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

175 points by jmintz 12y ago

joosters 12y ago
Does anyone know if this is the same technique that iOS uses for HDR (I know the basic principle of multiple exposures is the same). Are there different algorithms at play here?
lnanek2 12y ago
Not really interesting since other OEMs have had this for years. Good to see Google trying to keep up with their low cost alternative offerings, however.
- fumar 12y ago
  I have had HDR+ for over a year. This post is an overview of the technology and not a product launch.
bentcorner 12y ago
> However, bracketing is not actually necessary; one can use the same exposure time in every shot. By using a short exposure HDR+ avoids blowing out highlights, and by combining enough shots it reduces noise in the shadows. Does this mean they're using ISO bracketing instead of exposure bracketing?
- sp332 12y ago
  No, it takes multiple photos with the same settings and just averages out the noise in the shadows. That wouldn't keep the shadows from lacking detail though. You'd just get a smoother black!
  - joosters 12y ago
    With a tripod to stabilise a camera, is it possible to get more detail through multiple shots? Just averaging the noise would smooth things out, but I wonder if there is any more intelligent processing that could improve things. More shots could (in theory) provide more data. A similar problem might be to try and improve the resolution of a single hand-held photo, shot in normal lighting conditions, by taking many pictures in rapid succession and then processing them. Each picture would be in a very slightly different position and so (again, in theory) might provide more data?
    - batbomb 12y ago
      No, you can only get cleaner data and maximize the pixels you have, not more effective pixels. The way you could get "more" data is to simulate, say, a 28mm equivalent lens with, say, multiple shots from an 135mm equivalent lens at different locations and stitch them together. Thats what they do when you see those 3GP+ shots you can zoom in on.
      - judk 12y ago
        You an absolutely gwt subpixel detail by averaging multiple photos taken with the same setting with almost exactly the same frame. I had software in 2004 that did this, converting short video to high res photo
  - vilhelm_s 12y ago
    I think it should work for shadows also? Adding together 10 photos taken at 1/100s should give the same amount of light as one photo taken at 1/10s.
    - sp332 12y ago
      But if each photo is just black because it's underexposed, then adding them together only gives you black.
      - vilhelm_s 12y ago
        If the pixels were literally black that would be the case, but even on very underexposed pictures I don't think that ever happens. There's still photons on the sensor, it's just that they are swamped by the noise. Like, most DSLRs nowadays capture 12-bit values, which suggests you would have to underexpose by something on the order of 12EV to truncate the output to zero.
        CHY872 12y ago
        Yes, and that is very, very possible. In any case, doing that would give you some relatively painful quantisation error, which is why the HDR approach works better.
  - mvgoogler 12y ago
    You can effectively with increase the ISO in the dark areas without increasing the noise by averaging together multiple photos
  - rcthompson 12y ago
    You're correct that it's taking multiple photos with the same settings, but the trick is that it can choose different settings than it would have for a single photo. So instead of a single medium-ISO shot that loses all shadow detail but minimizes noise, it could take multiple high-ISO shots to capture the shadow detail and then average them to minimize noise. So if you think of your dynamic range as being limited by the noise floor and the overexposure ceiling, this technique lowers the noise floor while keeping the ceiling right where it is, giving you a better effective dynamic range. ISO bracketing extends both the floor and ceiling by a much larger margin, of course, but its has issues that complicate its use in automated HDR shots, as described in the article.
  - thomasahle 12y ago
    From a statistical point of view, you can certainly get less noise, while preserving details, by averaging multiple shots.
ot 12y ago
I posted this 2 hours ago [1] and both the posts are in home; the URLs differ just by a trailing question mark. How come the duplicate detector didn't trigger? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515417
- joosters 12y ago
  I think the duplicate detector looks at exact URL matches. Things like a trailing / or ? will let a new story go through.
  - ot 12y ago
    The duplicate detector is usually quite more clever than just exact URL match. Why the downvote? EDIT: In fact, I just tried to re-submit an existing link by adding a question mark and it didn't go through.
    - peteretep 12y ago
      > The duplicate detector is usually quite more clever than > just exact URL match This doesn't match my experience, but then I usually editorialize my titles if I'm resubmitting something I know is here already.
thrownaway2424 12y ago
Meh. The camera software on Android is so bad that a default-setting picture from an iPhone looks as good or better than an HDR picture on Android. People have demonstrated the quality you can get from the sensor on a Nexus 5 if you capture raw and process offline[1]. I realize that these Google[x] researchers are probably not responsible for the mainline camera application, but the organizational details of Android management don't interest me. What would interest me would be an Android camera app that captures decent pictures, has usable auto-exposure and auto-focus algorithms, and doesn't take tens of seconds to start. 1: http://imgur.com/a/qQkkR#0 http://imgur.com/a/qQkkR#0
- seunosewa 12y ago
  I guess HDR+ is supposed to close that gap. Recent iPhones do something very similar all the time.
  - crishoj 12y ago
    HDR is provided as an additional, alternative photo by the iOS camera app, if the scene is deemed to benefit from HDR processing.
- shawabawa3 12y ago
  All that guy seems to have done is manually set the ISO to 100 when taking a relatively dark picture with his phone on a tripod. If the camera app did that by default pretty much every photo would be blurry
- personZ 12y ago
  What a dismissive bunch of prattle. Meh. This is about algorithms to achieve better results with a given sensor. The Nexus 5, like the various Nexii that came before, has a poor image sensor -- it's a $300 smartphone, and LG wasn't going to put the best in it. HDR+ gives rather decent results in a wide range of settings despite that, and mine has managed a large number of fantastic shots. The Nexus 6, being twice the price, apparently has a fantastic sensor, and with that dramatically better base results, made even better with HDR+. Awesome. That's good.
forrestthewoods 12y ago
Yikes. That first picture looks awful. The HDR+ version looks like cheap CGI. Very plasticy. Some of the other pics are nice so that seems like a really weird one to lead with.
- acomjean 12y ago
  the "HDR" look can be overdone. If its done right you don't notice it. Since Photoshop added HDR photo merging its been a thing to capture the full dynamic range of a scene and make it look HDR. google "hdr photos" to see it overdone. https://www.google.com/search?q=hdr+photos https://www.google.com/search?q=hdr+photos
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  As someone who is a pretty serious hobbyist photographer, it is actually the second picture that looks very unnatural to me. The first one I can imagine existing in "real life" if there were a soft-box enclosed fill light out of the frame that was lighting up the lady's face (it can't be the sun since the tree isn't being lit the way it would if the light hitting her was point-light-esque), which would make the photo very "posed", but still possibly something that isn't highly post-processed. The second picture with the two ladies is much more distracting. The HDR version keeps a lot more detail than the non-HDR image, but at the expense of making everything look extremely flat and unnatural as your brain tries to process how the lighting is working (this may be unique to people who are used to worrying about light with regards to photography and a non-issue for normal folks, I can't say for sure) since the scene is clearly midday but the light across the entire scene makes it seem like the sun must be very low, which doesn't match with the contents of the scene. The HDR version of the second photo would look better if the exposure on the two ladies were bumped up close to the value that the background sky was bumped down, but doing that automatically would be an amazing visual detection feat that I wouldn't expect out of a phone camera. The lighting still wouldn't make sense but at least it wouldn't look so flat.
  - driverdan 12y ago
    The interesting thing about the second HDR+ photo is that it seems to have true high dynamic range instead of the limited range created by different exposure settings. The subjects are actually darker than in the non-HDR picture. I'm not saying that it looks great, just that it's interesting from a technical perspective.
piyush_soni 12y ago
The blogspot fails to discuss why Samsung Galaxy S4/S5 HDR results are much better than my Nexus 5's. Also, there are limitations in leaving it on. Besides it being slow, it also has other restrictions like the inability to use Flash while in HDR+ mode. Howsoever good it may be by default, flash is sometimes important not only in dark, but also when facing sunlight while taking the shot.
- magicalist 12y ago
  > The blogspot fails to discuss why Samsung Galaxy S4/S5 HDR results are much better than my Nexus 5's Well, $300 price difference can buy you a lot. Now I get it. Comments like this one must be why Google felt pressured into making the next Nexus phone so much more expensive :P
  - post_break 12y ago
    Galaxy S4 on stock rom photos look amazing. S4 on Google rom photos look like shit. It's in the software.
    - higherpurpose 12y ago
      Indeed. The pre-Lollipop stock camera software was crap. Now it seems much better. Also Samsung's phones, even the S5, seem to be crap in the low-light/dark, too. They only excel in good to medium lighting.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    Probably has a bit to do with it... I, for one was really happy with a great mid-range option that was by far the best value in each release... still on my N4, and not sure what I'm going to get as an upgrade.
    - magicalist 12y ago
      Yep, I'm with you. I'm more or less fine with the nexus 5's camera (usually if an event is important to capture with great quality, someone else has a better camera already there), so I'd much rather the nexuses stick to the price point than go up in quality for a disproportionately larger increase in price.
davb 12y ago
It's worth noting that with HDR+ enabled on the Nexus 5, you can no longer enable the flash or timer. And the processing time can feel frustratingly long. So leaving it enabled all the time doesn't work for everyone.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Not sure if there will be a change in the processing itself (bar filling up afterwards), but with Lollipop taking the picture (circle loading) should be a lot faster. They also say it's 0.3-1 sec, which isn't too bad. Normal photos used to take that long on high-end phones a couple of years ago.
Hopka 12y ago
The automatic alignment helps prevent ghosts from camera shake. But it would be interesting to see how they avoid ghosts from moving subjects like leaves in the wind if they are effectively exposing longer (by taking several photos in a row).
conradfr 12y ago
HDR in my Nexus 4 allowed me to take almost focus photos on live music events, until it started to crash the camera / reboot the phone, oh well.
FreakyT 12y ago
It's unfortunate that HDR mode in Google Camera remains unavailable for phones other than the Nexus 5 & 6 -- I have a Moto X, and the app is really only useful for photospheres, since normal photos tend look awful without HDR. Has Google discussed any technical reason for this restriction? Seems like lots of third party apps support HDR on a wider variety of phones...
- adrusi 12y ago
  Google's HDR+ is different from regular HDR, which can be acheived through burst exposure bracketing and computation alone. HDR+ also performs stabilization and other tricks to improve the result, and these operations might depend on additional hints from the hardware to acheive the desired accuracy. OEMs are free to implement such features in their own apps, specialized to their own hardware, and most in fact do.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Lens Blur is pretty great, too, and it's available for others. I think the restriction may be the fact that it has to 1) support OIS and 2) Google has to support that specific OIS. It would be nice if Google could do something similar for EIS phones, too, though.
- marclevoy 12y ago
  HDR+ is available only on Nexus 5 and Nexus 6, because only those devices currently fully support the Camera2 API, which is required for HDR+. This will gradually change, and more devices will start offering it.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Seems like two people come into this experience and walk away with completely different expectations. One group are people, for whom camera phones have been their only "camera" and they are amazed at how great the pictures are now. The other group are people who argue the details of a phase detection autofocus in the Canon DSLR and the 51 point field autofocus of the Nikon DSLR and can't believe that the handset makers are allowed to actually call these things 'cameras' in their advertisements. Very little input from the folks in the middle.
- personZ 12y ago
  The Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 both feature on sensor phase detection. Further it's worth nothing that the whole notion of "n points of autofocus" is a flaw of phase detection, not a feature -- contrast detection has millions of possible points of autofocus. And indeed, most high-end SLRs have contrast-detection modes (e.g. Canon LiveView) that brings benefits that often merit its regular use, and are mandated for things like video mode. I think you're presenting some sort of knowledge gap that is contrived. I used SLRs for years. I seldom use it anymore because the results of my smartphone, under many normal circumstances, are comparable. This is the case for many people. The camera you have and all of that, and they just keep getting better and better.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    The primary benefit of a larger sensor is shooting in sub-optimal conditions. If all you do is take photos in perfect daylight then a smartphone can likely do as well. SLRs shine when there is more lighting range (e.g. strong shadows and light) in the shot and in particular when it is a lower-light situation. A smartphone has to start doing HDR (which has inherent downsides, like its inability to record motion) a lot sooner than a lot of SLRs as the dynamic range is wider on the latter. You also lose physical controls and the ability to change lenses on a smartphone, which slows you down, and makes your shots look more samey. The viewfinder (either EVF or OVF) is also a huge benefit when shooting in either strong sunlight or extreme darkness (as the LCD's backlight can bleed light into your shot). As to contrast Vs. phase detection: Contrast is very accurate for non-moving targets and even some moving targets (thanks largely to software). Phase detection is still the king of the castle when it comes to high speed and erratic motion however, by far.
notlisted 12y ago
I have an Android phone, but what is described in the post sounds a lot like what the app Average Cam Pro [1] does on my iPad (multiple exposures, average them out) with the refinement that the ACP app also allows you to subtract a "dark image" to combat sensor-specific banding noise, plus the user can adjust exposure after the shot. It takes the cleanest pictures by far, beating out my Canon 7D at times, but for optimal results it does require the device to be extremely steady. I've been waiting for this app to appear on Android too, but it hasn't so far. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/average-camera-pro/id415577873?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/average-camera-pro/id4155778...
- notlisted 12y ago
  PS some sample shots created by another photographer: http://blog.instagram.com/post/66187514665/howishootwater http://blog.instagram.com/post/66187514665/howishootwater Edit: I just discovered Flickr is filled with em. Some good examples on what happens when the number of shots you select (anywhere from 4-64 I believe) is less than optimal if you scroll down: https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%23avgcampro https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%23avgcampro I use Avg Cam Pro in touristy situations with lots of movement. Take 64 shots and (moving) people simply fade away by the time you're done.
boxcardavin 12y ago
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.
- xexers 12y ago
  > 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?
  - boxcardavin 12y ago
    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.
- oscilloscope 12y ago
  My understanding is that most flagship camera sensors are made by Sony, so there may be less diversity of hardware than there appears to be.
- sigmar 12y ago
  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)
  - 12y ago
nakedrobot2 12y ago
Yeah, this is fine. But my Nexus 5 takes half of its pictures out of focus. It is really, really frustrating. Can't they solve that hard problem first? :-)
ioedward 12y ago
I've been messing around with the Google Camera app and the new Camera API provided by Android 5. It turns out that you can actually obtain a lot higher quality images by using the DNG (digital negative) of the photo, instead of using the JPEG. By "HDRing" images yourself, you can actually outperform Google Camera's HDR+ functionality. Here's the JPEG, non HDR+ shot on a Nexus 5: http://i.imgur.com/So44muL.jpg http://i.imgur.com/So44muL.jpg Here's a similar image shot with HDR+: http://i.imgur.com/QFS3ZYd.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QFS3ZYd.jpg. As you can see, the dynamic range is increased greatly; however there's strange black spots in the shadows. Here's the same photo that I took in DNG format, edited in Lightroom: http://i.imgur.com/VRFsnf5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/VRFsnf5.jpg And here's my HDR photo, combined 5 DNG exposures inside Photoshop HDR Pro's functionality: http://i.imgur.com/RTT6ULz.jpg http://i.imgur.com/RTT6ULz.jpg
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Could Google's HDR+ also use DNG instead of jpeg and combine those automatically? That would make it much slower, though, so they'd have to take 3 at most.
  - ioedward 12y ago
    There's nothing technical that's stopping them from doing it. I expect third party apps to do something similar once Lollipop has a higher market share.
  - rcthompson 12y ago
    HDR+ does the processing immediately after taking the images. I would hope that the "HDR" step happens before any compression.
- magicalist 12y ago
  Is this handheld or mounted somehow? That last image looks great, but I thought HDR Pro needed it to be stable between shots.
  - ioedward 12y ago
fumar 12y ago
Every picture that is on my VSCO Grid was taken with the HDR+ Photo app. Please note: I have manipulated most of the images. After purchasing the N5 last year, I quickly learned that the Nexus 5 camera should always be set on HDR+. Even though the HDR process takes multiple images. Many of the pictures on my VSCO grid were taken in motion. They still have a focus and do not look blurry. http://fantasma.vsco.co/ http://fantasma.vsco.co/
TwoBit 12y ago
Why can't Canon and Nikon DSLRs provide some basic built-in HDR?
- ghaff 12y ago
  At least some modern DSLRs do. My Canon 5D Mark III supports hand-held HDR for example. It did take a while to find its way into higher-end models though. I assume the thinking was in part that the primary audience would be shooting on tripods and could just combine bracketed photos on the computer.
no_news_is 12y ago
The blogger wrote SynthCam for iOS first: https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoy/ https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoy/ Some similar technology, my impression is less "automatic" I think but more control. Haven't seen either in action so I'm not sure how it compares.

175 points by jmintz 12y ago

Does anyone know if this is the same technique that iOS uses for HDR (I know the basic principle of multiple exposures is the same). Are there different algorithms at play here?

lnanek2 12y ago

Not really interesting since other OEMs have had this for years. Good to see Google trying to keep up with their low cost alternative offerings, however.

fumar 12y ago
I have had HDR+ for over a year. This post is an overview of the technology and not a product launch.

bentcorner 12y ago

> However, bracketing is not actually necessary; one can use the same exposure time in every shot. By using a short exposure HDR+ avoids blowing out highlights, and by combining enough shots it reduces noise in the shadows. Does this mean they're using ISO bracketing instead of exposure bracketing?

sp332 12y ago
No, it takes multiple photos with the same settings and just averages out the noise in the shadows. That wouldn't keep the shadows from lacking detail though. You'd just get a smoother black!
- joosters 12y ago
  With a tripod to stabilise a camera, is it possible to get more detail through multiple shots? Just averaging the noise would smooth things out, but I wonder if there is any more intelligent processing that could improve things. More shots could (in theory) provide more data. A similar problem might be to try and improve the resolution of a single hand-held photo, shot in normal lighting conditions, by taking many pictures in rapid succession and then processing them. Each picture would be in a very slightly different position and so (again, in theory) might provide more data?
  - batbomb 12y ago
    No, you can only get cleaner data and maximize the pixels you have, not more effective pixels. The way you could get "more" data is to simulate, say, a 28mm equivalent lens with, say, multiple shots from an 135mm equivalent lens at different locations and stitch them together. Thats what they do when you see those 3GP+ shots you can zoom in on.
    - judk 12y ago
      You an absolutely gwt subpixel detail by averaging multiple photos taken with the same setting with almost exactly the same frame. I had software in 2004 that did this, converting short video to high res photo
- vilhelm_s 12y ago
  I think it should work for shadows also? Adding together 10 photos taken at 1/100s should give the same amount of light as one photo taken at 1/10s.
  - sp332 12y ago
    But if each photo is just black because it's underexposed, then adding them together only gives you black.
    - vilhelm_s 12y ago
      If the pixels were literally black that would be the case, but even on very underexposed pictures I don't think that ever happens. There's still photons on the sensor, it's just that they are swamped by the noise. Like, most DSLRs nowadays capture 12-bit values, which suggests you would have to underexpose by something on the order of 12EV to truncate the output to zero.
      - CHY872 12y ago
        Yes, and that is very, very possible. In any case, doing that would give you some relatively painful quantisation error, which is why the HDR approach works better.
- mvgoogler 12y ago
  You can effectively with increase the ISO in the dark areas without increasing the noise by averaging together multiple photos
- rcthompson 12y ago
  You're correct that it's taking multiple photos with the same settings, but the trick is that it can choose different settings than it would have for a single photo. So instead of a single medium-ISO shot that loses all shadow detail but minimizes noise, it could take multiple high-ISO shots to capture the shadow detail and then average them to minimize noise. So if you think of your dynamic range as being limited by the noise floor and the overexposure ceiling, this technique lowers the noise floor while keeping the ceiling right where it is, giving you a better effective dynamic range. ISO bracketing extends both the floor and ceiling by a much larger margin, of course, but its has issues that complicate its use in automated HDR shots, as described in the article.
- thomasahle 12y ago
  From a statistical point of view, you can certainly get less noise, while preserving details, by averaging multiple shots.

ot 12y ago

I posted this 2 hours ago [1] and both the posts are in home; the URLs differ just by a trailing question mark. How come the duplicate detector didn't trigger? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515417

joosters 12y ago
I think the duplicate detector looks at exact URL matches. Things like a trailing / or ? will let a new story go through.
- ot 12y ago
  The duplicate detector is usually quite more clever than just exact URL match. Why the downvote? EDIT: In fact, I just tried to re-submit an existing link by adding a question mark and it didn't go through.
  - peteretep 12y ago
    > The duplicate detector is usually quite more clever than > just exact URL match This doesn't match my experience, but then I usually editorialize my titles if I'm resubmitting something I know is here already.

thrownaway2424 12y ago

Meh. The camera software on Android is so bad that a default-setting picture from an iPhone looks as good or better than an HDR picture on Android. People have demonstrated the quality you can get from the sensor on a Nexus 5 if you capture raw and process offline[1]. I realize that these Google[x] researchers are probably not responsible for the mainline camera application, but the organizational details of Android management don't interest me. What would interest me would be an Android camera app that captures decent pictures, has usable auto-exposure and auto-focus algorithms, and doesn't take tens of seconds to start. 1: http://imgur.com/a/qQkkR#0 http://imgur.com/a/qQkkR#0

seunosewa 12y ago
I guess HDR+ is supposed to close that gap. Recent iPhones do something very similar all the time.
- crishoj 12y ago
  HDR is provided as an additional, alternative photo by the iOS camera app, if the scene is deemed to benefit from HDR processing.
shawabawa3 12y ago
All that guy seems to have done is manually set the ISO to 100 when taking a relatively dark picture with his phone on a tripod. If the camera app did that by default pretty much every photo would be blurry
personZ 12y ago
What a dismissive bunch of prattle. Meh. This is about algorithms to achieve better results with a given sensor. The Nexus 5, like the various Nexii that came before, has a poor image sensor -- it's a $300 smartphone, and LG wasn't going to put the best in it. HDR+ gives rather decent results in a wide range of settings despite that, and mine has managed a large number of fantastic shots. The Nexus 6, being twice the price, apparently has a fantastic sensor, and with that dramatically better base results, made even better with HDR+. Awesome. That's good.

forrestthewoods 12y ago

Yikes. That first picture looks awful. The HDR+ version looks like cheap CGI. Very plasticy. Some of the other pics are nice so that seems like a really weird one to lead with.

acomjean 12y ago
the "HDR" look can be overdone. If its done right you don't notice it. Since Photoshop added HDR photo merging its been a thing to capture the full dynamic range of a scene and make it look HDR. google "hdr photos" to see it overdone. https://www.google.com/search?q=hdr+photos https://www.google.com/search?q=hdr+photos
georgemcbay 12y ago
As someone who is a pretty serious hobbyist photographer, it is actually the second picture that looks very unnatural to me. The first one I can imagine existing in "real life" if there were a soft-box enclosed fill light out of the frame that was lighting up the lady's face (it can't be the sun since the tree isn't being lit the way it would if the light hitting her was point-light-esque), which would make the photo very "posed", but still possibly something that isn't highly post-processed. The second picture with the two ladies is much more distracting. The HDR version keeps a lot more detail than the non-HDR image, but at the expense of making everything look extremely flat and unnatural as your brain tries to process how the lighting is working (this may be unique to people who are used to worrying about light with regards to photography and a non-issue for normal folks, I can't say for sure) since the scene is clearly midday but the light across the entire scene makes it seem like the sun must be very low, which doesn't match with the contents of the scene. The HDR version of the second photo would look better if the exposure on the two ladies were bumped up close to the value that the background sky was bumped down, but doing that automatically would be an amazing visual detection feat that I wouldn't expect out of a phone camera. The lighting still wouldn't make sense but at least it wouldn't look so flat.
- driverdan 12y ago
  The interesting thing about the second HDR+ photo is that it seems to have true high dynamic range instead of the limited range created by different exposure settings. The subjects are actually darker than in the non-HDR picture. I'm not saying that it looks great, just that it's interesting from a technical perspective.

piyush_soni 12y ago

The blogspot fails to discuss why Samsung Galaxy S4/S5 HDR results are much better than my Nexus 5's. Also, there are limitations in leaving it on. Besides it being slow, it also has other restrictions like the inability to use Flash while in HDR+ mode. Howsoever good it may be by default, flash is sometimes important not only in dark, but also when facing sunlight while taking the shot.

magicalist 12y ago
> The blogspot fails to discuss why Samsung Galaxy S4/S5 HDR results are much better than my Nexus 5's Well, $300 price difference can buy you a lot. Now I get it. Comments like this one must be why Google felt pressured into making the next Nexus phone so much more expensive :P
- post_break 12y ago
  Galaxy S4 on stock rom photos look amazing. S4 on Google rom photos look like shit. It's in the software.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Indeed. The pre-Lollipop stock camera software was crap. Now it seems much better. Also Samsung's phones, even the S5, seem to be crap in the low-light/dark, too. They only excel in good to medium lighting.
- tracker1 12y ago
  Probably has a bit to do with it... I, for one was really happy with a great mid-range option that was by far the best value in each release... still on my N4, and not sure what I'm going to get as an upgrade.
  - magicalist 12y ago
    Yep, I'm with you. I'm more or less fine with the nexus 5's camera (usually if an event is important to capture with great quality, someone else has a better camera already there), so I'd much rather the nexuses stick to the price point than go up in quality for a disproportionately larger increase in price.

davb 12y ago

It's worth noting that with HDR+ enabled on the Nexus 5, you can no longer enable the flash or timer. And the processing time can feel frustratingly long. So leaving it enabled all the time doesn't work for everyone.

higherpurpose 12y ago
Not sure if there will be a change in the processing itself (bar filling up afterwards), but with Lollipop taking the picture (circle loading) should be a lot faster. They also say it's 0.3-1 sec, which isn't too bad. Normal photos used to take that long on high-end phones a couple of years ago.

Hopka 12y ago

The automatic alignment helps prevent ghosts from camera shake. But it would be interesting to see how they avoid ghosts from moving subjects like leaves in the wind if they are effectively exposing longer (by taking several photos in a row).

conradfr 12y ago

HDR in my Nexus 4 allowed me to take almost focus photos on live music events, until it started to crash the camera / reboot the phone, oh well.

FreakyT 12y ago

It's unfortunate that HDR mode in Google Camera remains unavailable for phones other than the Nexus 5 & 6 -- I have a Moto X, and the app is really only useful for photospheres, since normal photos tend look awful without HDR. Has Google discussed any technical reason for this restriction? Seems like lots of third party apps support HDR on a wider variety of phones...

adrusi 12y ago
Google's HDR+ is different from regular HDR, which can be acheived through burst exposure bracketing and computation alone. HDR+ also performs stabilization and other tricks to improve the result, and these operations might depend on additional hints from the hardware to acheive the desired accuracy. OEMs are free to implement such features in their own apps, specialized to their own hardware, and most in fact do.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Lens Blur is pretty great, too, and it's available for others. I think the restriction may be the fact that it has to 1) support OIS and 2) Google has to support that specific OIS. It would be nice if Google could do something similar for EIS phones, too, though.
marclevoy 12y ago
HDR+ is available only on Nexus 5 and Nexus 6, because only those devices currently fully support the Camera2 API, which is required for HDR+. This will gradually change, and more devices will start offering it.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Seems like two people come into this experience and walk away with completely different expectations. One group are people, for whom camera phones have been their only "camera" and they are amazed at how great the pictures are now. The other group are people who argue the details of a phase detection autofocus in the Canon DSLR and the 51 point field autofocus of the Nikon DSLR and can't believe that the handset makers are allowed to actually call these things 'cameras' in their advertisements. Very little input from the folks in the middle.

personZ 12y ago
The Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 both feature on sensor phase detection. Further it's worth nothing that the whole notion of "n points of autofocus" is a flaw of phase detection, not a feature -- contrast detection has millions of possible points of autofocus. And indeed, most high-end SLRs have contrast-detection modes (e.g. Canon LiveView) that brings benefits that often merit its regular use, and are mandated for things like video mode. I think you're presenting some sort of knowledge gap that is contrived. I used SLRs for years. I seldom use it anymore because the results of my smartphone, under many normal circumstances, are comparable. This is the case for many people. The camera you have and all of that, and they just keep getting better and better.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  The primary benefit of a larger sensor is shooting in sub-optimal conditions. If all you do is take photos in perfect daylight then a smartphone can likely do as well. SLRs shine when there is more lighting range (e.g. strong shadows and light) in the shot and in particular when it is a lower-light situation. A smartphone has to start doing HDR (which has inherent downsides, like its inability to record motion) a lot sooner than a lot of SLRs as the dynamic range is wider on the latter. You also lose physical controls and the ability to change lenses on a smartphone, which slows you down, and makes your shots look more samey. The viewfinder (either EVF or OVF) is also a huge benefit when shooting in either strong sunlight or extreme darkness (as the LCD's backlight can bleed light into your shot). As to contrast Vs. phase detection: Contrast is very accurate for non-moving targets and even some moving targets (thanks largely to software). Phase detection is still the king of the castle when it comes to high speed and erratic motion however, by far.

notlisted 12y ago

I have an Android phone, but what is described in the post sounds a lot like what the app Average Cam Pro [1] does on my iPad (multiple exposures, average them out) with the refinement that the ACP app also allows you to subtract a "dark image" to combat sensor-specific banding noise, plus the user can adjust exposure after the shot. It takes the cleanest pictures by far, beating out my Canon 7D at times, but for optimal results it does require the device to be extremely steady. I've been waiting for this app to appear on Android too, but it hasn't so far. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/average-camera-pro/id415577873?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/average-camera-pro/id4155778...

notlisted 12y ago
PS some sample shots created by another photographer: http://blog.instagram.com/post/66187514665/howishootwater http://blog.instagram.com/post/66187514665/howishootwater Edit: I just discovered Flickr is filled with em. Some good examples on what happens when the number of shots you select (anywhere from 4-64 I believe) is less than optimal if you scroll down: https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%23avgcampro https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%23avgcampro I use Avg Cam Pro in touristy situations with lots of movement. Take 64 shots and (moving) people simply fade away by the time you're done.

boxcardavin 12y ago

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.

xexers 12y ago
> 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?
- boxcardavin 12y ago
  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.
oscilloscope 12y ago
My understanding is that most flagship camera sensors are made by Sony, so there may be less diversity of hardware than there appears to be.
sigmar 12y ago
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)
- 12y ago

nakedrobot2 12y ago

Yeah, this is fine. But my Nexus 5 takes half of its pictures out of focus. It is really, really frustrating. Can't they solve that hard problem first? :-)

ioedward 12y ago

I've been messing around with the Google Camera app and the new Camera API provided by Android 5. It turns out that you can actually obtain a lot higher quality images by using the DNG (digital negative) of the photo, instead of using the JPEG. By "HDRing" images yourself, you can actually outperform Google Camera's HDR+ functionality. Here's the JPEG, non HDR+ shot on a Nexus 5: http://i.imgur.com/So44muL.jpg http://i.imgur.com/So44muL.jpg Here's a similar image shot with HDR+: http://i.imgur.com/QFS3ZYd.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QFS3ZYd.jpg. As you can see, the dynamic range is increased greatly; however there's strange black spots in the shadows. Here's the same photo that I took in DNG format, edited in Lightroom: http://i.imgur.com/VRFsnf5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/VRFsnf5.jpg And here's my HDR photo, combined 5 DNG exposures inside Photoshop HDR Pro's functionality: http://i.imgur.com/RTT6ULz.jpg http://i.imgur.com/RTT6ULz.jpg

higherpurpose 12y ago
Could Google's HDR+ also use DNG instead of jpeg and combine those automatically? That would make it much slower, though, so they'd have to take 3 at most.
- ioedward 12y ago
  There's nothing technical that's stopping them from doing it. I expect third party apps to do something similar once Lollipop has a higher market share.
- rcthompson 12y ago
  HDR+ does the processing immediately after taking the images. I would hope that the "HDR" step happens before any compression.
magicalist 12y ago
Is this handheld or mounted somehow? That last image looks great, but I thought HDR Pro needed it to be stable between shots.
- ioedward 12y ago

fumar 12y ago

Every picture that is on my VSCO Grid was taken with the HDR+ Photo app. Please note: I have manipulated most of the images. After purchasing the N5 last year, I quickly learned that the Nexus 5 camera should always be set on HDR+. Even though the HDR process takes multiple images. Many of the pictures on my VSCO grid were taken in motion. They still have a focus and do not look blurry. http://fantasma.vsco.co/ http://fantasma.vsco.co/

TwoBit 12y ago

Why can't Canon and Nikon DSLRs provide some basic built-in HDR?

ghaff 12y ago
At least some modern DSLRs do. My Canon 5D Mark III supports hand-held HDR for example. It did take a while to find its way into higher-end models though. I assume the thinking was in part that the primary audience would be shooting on tripods and could just combine bracketed photos on the computer.

no_news_is 12y ago

The blogger wrote SynthCam for iOS first: https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoy/ https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoy/ Some similar technology, my impression is less "automatic" I think but more control. Haven't seen either in action so I'm not sure how it compares.