapseed or VSCO to jazz up the pictures. 

Save for a lone purist, every respondent agreed that they touch up the photos they click, before or after capture. At the end of the day, unless the purpose of it all is to make the images look pleasing, especially if you are posting them on social media. Thankfully, the OnePlus 15 offers plenty in that department. 

My strongest recommendation, however, is leaning into the filters. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, here’s the good news. The filters you get in the default OnePlus camera app are fairly straightforward. Unlike apps such as VSCO Capture, where you can even control bloom and halation intensity for each filter, OnePlus lets you apply these filters and click your way through.

Take a look at this pristine shot:

And now gaze upon the same frame, with a film-filter on top:

My favorite is the film-inspired Neon filter that emulates the effect of the CineStill 800 Tungsten film. I also love the warm and cold CCD filters because they suppress the background drama and keep the focus restricted on highlighting the subject. Then there’s the Serenity and Faded filters, which take an understated approach to color and contrast. 

The result from these two is perfect for retro-inspired capture. I predominantly pushed the film and CCD filters for a couple of reasons. First, they ramp up the color saturation by focusing on the colder hues, giving a distinctly intense look to each shot. Plus, the grain applied over the frame masks the usual mess created by oversharpening or smoothing in general. 

With the presence of color noise, the shadow elements and far-off artifacts in the frame at least seem to retain their natural geometry. But it’s really the slight change in color chemistry that really injects new life into these shots. All the shots you see above were captured with the filter applied, without making any post-capture edits. 

If you are, however, in two minds about the final result, you can click pristine shots and experiment with these filters in the Photos app. A crucial benefit of this approach is that you also get to decide the intensity of these filters. And if there are any further corrections required, there are plenty of granular options at your disposal in the same interface.

Understanding the megapixel game 

All three rear cameras on the OnePlus 15 rely on a 50-megapixel sensor. By default, the pictures are clicked at a binned 12-megapixel resolution, but you can toggle the Hi-Res mode to capture snaps at full 50-megapixel quality. The latter promises more details as you peek deeper into a photo, but it comes at a cost. 

Enable this mode only when you have a still surface to prop the phone or have a solid support for your arms. Otherwise, these hi-res captures are pretty susceptible to motion blur. Additionally, prefer to click full-res shots in well-lit outdoors, because the camera struggles with processing light data, dynamic range, and noise. 

Moreover, it’s not perfect if you’re capturing a moving object, and the shutter also feels slower due to the processing requirement. But when propped against a still support or mounted on a tripod, the hi-res mode can capture some terrific shots. 

Also, keep in mind that you can’t capture RAW pictures at 50-megapixel resolution, so if you’re planning on granular color correction, steer clear of the megapixel charm. The default pixel-binned shots, on the other hand, turn out pretty well at the 12-megapixel resolution. 

What worked best for me, especially as I was mostly on the move, was enabling the action mode. This setting ensures that the camera compensates for movement of the subject, especially if it’s a pet, moving person, vehicle, or just a flower stalk swaying in the wind. The overarching idea is to avoid blurred edges and fuzziness. 

I have clicked some really appealing pictures while zooming on a highway, riding pillion on a scooter moving at nearly 30 miles per hour. The bokeh turned out a tad aggressive, but the subject was separated nicely, and the overall picture looked terrific even without any edits.

On a similar note, enable the motion photo option from the top. Motion photos take more storage, but there’s an understated benefit. We often click a series of pictures, only to realize later that some of them had poor edge clearance and turned out blurry. With Motion Photos, you can extract the best (aka sharpest) frame from the short clip. 

Getting the basics right

Now, this might sound like yet another drab lesson on the art of photography. But I promise, it’s not. A repeating advice that my photojournalist friends often dole out, especially when I’ve clicked a terrible picture of them, is the two golden rules for freezing the perfect frame in the camera viewfinder. 

Follow the rule of thirds, and find geometry. The latter might take some moving around or angle adjustment, but trust me, these two principles really make a difference in how a scene turns out in your photos. Let’s start with the rule of thirds, which comes to life courtesy of the gridline feature you can enable in the camera app. 

In a nutshell, imagine the frame you want to capture appearing on your phone’s screen. Now, divide into nine symmetrical blocks, demarcated by clear lines — two each along the vertical and horizontal axis. When you launch the camera app, position the subject along the gridlines instead of keeping it in the middle of the frame. 

Simply put, the subject can appear closer to the left or right edge of the image, leaving you plenty of space to show the drama of the surroundings. It’s a fantastic way of telling a story using the world around the subject. You can put the subject on either side of the frame, depending on where the action is happening, as seen in the frame. 

In scenarios where you don’t have a subject to compose the frame around, such as a natural landscape, try to look for symmetry. You don’t necessarily have to go hunting for straight lines. It can be the arc of the sun or a rainbow, rows of vegetables on a distance farm, color gradients on the skyline, criss-crossing roads, repeating curves, or just a sharply drawn outline on an otherwise empty background. 

The core idea behind this approach is that the human eyes are not only good at perceiving colors, but they also excel at detecting patterns and geometry in the world around us. Sometimes, clever cropping and a slight frame rotation in the post-edits can give a whole new spin to a picture. 

Overall, the OnePlus 15’s cameras are pretty reliable, even if they are not the best in the segment. But if you give them some time and play with the tools at your disposal, they can surprise you with some Instagram-worthy snaps.