Guys,
I've started a multi-part article series discussing how the Note4's camera should be used (and how it compares to other high-end phones, cameraphones or even standalone cameras).
The first two parts in the series have already been published:
Part I: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3781966
Part II: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3782300
This series will be of particular interest to Snapdragon 805 users. Exynos users, at the moment, will find the series less interesting, as third-party apps, currently, can't access the (almost) non-processed image stream and they, consequently, can't export non-overprocessed images.
EDIT (2015/01/17): Part III is published on HDR: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3782850
EDIT (2015/01/24): a brand new writeup is here at XDA; you should start with it instead of the previous ones: http://forum.xda-developers.com/note-4/general/shooting-light-best-image-quality-note-4-t3012008
Great. Thank you
Skickat från min iPhone 6 Plus med Tapatalk
So which app we must use for normal photos ?
How to manually change shutter speed to 1/8s in Snap Camera HDR app? Thx
masterchif92 said:
So which app we must use for normal photos ?
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Basically, if you have an Exynos device, the stock Camera app unless
- you're absolutely sure you don't need shutter speeds under 1/30s (the restriction of many apps, incl. FV-5) and
- you do need the on-screen controls of that app.
Otherwise, the image quality will be the same so there's no advantage in using any third-party app for shooting, as opposed to the Snapdragon case.
If you have a Snapdragon device, you can get far-far better image quality out of your camera in both still and video shooting mode because of the lack of noise reduction and oversharpening. Then, using third-party apps like Snap camera HDR is preferable, assuming, of course, you don't need features like dual camera.
Menneisyys said:
Basically, if you have an Exynos device, the stock Camera app unless
- you're absolutely sure you don't need shutter speeds under 1/30s (the restriction of many apps, incl. FV-5) and
- you do need the on-screen controls of that app.
Otherwise, the image quality will be the same so there's no advantage in using any third-party app for shooting, as opposed to the Snapdragon case.
If you have a Snapdragon device, you can get far-far better image quality out of your camera in both still and video shooting mode because of the lack of noise reduction and oversharpening. Then, using third-party apps like Snap camera HDR is preferable, assuming, of course, you don't need features like dual camera.
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I have the s805 model....there are some settings with this camera to set? Or it will be good with the stock one ?
cornelito said:
How to manually change shutter speed to 1/8s in Snap Camera HDR app? Thx
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Click to collapse
You can't - the pre-Lollipop API doesn't let for directly setting the shutter speed. The device will automatically use 1/8s when there's little light.
You'll need to make sure you do enable the Photo > “Samsung Camera Mode” checkbox; otherwise, it will NOT be able to go under 1/15s, resulting in a complete loss of no less than 1EV. At least on Snapdragons; I couldn't test this on Exynos devices.
masterchif92 said:
I have the s805 model....there are some settings with this camera to set? Or it will be good with the stock one ?
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Then, if you really want to see in which cases third-party apps can produce significantly better images, you really want to compare my example shots of the stock app to those of, say, Snap camera HDR - see the crops in my article.
Basically, the stock Camera app applies far too much noise reduction and oversharpening, pretty much ruining fine detail and introducing ugly oversharpening halos. Photos produced by third-party apps, incl. Snap camera HDR, are far more natural.
Just writing my HDR article. The first two parts of the new article is already published: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3782850
Very nice articles. Thanks for doing them.
Is there any way to get rid of the cruddy yellowish look I get on low light photos on my phone? My wife's phone doesn't have this at all, and both of the Note 4s that I have had do. I've been very unimpressed with the low light abilities of this phone, so far. I'd love a solution that doesn't involve sending the phone in to maybe be fixed.
usmaak said:
Is there any way to get rid of the cruddy yellowish look I get on low light photos on my phone? My wife's phone doesn't have this at all, and both of the Note 4s that I have had do. I've been very unimpressed with the low light abilities of this phone, so far. I'd love a solution that doesn't involve sending the phone in to maybe be fixed.
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Have you tried setting "White balance" to "Incandescent" in Settings?
Muyfa666 said:
Very nice articles. Thanks for doing them.
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Thanks! Today, I've continued working on the HDR article.
Thanks for your work. I don't know if I understand correctly but the play store version is 6.2.0. Can this version take pictures under 1/15s? Or we still need a test version for this?
Thanks
zabumba said:
Thanks for your work. I don't know if I understand correctly but the play store version is 6.2.0. Can this version take pictures under 1/15s? Or we still need a test version for this?
Thanks
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Yup, 6.2.0 has just been released. I've tested it; it works flawlessly, at least on Snapdragon:
1/8s is supported
almost-RAW output is supported
Hi there. It's a nice report! However i do have some input
1. The stock camera does do 1/4s in rare occasions , happens for me when I do shots in not-well lit conditions and yet insufficient for camera to engage in night mode.
2. I have no idea if its just me, but night mode does not downsize my photos to 6mpix no matter how dark the scene is. It still stays at 5312x2998. N910G here. Details of photos on poorly lit scenes do not have significantly worse detail for me as compared to well lit ones and file size is in fact larger by a bit. (the room is still not too dark though).
IMO the stock camera does some sort of multi frame noise averaging technique (similar to canon's and sony's "Hand-held Twilight") to reduce noice.
andalism said:
Hi there. It's a nice report! However i do have some input
1. The stock camera does do 1/4s in rare occasions , happens for me when I do shots in not-well lit conditions and yet insufficient for camera to engage in night mode.
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Wow! Haven't ever seen such an image from my European Snap 805 (F) model. Could you post the original to, say, flickr, or, here as an attachment? (Of course, feel free to remove the location info first from the EXIF data.)
IMO the stock camera does some sort of multi frame noise averaging technique (similar to canon's and sony's "Hand-held Twilight") to reduce noice.
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It'd, then, exhibit a much higher probability of camera shake / stitching errors. The relative noiseless-ness is because of the very-very strong noise reduction. (Or, maybe, because of the "G" model you have is somewhat different from the European one? I wouldn't think so - after all, both are Snapdragon-based.)
Menneisyys said:
Have you tried setting "White balance" to "Incandescent" in Settings?
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I've tried all of the settings in the phone. Nothing makes the problem go away. Using the same settings as my wife's phone, and there's a huge difference in the quality of indoor pictures between the three phones.
It does take quite nice outdoor pictures.
usmaak said:
I've tried all of the settings in the phone. Nothing makes the problem go away. Using the same settings as my wife's phone, and there's a huge difference in the quality of indoor pictures between the three phones.
It does take quite nice outdoor pictures.
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Could you take low-light images with an LCD computer screen displaying white
- without(!) using f.lux or other tools to decrease the white balance (this is equal to about 7000K) and
- at both a very low brightness level (to "kick in" night mode) and a high one (to avoid night mode)
with both phones? Preferably in "auto" and "incandescent" WB modes on both phones.
Menneisyys said:
Wow! Haven't ever seen such an image from my European Snap 805 (F) model. Could you post the original to, say, flickr, or, here as an attachment? (Of course, feel free to remove the location info first from the EXIF data.)
It'd, then, exhibit a much higher probability of camera shake / stitching errors. The relative noiseless-ness is because of the very-very strong noise reduction. (Or, maybe, because of the "G" model you have is somewhat different from the European one? I wouldn't think so - after all, both are Snapdragon-based.)
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Unfortunately, I deleted those photos as it was blurry due to the unexpectedly low shutter speeds or that the picture sucked. I will post if I can reproduce that setting again.
As for the noise averaging mode...
1. It will not cause camera shake/stitching errors even if you hold still. Why? If you were to shake your phone violently, the software is smart enough to abandon image stacking altogether & the final image produced is the result of just 1 picture that has a little fine bit of extra noise reduction maybe.
2.Samsung's night mode is not well documented, unfortunately, despite them having this mode since Galaxy SIII.
However, the answer lies hidden in one of their support page for galaxy S4
http://www.samsung.com/us/support/howtoguide/N0000003/10094/120418/SGH-I337ZBMATT
"Night: Take photos by combining them to get a brighter, clearer photo in low light, without flash."
Now, you may think that perhaps this mode only applies to the S4's night mode, so I did a mini test.
(click on photos to zoom in)
(1)
Image taken with night mode
(2)
Image taken WITHOUT night mode under same conditions (This is done by tricking the camera to first take a photo in bright light,continue holding down the shutter button to engage burst shot, quickly direct phone to subject and wait for phone to adjust to the right exposure)
(3)
Same image from (2), but edited in Lightroom by dragging the luminance noise slider to like 40.(there is little or no chroma noise, so I did not touch that slider)
As you can see, despite their photos taken under the same conditions, (1) is the best as it as less noisy compared to (2) and sharper than (3).If Samsung really did engage in strong noise reduction at night mode, much fine detail would be lost and the photo will look like an oil painting when you pixel-peep. Thus , night mode photos you take will look more like (3) than (1), when (1) is the actual night mode photo in reality.
3. Another good guess that Night mode is actually a multi frame mode is that, all night mode's photos have their EXIF data eroded.
(Fun fact, dpreview says iphone 6+ does this too)
"the built-in, stock Camera app may have too strong noise reduction and oversharpening"
IMO, Im sorry but I disagree, too strong noise reduction would mean that photos from the note 4 would be too smooth and would lack any fine detail at all, which from my observations isnt true. Samsung excels in that area. Also, oversharpening is also not the case, oversharpened photos often result in false detail and look contrasty/frosty which is again, not the case to me.
EDIT: oversharpening and noise reduction could be a matter of taste so it could be true for some
Hello there, I do not like the stock camera app so I did some research on apps that could replace it. But I could not find a single app that supports long exposure(up to 10 seconds, all of them has 1/10 of a second), RAW support and manual ISO. Has anyone found any good camera app that has all these things?
A few options exist depending on your device situation.
Try CAMERA FV-5 or Open Camera.
If you have root and a Exynos, there is a mod in one of the sub-forums of Note 8, and an associated application, that allows you to change the exposure time.
I do wish Samsung gave us more camera control under the 'Pro' settings. This with a proper stabilization grip and quality mobile lenses would allow photography enthusiasts to shine.
Hi everyone,
I thought I'd post this as since I've had my S5 (within last 6 months) I have been quite disappointed by the quality of the camera images, particularly in mid to low light. Having had a Xperia Z2, LG G3 and G2 I had seen that the S5 was meant to have by far the best camera out of its peers. Unfortunately, while not as anywhere near as bad as the Z2, the S5 is significantly worse than both the G3 and the G2, mainly due to the awful noise reduction implemented by the Samsung firmware. The Z2 also had this problem in spades, and the only way to remove it was to unlock the bootloader and erase the DRM keys.
I though that this was the same on the S5 (or even completely impossible), but have recently discovered a camera app called 'Snap Camera HDR' in the Play Store. There is a free version and a paid version.
The app is the most fully featured camera app I have seen (I have used Open Camera, Camera FV-5 and many others), with tonnes of options and manual controls.
They key thing though is that it allows you to disable the built in noise-reduction: Go through the menu and select, then deselect the option 'Denoise'
There are also options to select 'Samsung Camera Mode' which enables real-time HDR (you have to select 'Use OpenGLES 2.0' under 'Other'), and you can also increase image sharpness and
change compression levels.
I've done some real world tests and I think the difference is huge. I'd rather have a little bit of noise and keep a sharper, more detailed, more natural image.
Here are some comparisons (I've cropped them down so you can see the detail more easily):
(P.S.: I have absolutely nothing to do with the Snap Camera developers)
Hm, nice find. I'm not sure if I'd need it thought since I'm on the Note 7's camera app. Any idea if the Note's camera app has this problem or not? I'm no picture taking guy so i can't tell by myself. I've barely used my camera during the past 3 years.
PS: The S5's camera was never good in low light, its strength was only during the day
great, great discovery I was propio looking for a good room for lineage 15.1 unofficial, thanks
This also seems to work without root (I have root but the app has never asked for SU permissions). I'm not sure why other camera apps don't have this feature.
Camera FV-5 has several image adjustments (such as saturation and sharpness) but they don't actually seem to work.
I have an AT&T S5 so I'm unfortunately stuck with stock based ROMs. Does anyone know if this heavy handed noise reduction exists on AOSP or other ROMs?
This might actually make me like my S5. I'm looking forward to getting out and taking some decent shots with the phone now!
Here is an example of the highly customisable UI
Also the built in camera of LineageOS 14.1 has the option to disable camera noise reduction.
With this camera you also have the possibility to take pictures in RAW mode without compression and you can also use HDR mode (but without flashlight) :good:
regards
j1gga84 said:
Also the built in camera of LineageOS 14.1 has the option to disable camera noise reduction.
With this camera you also have the possibility to take pictures in RAW mode without compression and you can also use HDR mode (but without flashlight) :good:
regards
Click to expand...
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RAW? I didn't think Camera2 was supported on the S5 hardware..? Is the Lineage camera available as an apk?
Here: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/linea...a-2-0-002-776519c100-30-android-apk-download/
I don't know if it is RAW but pictures in best quality mode have a very big filesize.
Regards
Sent from my SM-G900F with Tapatalk
j1gga84 said:
Here: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/linea...a-2-0-002-776519c100-30-android-apk-download/
I don't know if it is RAW but pictures in best quality mode have a very big filesize.
Regards
Sent from my SM-G900F with Tapatalk
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Probably not RAW then. You'd know if it was RAW as you'd have to use a special image viewer and process the photographs afterwards.
I can't install it to test unfortunately as I'm limited to Lollipop.
Resurrecting this.
Tried the app in a hope it would allow me to disable the noise filter on my Galaxy Note 7 LDU. It does. But it also restricts the shutter speed to 1/10th of a second. Unacceptable having up to 10 seconds capability. Overall the app has a hard to use and confusing UI. Users complain that there is no support at all to ask devs for help or features. Ditched it.
halx said:
Resurrecting this.
Tried the app in a hope it would allow me to disable the noise filter on my Galaxy Note 7 LDU. It does. But it also restricts the shutter speed to 1/10th of a second. Unacceptable having up to 10 seconds capability. Overall the app has a hard to use and confusing UI. Users complain that there is no support at all to ask devs for help or features. Ditched it.
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Click to collapse
Fair enough. I still use it and as far as I'm concerned it's the best camera app for Android. I get what you mean about the UI, but what I like is that you can customise it quite a lot.
You can use the 'gesture' / 'pie' controls, or (as I do) chose to add all the required switches and adjustments as static buttons around the camera edge.
Hi
Been using a V50, that is identical to the V40 camera wise, for a couple of days comig from a V30.
Regarding RAW capture with the stock camera the output seems much worse than the V30 - the DNG files have vignetting and are very desaturated, noting like the output on the V30 and previous LG phones that had this corrected.
Using a 3rd party camera app, the DNG files don't have vignetting but are still very desaturated.
I'm on android 10. Does the V40 also has these issues, having the same camera hardware?
Thanks
Hi!
The V40 does actually have the same problems. Well, DNG files as RAW files by nature contain the unprocessed information what the camera saw when it took the picture, including all optical imperfections and sensor noise. I have a SONY a6000 mirrorless camera at home, and it also has these "problems". It is how it is... Instead of the camera software doing the hard work, it leaves it to you to decide what do you wanna do with the image. Using Lightroom Mobile, you can fix both vignetting and barrel distortion by enabling Lens Profile Corrections. There is also an Auto setting for the colours too. (and a built in capture mode with DNG support which automatically applies lens prifile corrections if I remember correctly) But if you do not want to go through all these to get a decent picture, why all the fuss, just use JPEG. The stock cam app can do awesome images with its built in post processing algorithm, I barely use RAW mode, unless I wanna do something really specific and go hard on editing.