5 ms·
As long as you manually control the exposure and exposure time, the same can be achieved with an iPhone camera. This is not specific to Pixel.
by ganitarashid 7y ago
As long as you manually control the exposure and exposure time, the same can be achieved with an iPhone camera. This is not specific to Pixel.
- pixelpoet 7y agoIt seems they have some ML stuff in there for specific features, e.g. sky / land light balance and hot pixel removal (probably similar to how denoising for MC path tracing works). Aside: randomly recognised Ryan Geiss in the credits, he did the Milkdrop plugin for Winamp back in the day, and also some cool tech demos for Nvidia...
- mirsadm 7y agoThere's no machine learning involved for hot pixel removal. The way I have heard it described is that hot pixels stay in the same place across multiple images. One of the processing steps is to figure out the location of the hot pixels by looking at multiple frames. Stars will shift slightly in between the longer exposures where as hot pixels will not.
- noeltock 7y agoThe higher quality does seem specific to the Pixel though, comparison https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1187557180276445186 https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1187557180276445186
- ladberg 7y agoIn that example the Pixel has a 6x longer exposure. While Pixels can currently get better night photos currently, it's simply because the software lets them take minutes-long exposures instead of seconds-long. From a hardware point of view I don't think there's an advantage.
- ganitarashid 7y agoYep it’s just the settings, hardware is basically the same and can achieve the same result. This is a marketing blog post.
- mirsadm 7y agoIf you ignore all the research and development into creating the software then sure every camera is the same.
- ladberg 7y agoBoth the Pixel and iPhone have AMAZING camera hardware and software that is better than any others in their domain. It’s just that the two are roughly equal except for the exposure time used.
- ubercow13 7y agoThe point of the software is to allow longer exposure time while mitigating the issues that causes. It’s not “just” a longer exposure time.
- ladberg 7y agoYeah, but I think the software differences required for 30 seconds vs 3 minutes is minimal. 30 seconds is still long enough to have to deal with all the issues that would come up with a 3 minute exposure.
- ganitarashid 7y agoExactly
- oceanofsolaris 7y agoThey mention a couple of features that are not just "long exposure" in the post: * Compensating for moving stars * "Live viewfinder" during exposure * Selectively darkening the sky * Dark current compensation (though that is probably needed for all long-exposure photography...still, not a simple "more exposure" feature)
- kccqzy 7y agoI think the point of GP is that astrophotography as demonstrated here is mostly implementable in software. If Google wanted, they could very well produce an app for iPhone that does all of the above.
- ganitarashid 7y agoAll easy software implementations. This is not a hardware story.
- jeen02 7y agoIf they're so easy, why haven't Apple implemented them?
- piyush_soni 7y agoOr at least someone would have come up with an app already, had it been that easy.
- ganitarashid 7y agoJust because it’s easy doesn’t mean users are clamoring for it. I can think of hundreds of things that are easy that apple hasn’t done
- ubercow13 7y agoIt’s hardly a secret that innovation in smartphone cameras is mainly in software now. This software camera innovation is one of, or the, main area that phone manufacturers are competing on at the top end of the market, so characterising it as ‘easy’ seems strange.