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Night Sight for Pixel phones

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Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#61

Post by ehsankia »

endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

If it was so simple to take handheld long exposure photos, how come no other phone had done it yet? I think you are overly simplifying this. At a high level it might be a simple concept, but clearly getting it working in practice isn't simple otherwise every company out there would've added it years ago.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#62

Post by whoisjuan »

Damn! That's honestly impressive! I started reading thinking it was going to be a simple brightness-up kind of thing, but it's incredible how they are able to recreate the whole photography based on an initial dark raw input.

I must imagine that the sensor is doing an extra but un-perceptible long exposure than then is used to correct the lightning of the dark version.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#63

Post by windexh8er »

endorphone wrote: post #60
windexh8er wrote: post #59

Earlier 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…

I don't doubt it's at all possible and that's really great you're a serious photographer with dev skills to write a camera app. But the reality here is it's not something that has been done and packaged up so well to be easily repeatable by those not as elite as yourself with regard to photography. We all understand stacking photos (HDR) is a thing and long exposure is likely as old as photography itself. But you clearly don't see the value in making it usable by anyone, at any time, in a device you carry with you that does many other things well. To give Google credit for advancing smart phone photography is very fair and very deserved. While they may not have advanced pro-level equipment, process or technology if that's what you're looking for you've completely missed the obvious point. I said it last year in a similar post. I have a very viable camera that shoots amazing and consistent photos and videos without having to lug around my DSLR gear. And it's ready in seconds when I pull it out... Are they award winning shots? Nope. But they're priceless to me since I can capture my family and life moments with increasingly better results with less user awareness or input. Do I enjoy manual photography? Sure do - that's not the point and I feel as though you've missed that.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#64

Post by endorphone »

ehsankia wrote: post #61
endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

If it was so simple to take handheld long exposure photos, how come no other phone had done it yet? I think you are overly simplifying this. At a high level it might be a simple concept, but clearly getting it working in practice isn't simple otherwise every company out there would've added it years ago.

Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting. It requires a pre-requisite of good OIS (which paradoxically the Pixel 1 didn't have, claiming that it wasn't necessary -- because of some magic AI sauce or something -- and seeing that noise repeated across the tubs. They added it with 2 and 3) and usually it is hidden behind an interface.

Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use (e.g. not in a review), give or take 100%, are of people. People move. Long exposures just lead to bad outcomes and blurred people.

I mean seriously search the net for Pixel 3 night mode. It's like the Suit Is Back. They're even using the same verbiage across them. And the uproarious nonsense about Google using AI to colourize is just...well a place like HN should just be chuckling at it.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#65

Post by mediaman »

endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

I can see your point: this basically just looks like long exposures, or stacked exposures, which is basically the same thing of letting more photons hit the sensor, aligned using OIS.

Any thoughts on why Apple, as the other leading phone maker with a heavy emphasis on camera quality, has not implemented anything like it? Not to discount the difficulty, but OIS aligned long exposures kind of seems like low hanging fruit. Instead, they keep trying to open the aperture more.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#66

Post by dgacmu »

endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

I'm sorry, but while you may be a photography fan, you don't know what you're talking about here.

Stacking is quite the opposite of a "ghetto" version of a long exposure - it's the fundamental building block of being able to do the equivalent of a long exposure without its associated problems (motion blur from both camera and subject, high sensor noise if you turn up the gain, and over-saturating any bright spots).

Stacking is the de facto technique used for DSLR astrophotography for exactly these reasons -- see https://photographingspace.com/stacking-vs-single/

However, you're ignoring the _very substantial_ challenges of merging many exposures taken on a handheld camera. Image stabilization is great, but there's a lot of motion over, say, 1 second on a hand-held camera. Much more than the typical IS algorithm is designed to handle.

The techniques are non-trivial: http://graphics.stanford.edu/talks/seeinthedark-public-15sep...

There's a lot going on to accomplish this. It starts with the ability to do high-speed burst reads of raw data from the CCD (so that individual frames don't get motion blurred, and raw so you can process before you lose any fidelity by RGB conversion), and requires a lot of computational horsepower to perform alignment and do merging. I don't know what the Pixel's algorithms are, but merging of many images with hand-held camera motion benefits from state of the art results in applying CNNs to the problem, at least, from some of the results from Vladlen Koltun's group at Intel (who I'd put at the forefront of this, along with Marc Levoy's group at Google):

http://vladlen.info/publications/learning-see-dark/

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the technical meat behind state of the art low-light photography on cell phones.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#67

Post by Jyaif »

endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

Seems pretty damn slow if it's only stacking multiple images.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#68

Post by endorphone »

dgacmu wrote: post #66
endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

I'm sorry, but while you may be a photography fan, you don't know what you're talking about here. Stacking is quite the opposite of a "ghetto" version of a long exposure - it's the fundamental building block of being able to do the equivalent of a long exposure without its associated problems (motion blur from both camera and subject, high sensor noise if you turn up the gain, and over-saturating any bright spots). S…

"you don't know what you're talking about here"

You literally repeated exactly what I said image stacking was, yet lead off by claiming that I don't know what I'm talking about. Classic.

The goal of both is to achieve the exact same result -- more photons for a given pixel. Stacking is a necessary compromise under certain circumstances -- lack of sufficient stabilization, particularly noisy sensor or environment, etc.

Further, this implementation is clearly long exposures (note the blur rather than strobe).

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#70

Post by gst »

endorphone wrote: post #64
ehsankia wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was so simple to take handheld long exposure photos, how come no other phone had done it yet? I think you are overly simplifying this. At a high level it might be a simple concept, but clearly getting it working in practice isn't simple otherwise every company out there would've added it years ago.

Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting. It requires a pre-requisite of good OIS (which paradoxically the Pixel 1 didn't have, claiming that it wasn't necessary -- because of some magic AI sauce or something -- and seeing that noise repeated across the tubs. They added it with 2 and 3) and usually it is hidden behind an interface. Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use…

> Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting. It requires a pre-requisite of good OIS (which paradoxically the Pixel 1 didn't have, claiming that it wasn't necessary -- because of some magic AI sauce or something -- and seeing that noise repeated across the tubs.

Night Sight works perfectly fine on the Pixel 1.

> Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use (e.g. not in a review), give or take 100%, are of people. People move. Long exposures just lead to bad outcomes and blurred people.

I tested Night Sight with pictures of people and it also works fine in those cases. Even pictures takes with the front camera (without a tripod, etc.) look great.

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