>>3422351Current phone cams have a lot of software work in it to make it look good straight out jpegs — similarly how consumer films like Kodak gold were back in old days. During the 1st 10 years or so (before Fuji got in the game for good), the focus of development of digital cameras had been on getting better specs and leaving data manipulation (or editing) on the photographer hands — and it's still like that for the most part.
For those photographers who know to do it, it was great. But for most part it was not. Bad examples are many: ranging from oversaturated Ken Rockwell pics to early tumblr color casts to over-hdr of Sebastião Salgado's Genesis. Most softwares over little in that regard still, having many options on how to manipulate channels, sharpness, and even demosaicing, but very little in terms of actually worked in profiles — I think that's part of why Portra and color negative film have gotten so much praise during the last decade.
Any ways, what you're experiencing is not uncommon at all. Most of pics I see around here on p generally got poor colors (except for those scanning film properly, like Alex). As I see, there's three ways to go about it: 1st one is to study color and learn how to work it (for that I suggest Johannes itten book "art of color" and Ctein articles), but that takes considerable amount time and training to get half decent (time not spent taking photos); the 2nd one is resort to film and have it processed/scanned properly, as most art photographers do (from Alex to Stephen Shore); the 3rd way is to use it as your look (get a decent ooc jpegs producing cameras like Fuji, Leica etc), and go for that raw look (like people on HCSP do)
