Getting good nighttime shots from a smartphone can be tricky, but Google is working on making it a whole lot easier.
Google Daydream software engineer Florian Kainz has developed a prototype Android app designed to capture night shots comparable to those taken with a DSLR camera and tripod for use with the Nexus 6P and Google Pixel.
Building on work done by Marc Levoy on the SeenInTheDarkapp, Kainz's app enables the user to take manual control of a few basic settings including exposure time, ISO and focus distance. Instead of taking one photo, the software takes a burst of up to 64 images in quick succession.
Raw frames are saved as DNG files so they can be downloaded to a computer for processing. Computing the mean average of all the images captured then cleans up picture grain resulting in a single clear shot.
Using the technique, Kainz was able to capture a series of stunning shots of the night sky over California.
While the app is a promising start, it's still very much at concept stage and way off from landing on Android phones. Read more: Google's PhotoScan now automatically removes glare when uploading old photos
"Trying to find out if phone cameras might be suitable for outdoor nighttime photography was a fun experiment, and clearly the result is yes, they are", said Kainz in a blog post.
"However, arriving at the final images required a lot of careful post-processing on a desktop computer, and the procedure is too cumbersome for all but the most dedicated cellphone photographers.
"However, with the right software, a phone should be able to process the images internally, and if steps such as painting layer masks by hand can be eliminated, it might be possible to do point-and-shoot photography in very low light conditions. Almost - the cellphone would still have to rest on the ground or be mounted on a tripod".
Earlier this week, Google updated the firm's PhotoScan app to let users turn off the anti-glare mode when taking photos of printed photos. The app was originally created with software to remove the glare associated with digitally scanning old glossy photos, those under glass in a frame, or photos trapped underneath plastic in a photo album. This used computer vision and image processing techniques to align several versions of the same picture, separating the glare from the image underneath. Now, this processing is done automatically with a single tap.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
