One of my biggest issues with the Camp Snap is the aggressive noise reduction and oversharpening. The latter results in ugly haloes that are especially visible in backlit scenes. Adding film grain to the image in Exposure X7 combats this to some extent, and also effectively breaks up oversmoothed areas, but it’s not an ideal solution. I think I might just have found a better way.

The Focus section in Exposure X7 contains a useful preset called Soften – Diffuse Glow. This module mimics vintage lenses that are softish and bloom the highlights. I have now created a preset that adds blurring and blooming, slight vignetting, and fine film grain.

Even though the Camp Snap is a toy camera, it features good sharpness and resolution when compared to other toy cameras like the Kodak Charmera, the G6 Thumb Camera, and the Chuzhao. More importantly, the Camp Snap doesn’t seem to insert obvious interpolation artifacts to photos because I don’t think it’s resizing images beyond the native resolution of the sensor. Both the G6 and the Chuzhao features these unattractive digital artifacts.

Tonight I went back and edited a bunch of Camp Snap photos. The Focus module seems to effectively soften the hard edges and sharpening haloes. I’ll be playing with this a lot more.