Synthetic Exposure - And suggestion of adding "experimental features" section
Camera app for Android.
Brought to you by:
mark-h
Menu
▾
▴
First off I would like to thank you for your work on a camera that is open source and that works generally well across the Android platform. I have noticed on and off that the camera UI has improved over the years, even though I myself do not use it all that much.
I think actually I'd like to take a brief detour here to explain my use case for Open Camera, as I think I'm not alone in the section of people who have the app on their phones. I was excited to see that there was an open source camera app for android, which helped unlock more features of my camera sensor when compared to the closed-source camera app.
However, since I don't use my smartphone camera anywhere close to professionally, I was more interested in having good-enough quality images from my daily driver camera. Upon some quick indoor and outdoor tests, I found that the amount of noise in Open Camera images (even on NR and HDR modes) was significantly higher than the stock app on my Fairphone 3+. I do not place blame here! Objectively speaking, I know that the stock camera has some quick and dirty methods of doing this, which leave high-frequency artifacts if I zoom in. However, they're honestly good enough for my purposes and worth not spending extra time doing photo editing. So, then, since there does not seem to be setting in the NR and HDR modes for extra image processing, Open Camera is no longer a candidate for a daily driver camera app.
So I looked into the features that the camera does allow, which my camera app does not. Key among these are setting a shutter speed - or, perhaps, to take a picture if the quick and dirty stock processing botches the job. Both are ways of extending the closed off functionality of the stock camera app. Such a setting, given long shutter speeds, would be great for, eg, quick and dirty astrophotography. However, as Mark has pointed out himself in his posts, it seems to be a limitation of the Camera 2 API.
This finally brings me to my feature request. I recently came across the free FV-5 Lite camera app, which proclaims to have a "synthetic exposure." However, having tried it, it's clear this is an experimental feature and I often got interesting a glitchy colored mess (and some crashes). I think Open Camera would greatly benefit from having this experimental feature! I also believe that as there doesn't seem to be a quick and dirty way of making astrophotography using other Android apps at the moment.
Therefore my thought is, if an interested developer sees that work is being done on this front, they'd be willing to contribute their time to it as well, since these options don't exist, and I personally like having extra options I did not have before. This feature, and perhaps others, may benefit from being in an "experimental features" section with an entirely different expectation on stability, and which are open to collaboration. (For instance I would not mind having another experimental feature for additionally filtering image outputs :))
So this is just a thought on what could be with Open Camera. I think I've said enough, and completely understand that what I mention may be a tall order for one developer, and frankly, a bit naive. Thanks again for your efforts!
Your fairphone has a quad pixel sensor, android 12 will bring quad sensor support for 3rd party apps. Lets hope opencamera will jump on that train.
Quad bayer sensors operate totally different, and would need support for pixel binning and low/high exposure pixels for HDR.
The 48mp sensor on your phone can be essentially split into two cameras that take two different exposures at the same time. This makes HDR the best way to shoot always if there is enough light. When there is not enough light, pixels are binned and you get 12MP images with larger pixels so less noise. Its essentially never intended to be used as a 48MP sensor. As thats impossible optically.
That synthetic exposure sounds like how night mode is done on most phones. And seems to be quite standard on every phone nowadays.
Yes, I imagine... for the moment the only other app I can use that seems to take advantage of the greater sensor
I hope so too. I would say that before I upgraded my camera sensor (because there is an option to do so) I also noticed a difference in quality between the two cameras, with the stock being unfortunately better. For the time being, only the unofficial GCam ports seem to give better IQ than my stock camera app, although they come with their own issues. I also understand that there are some Magisk modules that can help with this...
Well it doesn't seem to be the standard on my phone, and I'd hazard to guess that for those with phones older than a few years, companies have not bothered to give their customers these features. However, the point behind synthetic exposure, as far as I see it, is to again give the user more control and flexibility than in virtually all camera apps. Here one can manually extend the shutter speed to say, 60 seconds. And it's in this manual control where the potential application to astrophotography becomes apparent. It's a capability that I think many phones have, that can be unlocked through software. This is why I suggested it as an experimental feature.