Low Light and High Dynamic Range photography in the Google Camera App • Hacker News Board

Re: Low Light and High Dynamic Range photography in the Google Camera App

#111

Post by technofiend » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 5:29 PM UTC

footpath wrote: post #67

piyush_soni wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that was just one of the things it lacked as compared to the DSLRs. I'm not sure what's so amazing in these photographs (as compared to DSLRs) - to my untrained eyes they don't look great.

You are still looking at it from a purely technical perspective. In the article, the photographer already mentioned that he's only using the iPhone for the "composition and the perfect photo opp". The point of the parent, I think, is that in the hands of a competent photographer, any adequate camera can produce works of certain artistic merit. Those who are most up in arms about the technical aspects of a camera ofte…

Guitarists have the same arguments (like audiophiles) about warmness and tone of their work. But the fact of the matter is: if you don't practice enough to reliably produce a chord of your choice, does it really matter if you're plunking on a Squier Strat or one of Hendrix's original guitars? Not really. Equipment bragging rights don't mean anything without a modicum of practice and talent.

Re: Low Light and High Dynamic Range photography in the Google Camera App

#112

Post by boxcardavin » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:06 PM UTC

xexers wrote: post #69

boxcardavin wrote: post #59

One should remember that writing camera software that is agnostic to the hardware is technically hard, and nearly impossible if you want gorgeous photos (a la iPhone). When taking astronomy images we would characterize the CCD (mostly for noise) each night, and you need that kind of approach to tune your software to your hardware.

> One should remember that writing camera software that is agnostic to the hardware is technically hard In this case, is it? Their solution involves using burst mode, then taking those many pictures and turning them into 1 high quality image. Burst mode would simply output a bunch of .jpg images... couldn't you run the algorithm on those standardized images?

You get called dark current (thermal noise) on CMOS and CCD sensors, and the signal-to-noise ratio goes down as you decrease the exposure time. You see the effect when taking a low light photo, the graininess is from the SNR being very low while the noise is showing through. You can smooth this out quite a bit by combining burst photos (see Cortex Camera app) as the noise is random, but you always get better results with more light for each exposure.

Re: Low Light and High Dynamic Range photography in the Google Camera App

#113

Post by boxcardavin » Tue, Oct 28, 2014, 6:14 PM UTC

sigmar wrote: post #100

boxcardavin wrote: post #59

One should remember that writing camera software that is agnostic to the hardware is technically hard, and nearly impossible if you want gorgeous photos (a la iPhone). When taking astronomy images we would characterize the CCD (mostly for noise) each night, and you need that kind of approach to tune your software to your hardware.

Considering the many advantages to shooting in RAW, it is safe to assume that all one-size-fits-all software processing (a la iPhone) are vastly inferior to performing the image processing manually (with the data directly off the censor, uncompressed, and unaltered)

Would this be the end user doing that? Although you can't raw out of an iPhone it's not one-size-fits-all, I'd say it's the opposite as they have tuned the processing for that exact sensor/lens combination after testing.

To be clear, I would LOVE to get raw out of an iOS device camera. It would make motion analysis much more precise. With iOS 8 you have kinda/sorta control over the exposure time, but it could be more precise.