The Huawei P20 shipped out in April with this feature -- I look forward to dxomark's analysis of the Pixel 3 phone compared to the P20, which currently remains on top: https://www.dxomark.com/category/mobile-reviews/ Upgrading from a 3-year old Samsung S6, where I could almost see the battery percentages drop off percent by percent, the P20 Pro's 4000 mAh battery has been great (too bad the wireless charging didn't a…
Night Sight for Pixel phones
101–110 of 137 posts
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#102This might be a weird criticism but... making photos taken in the dark look like they are not actually dark seems kind of like a weird thing to do? I've struggled with my micro 4/3 camera to capture accurate night photographs, but the last thing I wanted of them was to be brighter than I was perceiving them to be. That said, the effect of some of these photographs is striking, and I'm sure the tech is interesting.
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? There are a bunch in the second half of the article.
Ah. An update was posted literally in the last ten minutes. This article came out yesterday (when I first saw it)
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't mind my derailing the conversation a bit, could you ask your father what he would recommend for 4K/60fps video as competition for the Panasonic GH5s? In its weight class, it's one of the few 60fps (and 400Mbps bitrate capable) cameras that can be mounted to a relatively small sized gimbal, and flown on a drone that doesn't cost $10,000. Is there anything expected to be released in the next few months tha…
Personally I would suggest checking out the new Fuji X-T3 -- I just got it and am very happy with the video quality. It's actually the only other small camera right now that will do 4k60p 10-bit.
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'd like to believe pulling off these levels of photos is as easy as you proclaim (because I would have a lot of old shots that are usable) the level of discounting you assert here is unfortunate, because it's simply not true. The proof is in the reality that nothing has done this good of a job to date. If you do have examples that match or exceed please share and I will be in line to buy.
Just to be clear, I've been a serious photographer (amateur, not professional, but with all of the gear) for two decades, and actually made a pretty popular computational photography app for Android. I honestly don't know which part you're doubting. Long exposures? Do you doubt that other cameras can do long exposures? Do you doubt that they can do noise reduction? Do you doubt that OIS allows for hand-held long expo…
Gallus looks interesting, I haven't heard about it before. Any thoughts on when you're bringing it back?
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#106What the Pixel cameras are doing is staggeringly good. My father is the founder of https://www.imatest.com/ , and has a substantial collection of top-end cameras. He's probably in the top 0.0001% of image quality nerds. But most of the time, he's now entirely happy shooting on his Pixel.
If you don't mind my derailing the conversation a bit, could you ask your father what he would recommend for 4K/60fps video as competition for the Panasonic GH5s? In its weight class, it's one of the few 60fps (and 400Mbps bitrate capable) cameras that can be mounted to a relatively small sized gimbal, and flown on a drone that doesn't cost $10,000. Is there anything expected to be released in the next few months tha…
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what this article says, do you have reason to believe it's incorrect? The quote about object detection in the parent post came from the article.
I'm sure the first step is taking many sharper short exposure shots (as opposed to longer exposures, which blur), then doing some tensor magic to stitch into a single image. Object detection alone won't give you sharp text in low light. You need a minimum number of photons hitting pixels.
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#108> Google says that its machine learning detects what objects are in the frame, and the camera is smart enough to know what color they are supposed to have. That is absolutely impressive. The color and text on the fire extinguishers along with the texture detail seen in the headphones in the last picture are just stunning. Congratulations to anyone who worked on this project!
It's impressive, but it also means that your camera isn't always going to capture what's there -- it'll capture what it guesses was there. I wonder how easily it is fooled to capture something that's not there?
I'm guessing that it works similarly to low-budget astrophotography but with the computer doing all the busywork for you: when you want to photograph stars or planets and you don't have a fancy tracking mount to compensate for earth's rotation you'll have very mediocre results with long exposure. If you expose a lot to see the object clearly then you get motion blur. If you use a shorter exposition to reduce the blur you don't have enough light to get a clear picture.
One solution is to take a bunch of low-exposure pictures in a row and then add them together (as in, sum the value of the non-gamma-corrected pixels) in post while taking care of moving or rotating each picture to line everything up. This way you simulate a long-exposure while at the same correcting for the displacement.
An other advantage is that you can effectively do "HDR": suppose that you're taking a panorama with the milky way in the sky and some city underneath it, with a long exposure the lights of the city would saturate completely. With shorter exposures you can correct that in post by scaling the intensity of the lights in the city as you add pixels (or summing fewer pictures for these areas). This way you can effectively have several levels of exposures in the same shot and you can tweak all that in post. In the case of the city/milky way example you'll also need to compensate for the motion in the sky but obviously not on land which is also something you can't really do "live".
I have a strong suspicion that it's basically what this software is doing: take a bunch of pictures, do edge/object detection to realign everything (probably also using the phone's IMU data), fit the result on some sort of gamma curve to figure out the correct exposition then add color correction based on a model of the sensor's performance under low light (since I'm sure by default under these conditions the sensor will start breaking down and favor some colors over others). Then maybe go through a subtle edge-enhancing filter to sharpen things a bit more and remove any leftover blurriness.
If I'm right then it's definitely a lot of very clever software but it's not like it's really "making up" anything.
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#109If you're interested in learning more about this stuff the head of the Pixel team (Marc Levoy - Prof emeritus at Stanford) has an entire lecture series on this stuff from a class he ran at Google. They are here along with lecture notes: https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/home What's really cool is you can see him talk about a lot of these ideas well before they made it into the Pixel phone
from what I can tell, Marc Levoy is the main reason why the Pixel has all these abilities.
Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you link to some research on that? I'd love to throw together a hack where you use LED light strips to do this. Isn't it possible that the light would increase bacteria though? https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/66878/blue-light...
I'm sadly unable to find the original study where I found this. If memory serves me it was from around 2003. Not sure how it would increase bacteria, as bacteria don't photosynthesis light, unless the lights gave off sufficient heat to increase their activity. If anything I would think the light might inhibit bacterial growth.