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

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and-high-dynamic-range.html?

by jmintz • 12 years ago

175 112 12 years ago

googleresearch.blogspot.com

joosters3• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

fumar2• 12 years ago

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

bentcorner• 12 years 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?

sp3322• 12 years 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!

joosters3• 12 years 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?

vilhelm_s2• 12 years 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.

mvgoogler• 12 years ago

You can effectively with increase the ISO in the dark areas without increasing the noise by averaging together multiple photos

rcthompson3• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

From a statistical point of view, you can certainly get less noise, while preserving details, by averaging multiple shots.

ot2• 12 years 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

joosters3• 12 years ago

I think the duplicate detector looks at exact URL matches. Things like a trailing / or ? will let a new story go through.

ot2• 12 years 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.

thrownaway24245• 12 years 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

seunosewa• 12 years ago

I guess HDR+ is supposed to close that gap. Recent iPhones do something very similar all the time.

crishoj• 12 years 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• 12 years 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

personZ8• 12 years 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.

thrownaway24245• 12 years ago

The Nexus 5 has a really excellent Sony camera module with 1.4 micron pixels. It's comparable to bordering on identical to the sensor in the iPhone 5s, which produces far better images.

adrusi3• 12 years ago

I'm hoping the 6's optical image stabilization will help make HDR+ even better.

heliodor• 12 years ago

I have a Nexus 5 at the moment and while the pictures are not amazing, what boggles my mind is that the camera sensor and the phone's screen don't have the same aspect ratio!

personZ8• 12 years ago

Worth noting that this is the case across most compact camera devices. Most smartphone camera sensors are 4:3 (e.g. iPhones), while the screen on the device is often 16:9 or 16:10. In contrast full-sized SLRs are usually 3:2 owing to the 35mm legacy.

thrownaway24245• 12 years ago

You can just crop it if it bothers you. The lenses throw a circle of light, so the farther the aspect ratio gets from 1:1 the more lens you are wasting. What surprised me was the new Blackberry has a square (1:1) screen but doesn't capitalize on it with a 1:1 camera sensor. Probably they couldn't source a decent sensor with that aspect ratio.

simias• 12 years ago

It usually makes more sense for sensors to be closer to a circular shape (i.e. square aspect ratio) because the image projected by the lens is going to be circular anyway. So if you have a very wide sensor you lose a lot of light on the top and bottom in order to expose the sides correctly.

rcthompson3• 12 years ago

How is it fair to compare the default settings, which are presumably optimized for handheld shots, to a half-second exposure from a tripod? Of course a picture with a stable half-second exposure will be far, far better than anything the defaults come up with. But it's effectively complaining that a tripod gives better results than handheld shots.

forrestthewoods• 12 years 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.

acomjean2• 12 years 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

georgemcbay2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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_soni3• 12 years 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.

magicalist3• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Galaxy S4 on stock rom photos look amazing. S4 on Google rom photos look like shit. It's in the software.

tracker1• 12 years 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.

davb• 12 years 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.

higherpurpose5• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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...

adrusi3• 12 years 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.

higherpurpose5• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

personZ8• 12 years 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.

Someone12342• 12 years 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.

potatolicious4• 12 years ago

"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."

This demographic can be safely ignored. The people who get the most up in arms about the "purity" of photographic tools are also the ones producing the least work. They're the ones who buy $10,000 worth of bodies and lenses but can never go beyond photos of their local park, or sharpness test charts in their basement. This group isn't good for much more than vociferous, highly-technical religion wars on the Internet. We'll start caring what they think when they start producing work.

In the mean time there are many passionate photographers out there producing great work, with a variety tools, cheap to expensive, simple to complex.

This guy with a crappy old iPhone 3GS has been taking better photos (and publishing them) than the bulk of people with 5D3's and 70-200 f/2.8's: http://boingboing.net/2009/10/29/photographer-takes-p-1.html

piyush_soni3• 12 years ago

Really, I don't see anything good in his photos. All these post-processed photos lack a lot of detail, even from a smartphone standards.

ghaff2• 12 years ago

Mostly agree. Under the right conditions/use cases (and in the right hands of course) phones can take pretty nice photos--though I can't say most of those in the link you provided do a whole lot for me. For the majority of users, today's cameraphones are better than whatever mass market point and shoot they were using going back to the Instamatic days. With the exception of a few niches, there's little reason to buy a dedicated camera these days unless you're going interchangeable lens and learn how to use it--and make the effort to bring it with you.

And there is a generally annoying group of online gearheads who spend a lot more time obsessing about camera specs than they do going out and taking photos.

nzealand• 12 years ago

Looks like he has upgraded to a 5s...

http://sasurau.squarespace.com/about/

It is a pity, there is something magical about the lomography look of a beat up 3Gs.

mnem• 12 years ago

Interestingly, he seems to use multiple cameras. For example, the alley shot as taken with a Lumix GF1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sasurau/3944365957/ - personally I find the feeling of the Lumix one far more emotive in this case.

I totally agree that it's not the price of your equipment though, it's what you do with it - most of the time. Photography has a great many reasons to occur and there are aspects which most definitely benefit from higher quality equipment. For example, nature macro photography (some beautiful examples from the same photographer above: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sasurau/sets/72157631002090680... ). I guess the more you are looking for "The Decisive Moment", the less raw quality matters. Although, again, something like studio photography is likely to be a balance of quality and decisive moments.

Ultimately, unless you're getting most of your income from the photographs, just make sure however you're doing it you're having fun and enjoying it :)

jemfinch2• 12 years ago

Bullshit.

Features like megapixels, 51 phase detection AF points, face detection metering and other goodies all allow real people to capture better, more memorable images than cell phone cameras.

1. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/8594571664/in/set-721... could not have been captured with a cell phone camera. I was holding my DSLR in my offhand and pushing him on the swing with my other hand.

2. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/9326415006/in/set-721... could not have been captured with a cell phone either. My wife was holding him and he was peeking out over her shoulder then switching to the other shoulder immediately when I brought the camera up. With a cell phone's shutter lag, he'd have been on the other side before the picture was taken.

3. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/8582319362/in/set-721... no cell phone camera in the world could have captured this in such low light so successfully.

4. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemfinch/9012492563/in/set-721... there are a hundred fleeting moments a day like this, and no cell phone in the world is fast enough to capture them.

It's easy to take a picture of an abandoned alley or cats lying on blacktop with a cellphone camera. Try doing that with a newborn's first smile, or a mischievous preschooler's momentary smirk.

acomjean2• 12 years ago

As someone who has both a DSLR and a smartphone. The smartphones are pretty good and "the camera you have with you" is always better than the camera at your home. Plus the wifi connectivity and abitliy to push photos real time is really nice.

The DSLR pictures when I do get around to loading and editing are better. It just takes more time.

As for focus points, I have this wierd camera the canon 70d. Every "pixel" on the camera can phase detect. But I don't think the camera is making full use of the sensor. I wish I could write software for it.

An overview of camera focusing: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-eos-70d/3

gchokov• 12 years ago

Use some Magic Lantern build of the firmware in this case.

hnriot• 12 years ago

why would there be? they are content already. I think it's dangerous to bucket people in this way, i know plenty of people with $30k+ gear and use their iPhone most of the time. Those two categories you have are not mutually exclusive.

Autofocus in the iPhone is much faster than the majority of Canon (or Nikon) DSLRs, regardless of the number of focus points. Partly because it's a lot easier to focus a lens that has nearly infinite depth of field! Most photographers are also gear heads, which is another dangerous thing to say, just like saying (quite correctly) that most serial killers are keen photographers. which true, it doesn't necessarily add much to the conversation.

why we have this obsession with resolution is largely because of computers. In the "old days" I would make contact sheets and then prints, mainly 8x8" (from a Hasselblad, pre instagram-square-hipness), and they would (and do) look stunning, to use object oriented speak, a fiber print IS-A photograph, where as a digital print HAS-A photograph on the paper surface. They are different, when silver crystals are in (vs on) the medium it becomes something altogether different. In these modern enlightened times we put a photo up on a retina big screen and stare at it from 2' and of course we're going to see imperfections, this creates a cycle of obsession with sharpness. But of course it doesn't matter, would a painting be any better if it was created with a smaller brush? This is all a very classical philosophical debate, it's the medium is the message all over again.

From my perspective this work is impressive, does it make better photos? No, but it does make the photos more representative of what the taker was looking at. Over time we are subtracting the technology component from photography, eventually we will have the ability to record easily any visual experience we have. For me this comes from having enough experience in using equipment and eeking the most out of it, but in contrast my daughter is frustrated by cameras (both her Canon DSLR and her iPhone), she will see something like the solar eclipse and wonder why simply pointing the camera at it won't bring about a photo that looks the same as the one that the Mt Hamilton took on their 36" reflecting telescope, or why a photo at her friends candle lit birthday party didn't look how she remembered it. Her generation will grow up with sufficiently advanced technology that a lot of the inconvenience of photography's technical side has been automated. Just as I grew up in a time when emulsions were capable of exposing in a few hundredth's of a second rather than minutes.

notlisted2• 12 years 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/id4155778...

notlisted2• 12 years ago

PS some sample shots created by another photographer: 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

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.

boxcardavin3• 12 years 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• 12 years 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?

boxcardavin3• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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)

boxcardavin3• 12 years ago

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.

nakedrobot2• 12 years 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? :-)

ioedward4• 12 years 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

Here's a similar image shot with HDR+: 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

And here's my HDR photo, combined 5 DNG exposures inside Photoshop HDR Pro's functionality:

http://i.imgur.com/RTT6ULz.jpg

higherpurpose5• 12 years 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.

ioedward4• 12 years 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.

rcthompson3• 12 years ago

HDR+ does the processing immediately after taking the images. I would hope that the "HDR" step happens before any compression.

magicalist3• 12 years ago

Is this handheld or mounted somehow? That last image looks great, but I thought HDR Pro needed it to be stable between shots.

ioedward4• 12 years ago

All hand held, shot from 1/35th of a second to 1/1000th of a second. HDR Pro does some basic auto aligning and ghost removal, AFAIK.

tambourine_man• 12 years ago

I didn't know it was possible to save real DNGs on Android (as opposed to JPEGs inside DNGs). I've been waiting for years to be able to shoot RAW on a phone camera.

Do you mind posting a DNG file of this photo? I might switch from iOS if Apple doesn't provide this functionality soon enough.

ioedward4• 12 years ago

Sure! I would _not_ advise getting the Nexus 5. As noted below in other comments, the image quality and autofocusing speed has much to be desired. The Camera2 API that supports DNG is only available on Android 5.0 phones.

http://edward.io/raw_nexus_5.zip

marak830• 12 years ago

Wow thats quite interesting, i think ill try that this weekend, see if i can setup an automated solution too if i can get it working smoothly.

blurri• 12 years ago

Yes, raw files have quite the dynamic range and the current generation of raw processors can really pull a lot of detail out of the shadows and highlights.

The strange black dots you find in the shadows are noise. Simple no data to produce any results.

The key part to in camera HDR is, automatic. No manually fixing your camera to tripod, copying them onto computer and the loading into software capable of HDR and finally manually processing them.

fumar2• 12 years 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/

TwoBit• 12 years ago

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

ghaff2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

The blogger wrote SynthCam for iOS first: 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.

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

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