
Live HDR+ and Dual Exposure Controls on Pixel 4 and 4a - theafh
https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/08/live-hdr-and-dual-exposure-controls-on.html
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renewiltord
Modern smartphone HDR is so insane. I tried replicating it with a tripod and
HDR software but I had to apply so much compensation and the smartphones are
just point and click. Great stuff.

I am very impressed with the photo AI work people have been doing. Very
concrete feature for people to use.

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dharma1
"HDR images can be challenging to edit, because some decisions are effectively
baked into the final JPG. To maximize latitude for editing, it’s possible to
save RAW images for each shot (an option in the app). However, this process
takes the photographer out of the moment and requires expertise with RAW
editing tools as well as additional storage."

I wish at least 12bit (ideally 14 or 16bit) compressed image formats (like
HEIF) took over jpeg on cameras. It's great to have raw as an option, but can
we please just get rid of 8bit jpg as the default

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dstaley
The iPhone defaults to HEIF, and all Android devices running at least Android
9 have the option to save images in HEIF. That being said, I have no idea if
you get any of the benefits of a higher bit-depth.

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dharma1
I don't think the iPhone HEIF is 14/16bit. And I'm not sure a single shot on a
sensor that small has that much dynamic range anyway, so you'd still want HDR+
style multiple exposures. Just wish the end result wasn't stored 8bit so you
have more freedom to change the exposure/shadows/highlights after the shot is
saved

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dstaley
Yeah I think the big issue here is that HEIF is typically used to get JPEG
level quality at a lower file size. Increased bit depth would negate those
file savings, and I bet Apple/Google would just prefer you use RAW.

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dharma1
14bit HEIF is still smaller than 8bit jpg. And lossless raw is easily 5-10x
the size

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wiremaus
Good concept. Well implemented HDR is a great way to get phones to reproduce
more "true to life" images.

Interestingly, the final rendering in the Pixel 3 looks better to my eyes.

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mnholt
Yeah I agree. Nearly all HDR photography is uninteresting to me because I’m
attracted to contrasting light in the frame. Having everything in focus looks
bland to me.

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pier25
Yes most HDR is meh or just plain ugly.

But it's definitely a great tool. See this HDR photo I made years ago:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/petit_pierrot/3806527134/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/petit_pierrot/3806527134/)

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metalliqaz
That is a great photo. To me HDR on the phone is useful for capturing whatever
I happen to be doing in a way that is more like how I perceive it in person.

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metalliqaz
I really wish they added that feature to my Pixel 3 XL. The GPU isn't all that
less capable in the older phone.

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viraptor
And to generic android as well. I get that they want differentiation, but
there's serious lack of other implementation in play store. For actually good
hdr it looks like there's pixel or nothing. I'd be happy to pay quite a bit to
get their new HDR+ on a OnePlus for example.

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metalliqaz
the pixel phones have specialized DSPs (pixel visual core, pixel neural core)
that probably can't be counted on in generic android

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viraptor
That's just a speed improvement though, right? You could do the same in
software if you sacrifice the live preview.

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metalliqaz
true, but why spend the money on man-hours to implement it?

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formerly_proven
Real cameras have been doing "HDR" for ages, since their sensors have 12-14
stops of dynamic range, but JPEG only has 8. And it works incredibly well,
just like the color science Nikon and Canon have figured out, a thing
smartphones are lacking as well. With a lot of light smartphones can take very
good pictures as far as resolution is concerned, but color and dynamic range
rendering are consistently poor. For me it's rare that I need to change the
colors my Nikon camera produces, and if I do, it's usually just a slight tweak
(a few hundred Kelvin of red-blue shift or maybe a tiny magenta-green
adjustment), while the colors in practically every iPhone shot are lacking and
require effort to get to a satisfactory level.

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_coveredInBees
That doesn't sound right at all. DSLRs like my Canon do indeed have a larger
dynamic range but they are still nowhere near being close to the dynamic range
the human eye can capture. Moreover, the native image rendered by DSLRs still
has a linear transfer function that still suffers all the issues that HDR
tries to solve. This is why auto-bracket exposure is a thing on all DSLRs so
you can try to capture high dynamic range scenes in multiple photographs that
you then need to combine offline in separate software.

And the sad fact of the matter is that computational photography on phones,
especially when it comes to HDR, makes it absolutely no hassle to obtain
exceptionally good HDR captures 80+% of the time. I've literally taken back to
back comparison shots of my son on a bright sunny day on a boat when on the
ocean and my smartphone picture (S9+) was far superior to my DSLR image, even
after trying to capture details from highlights/shadows in postprocessing.

Phones these days can perform a lot of neat tricks to reduce noise, capture
large dynamic ranges and compress it all into a pleasing HDR image in
fractions of seconds that lets you achieve great HDR images even with moving
subjects (something notoriously hard with a DSLR).

Not that DSLRs don't have a whole host of other advantages when it comes to
image quality and depth-of-focus, etc, but HDR is not one of them. It is
almost the sole reason why I've been reaching for my DSLR less and less when
on vacation.

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tgsovlerkhgsel
The DSLR captures pictures and then you post-process them. The phone can
dynamically adjust _what_ it captures, and potentially capture way more data
(quickly slurping a gigabyte of image data into RAM) than a DSLR can push to
persistent storage in an acceptable timeframe.

Together with the phone always being in my pocket, while a DSLR is bulky, I've
gone completely with the phone. I just wish the computational photography
developers and the camera engineers would come together and make something
that uses the far superior hardware of the DSLR combined with the far superior
software originally designed for phones.

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_coveredInBees
Yeah, it's a similar situation for me. Though large prints from phone
photographs are pretty poor in comparison to the image quality from even my
entry-level Rebel Xsi from 2007. Sports photography with a good lens is still
something that a camera phone will never rival, but in most day to day
situations, it has surpassed DSLRs purely out of convenience and being good
enough (and in the case of things like HDR/low-light photography, better than
a DSLR in many situations).

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randyrand
This is really cool. Nit: I find it really unintuitive that 100% is on the
_left_ of the slider. "Volume" knobs and sliders are almost always the other
way around in my experience.

