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HOW TO shoot STARS with a PHONE + Pixel 4a ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY mode review
Want to learn how to shoot stars with a phone? In this tutorial, I will teach everything from start to finish on how to photograph sharp stars using only your mobile device (smartphone). I will be using the Pixel 4a phone and test for the first time the astrophotography mode. Watch till the end for my review! We will be using ProCam X and PhotoPills to determine the right settings. For both techniques, I will also cover how to use Adobe Lightroom CC on your phone to edit the RAW. All of this was filmed in the wild to get the most detail out of the stars.
🔗 📸 High-resolution photos & written guides: https://astrophotography.lbaphotographie.ca
🔗 Lightroom Edits: https://lightroom.app.link/YFOse2nQ99
🔗 BUY THE GOOGLE PIXEL 4a (affiliate link): https://amzn.to/3o0B3DR
✨ ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY SERIES ✨
- Capturing sharp stars: https://youtu.be/r0Rzd07gSd0
- Capturing star trails: https://youtu.be/zceHyYOH0lQ
- Create star timelapses (upcoming)
- Capture the stars with the Osmo Pocket (upcoming)
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:14 - Pixel 4a unboxing!
01:09 - Taking out the kayak
01:30 - Required equipment
01:48 - Description of the different techniques
02:25 - 1st method: Pro camera app
04:50 - Editing in Lightroom pro camera app results
07:46 - 2nd method: Pixel 4a Astrophotography Mode
11:33 - More pictures!
11:43 - Editing in Lightroom RAW Pixel 4a Astrophotography mode photo
13:51 - Final thoughts
14:37 - Pixel 4a vs DSRL?
15:42 - Thanks for watching!
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:14 Pixel 4a unboxing!
- 1:09 Taking out the kayak
- 1:30 Required equipment
- 1:48 Description of the different techniques
- 2:25 1st method: Pro camera app
- 4:50 Editing in Lightroom pro camera app results
- 7:46 2nd method: Pixel 4a Astrophotography Mode
- 11:33 More pictures!
- 11:43 Editing in Lightroom RAW Pixel 4a Astrophotography mode photo
- 13:51 Final thoughts
- 14:37 Pixel 4a vs DSRL?
- 15:42 Thanks for watching!
i just completed taking my first test shots with the pixel 4a astrophotography mode and wow the results are simply amazing i didn't know that a tiny sensor inside a phone could actually produce these types of results i just got a notification that my new cell phone arrived and i'm super excited about this one because it's a 350 phone that allows you to take pictures of the stars so let's go downstairs to get it quickly unbox it and go to the cottage to talk about how you can shoot the stars using your cell phone here it is now let's leave for the college and if you haven't done it yet go check out my first video on astrophotography where i explain how to capture sharp stars and i also explained that video why it's important to get away from the city center to avoid the light pollution so go check it out the link is going to be somewhere up here i just got the cottage and i can't wait to test out how this phone is gonna perform to take pictures of the stars so let's go take out the kayak and then go in the center of the lake to have a nice clear view of the stars [Music] the good news when taking pictures of the stars using your cell phone is that you don't need much equipment so you only need a cheap tripod like this one and a mount for your phone to be able to attach it to the tripod so i'm gonna set it up and we're gonna be ready to take our first shot so now let's talk about how to capture the stars using your cell phone and there's two main ways that i know of the first one is to use a pro camera app on your cell phone and this is going to work on most cell phones that allow to take longer exposures and then we come back to that point a little bit later and the second one is to use on pixel phones the most recent one so the pixel 3 the pixel 4 and the pixel 5 that's coming out they have an astrophotography mode so we're going to test both of them but if you're only interested in the pixel astrophotography mode go look at the chapters below and skip to that part because i'm going to talk about it later i'm going to start about talking about the mode that works for most cell phones first if your camera has a built-in pro mode inside of its camera app just use that one but if you're like me and you have a pixel phone or another phone that only has automatic modes inside of its camera app i suggest going on the store and looking for a camera app that works for you so i decided to go with pro cam x which has a raw built in and it can support longer exposures that's the thing you want to look for so actually this camera has a limit of 10 seconds and we're gonna see we are probably want something a little bit longer uh best maximum we can go with and so every phone is gonna have a different maximum i know samsung phones usually can go up to 30 seconds uh some lg phones also can go up to 30 seconds so you just want to find an app that allows you to go to the maximum shutter speed that you have so for example here if i have the lightroom app it only allows me to go up to one second so that's not a good app to use to take pictures of the stars because you really want the longest shutter speed possible talking of shutter speed that's actually the thing you're going to have the most control on inside of your camera because most cell phone cameras have a fixed aperture around 2f2 so that's pretty good already but you want to keep the iso as low as possible because if the iso is too high because it's a tiny sensor you're going to have so much noise inside of the shot it's going to be unusable so for this we're going to go inside of photopills again and here i'm going to open it go and spot stars and check for my camera so i already have my pixel 4a selected uh as a phone here so if you look at here we have the mpf rule and it says it's 22 seconds to get sharp star so that's the maximum shutter we can go but like i said before on this cell phone the maximum is actually 10 seconds so i'm a little bit scared we're not gonna have enough light inside of the shot to see the stars well uh so jump let's jump into um the pro cam x app and set up the shot and we should be ready to take the first test shot i just completed taking a few test shots and i'm really pleased with the results but i forgot a few very important things about the settings on your camera so the first one is you want to make sure you don't have any flash because the flash is only going to show up in the foreground and you're taking the distance so it's not useful to have a flash and the second thing is that you actually want to make sure that you have your focus set on infinity and that's because the stars are really far so you want to come here and make sure you're on infinity mode inside of your pro camera app so once all of these things are set you can then just play with the iso to find the setting that is the best for you before moving on to the pixel 4 astrophotographic mode i wanted to take a look at the pictures on my cell phone so i imported them inside of lightroom mobile and if we take a look first at the different iso exposures here we have the shot at iso 400 and i actually think this one is the one that looks the best so we really see the stars nice and everything else is pretty dark so you don't you're not distracted with anything else and too much noise if you look at the one at 800 it's still not bad and it's still pretty usable as a shot but you're starting to see a lot of noise in the bottom of the shot here if we zoom in so i'm not sure like this is a shot that you could print or like even share on social medias and when we go to a thousand six hundred i think this shot is just unusable uh there's way too much noise and like the noise is uh color noise so that's the worst worst type of noise inside of a shot so you probably wouldn't even be able to share it on a social media and have a good result but if you go back here to the one at iso 400 i actually have a raw picture and that's an important thing i did inside of the app is i configured it to have a raw and also a gpek shot so if we come here this is going to be um the dng picture so if i just check here inside of info and we can see here this is the dng shot so if we go back in edit mode we're going to do a quick edit so in the last one i did like quite a lot the fact that it was a little bit darker so i'm actually going to bring down the exposure a little bit i'm going to bring the contrast up that's going to make the stars pop a little bit more here um i'm going to bring the highlights up a little bit just to bring up the stars again out a little bit then i'm going to bring the whites up a little bit but bring down the shadows so because there's a lot of noise inside of the shadows i actually want to keep them as dark as possible so we're also going to bring down the black a little bit and that's really going to start making the stars pop so like i thought in my other videos it's actually really important to use a mask for the star so here we're going to come in selective mode we're going to add a linear mask so we're just going to drag it down here add a nice feather bring it down here uh select this mask then i'm gonna go inside of details here oops no i want it to go inside of this menu here and then we're gonna go in clarity and we really want to bring the clarity up to make the stars pop a little bit more so now we see we have a lot more stars in the sky if we just bring down the layer mask a little bit we actually see that we're getting a pretty good result and if we look at the final shot here i actually think it's not bad for a shot taken with a cell phone so definitely i wouldn't go over iso 400 on the pixel 4a but it's still a really really good shot of the stars i'm actually really impressed with the result we're getting out of here okay so now let's take the shot with the pixel 4a mode and it's the first time i'm actually using this mode so i'm going to discover i just as you if it's working well or not so just let me start the screen recording here and now we're good to go so i'm going to place the camera on the tripod and this is actually a really important step because if the camera is not perfectly still on a tripod it won't recognize that you want to take an astrophotography shot so it won't show up the menu to take that type of shot so you want to be sure that the camera is perfectly still uh on a tripod so now we're ready to go inside of the camera app here so i'm going to bring up the menu right here so we're going to open the camera then you want to go and move inside of the night side option here and right away so we saw the top here there was a small little message at a pop top and said that more in astrophotography so we're good to go now because it's perfectly steady so the image is really terrible right now so like i hope that's not what we're gonna see at the end uh but we can see actually there's a little bit of light there so we can see that we have the lake so i might want to bring this up a little bit so i'm just going to bring it up a little bit more turn it again just to get a better composition and now let's press the button and wait so now we have a four minute countdown so we're actually gonna let it run and see the result we get in four minutes you see that uh so just right now um there's actually a first shot that appeared here so we can actually see that already has a lot of detail so it has the water on the bottom here there's this place that's starting to appear there's still a lot of color noise but i'm pretty sure they're gonna get rid of that um but already a really good shot and that's actually how it works so it's taking now four minutes and just stays still for four minutes because it takes 15 second exposures and then stitch everything together using ai to get a better shot so i'm really excited to see how it's going to perform in the end so now let's just wait for the other few minutes to complete and see the result it's actually getting quite cold now so i think it's around like zero degree almost so that's the thing when i talked about in the first episode that you always need to be uh ready for cold weather i actually have three different shirts and beneath this and my winter coat on so yeah you really need to be prepared for cold weather less than a minute left i'm super excited to see how it's gonna turn out so really crossing my hands that it's gonna be a good result because the main reason i got this phone was for its astrophotography mode okay so less than 10 seconds left um really excited um yeah so it's done let's open the viewfinder here so it's already looking pretty good still processing and wow wow look at this shot look at this shot this is amazing this is amazing look at the detail we have here in the stars there's a little bit of noise in the bottom so just clearly still noise and they're really intense on the noise reduction but this is amazing this is amazing from a photo coming out of a phone another thing i just discovered and it's because i have right here inside of my camera settings i have raw enable for the capture mode and they actually save a rough picture of every single shot we just took i was expecting to only get jpegs but having the raw files are is even better so let's come down here inside of lightroom find our raw folder and i'm just going to select a few shots i took here and do a quick edit on them to see if we have more information we can use so let's go inside of our photos and we have them right here and these are really incredible like right away we can see the shots are simply amazing so this is the one we just took so if we come here we're just going to crop it a little bit to bring it back up and we can see the haze in the bottom it's simply so much haze in the shot and like it's incredible that you actually got that detail in the foreground here um so we're just going to go here inside of the light so i'm going to bring down the highlights a little bit just because i don't want to have as much uh detail inside of the shot here i want to bring the contrast up so that's important um just to bring more detail inside of the stars and after i'm going to bring the exposure down a little bit just to make it a little bit darker i'm going to bring the whites up but bring the blacks down a little bit more and then i'm going to bring probably down the shadows also we're going to get that off here go in selective mode and a mask oops i wasn't on the right mode come here selective add a mask add a linear mask here so i'm just going to drag down a mask here bring it down here then go inside of i never remember where it is is it where is it's here clarity and just bring the clarity up to make a stars pop and yeah this is a really good shot considering that we completely took it using our phone before leaving i wanted to talk about my final thoughts of taking pictures using a phone so this was the first time tonight i was taking pictures of the stars using my phone and i came in today thinking it would be a total disaster because it's such a tiny sensor that is such sensitive to noise but i was actually quite surprised with the shots we could get using the pro mode and if we don't go over iso 400 i think the shots are actually pretty good you're for sure not getting too much details inside of the foregrounds but it's still really usable shots and denim you when you enable on the pixel 4 uh phones the astrophotography mode and here on the pixel 4a and just remember this is a 350 dollar phone so you wouldn't expect it to have such a good mode for taking stars but the pictures are simply amazing they're really really good i would say some of them uh looking at them on my phone almost look better than using my dslr and this brings another question should you get a dclr to take pictures of the stars and i would say it really depends if you just want to go quickly take a few shots during the year i think the pixel phone is a really great choice for you if you're like me and you want to have more control you want to take time lapses you want to do all kinds of other things with astrophotography you're still going to get better results using a dedicated full-frame camera because you're going to get more details and like for example in the foreground here when you go really into the details here it starts to break apart so using a full-frame camera you can have more control on this and that's one of the biggest problem i think with the astrophotography mode or just taking pictures of the stars in general using your cell phone is that it you have really limited options uh when taking the shots so you're either limited by the maximum shutter speed so like in this one it's 10 seconds or you when you use the astrophotography mode you have no control at all on how it's taking the shot but still overall this is a really impressive phone if you enjoyed this video about taking pictures with your phone of the stars please leave a like below and also subscribe to the channel if you want to learn more about astrophotography filmmaking or photography in general and i'm going to have my next video that's going to talk about how to use the dji osmo pocket a tiny camera to capture the stars so i'm pretty excited about that one too and also leave a comment below if you have any question on the subject see you in the next one [Music] bye [Applause] [Music] you
Video Links
- 🔗 📸 High-resolution photos & written guides
- 🔗 Lightroom Edits
- 🔗 BUY THE GOOGLE PIXEL 4a (affiliate link)
- Capturing sharp stars
- Capturing star trails
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
I just got my hands on the Pixel 4a, and I was genuinely curious whether a $350 phone could actually capture decent images of the stars. Spoiler alert: it can—and better than I expected.
In this video, I'm testing two distinct approaches to smartphone astrophotography. The first method uses ProCam X, a third-party camera app that lets me shoot in RAW with longer exposures (up to 10 seconds on this phone). The key here is understanding your phone's limitations: most phones have a fixed aperture around f/2.0, so shutter speed and ISO are what you really control. I used PhotoPills to calculate the right settings beforehand, and discovered that keeping ISO at 400 or below gives me usable shots without excessive noise.
The second method is Google's Astrophotography mode—and this is where I was genuinely impressed. Once the phone detects that it's perfectly still on a tripod, the mode activates and shoots fifteen-second exposures over four minutes, then stitches them together with AI. The detail that emerges is remarkable. I got RAW files straight out of the camera, which I could then refine in Lightroom Mobile.
Editing is where both shots come alive. I lifted the contrast to make stars pop, used selective masks to boost clarity in the sky specifically, and pulled down the blacks to minimize noise in darker areas. Both methods benefited from this approach, though the Astrophotography mode clearly captured more information in the foreground.
So, should you ditch your DSLR? Not quite. The phone is genuinely excellent if you want quick shots or are just getting into astrophotography. But if you're serious—if you want timelapses, more control over composition, or finer detail in the foreground—a full-frame camera still wins. The phone's biggest constraint is that you have almost no control when using Astrophotography mode, and the standard mode maxes out at 10 seconds.
Still, I left the cottage genuinely impressed. A tiny sensor in a phone, in the middle of a dark lake, delivering images that almost rival what I get from my DSLR. That's worth paying attention to.