Google researcher takes good night photos with Pixel via dedicated camera app

Google researcher Florian Kainz turns out to be able to take relatively good night photos with the Nexus 6P and the Pixel smartphones with the experimental camera app SeeInTheDark and a self-written camera app that lets you manually set the focus distance, for example.

To see what’s possible in shooting under challenging lighting conditions, Kainz used the experimental and non-consumer SeeInTheDark app from Marc Levoy, a computer science professor and researcher at Google. The Nexus 6P and the Pixel already have the HDR + functionality, which enables improved recordings in low light. The SeeInTheDark app makes it possible to shoot in even less light.

This app works by lowering the resolution to about 1 megapixel. The app merges several consecutive shots on the assumption that it is a static scene, with the algorithm limiting noise and hot pixels as much as possible by, among other things, mapping the properties of the previous shot. The app also automatically applies all kinds of corrections in the field of black value, white balance, color and sharpness.

In addition to this app, Kainz has used a self-written simple camera app that lets the user manually set values ​​such as shutter speed, ISO and focus distance, something that is not possible with Google’s standard camera app. Setting the focus distance is especially important, because the two autofocus mechanisms used in smartphones, contrast detection and phase detection, usually fail in the dark and cannot focus on a star in the night sky. Using this app, Kainz could simply set the focus distance to infinity.

When taking a photo in the dark with this app, the app will wait a few seconds after pressing the shutter button, then take up to 64 shots. These shots are saved individually in the RAW format as dng files, after which regular post-processing for night shots must be used, in the form of using black frames and stacking the photos to minimize noise, for example. and detail as much as possible.

Because the Nexus 6P and the Pixel support shutter speeds of up to 4 and 2 seconds respectively, Kainz took 64 shots from a tripod during the night shots with the Google Pixel smartphone, each with a shutter speed of 2 seconds. Even though Kainz mainly builds on the possibilities of HDR+ with this method by using more shots, and the quality cannot yet match the night photos that can be made with DSLRs, it does show that the sensors in smartphones in combination with smart phones apps and algorithms and with good post-processing are able to produce relatively good night photos.