Photo taken with the Nexus 6P and processed with the Google experimental app
Most modern smartphones are capable of taking really good photos, but one of the biggest drawbacks of their tiny cameras is their poor performance when it comes to low-light situations. Even the cheapest compact cameras on the market are way ahead of mobiles when it comes to shooting at night or with lots of shadows.
Given this fact, developer and researcher Florian Kainz decided to create a Android application that improves the capabilities of the cameras when taking night photos. The app is currently on experimental phase but the first results are really impressive.
Night photo taken with the Google Pixel and processed with the Google experimental app
With dedicated functions for modify focus, exposure and ISO sensitivity, more advanced users will be able to have more control over the final result, although these 3 functions are not the reason why the application processes night photos better.
The secret ingredient Kainz's app is the burst photography and a technique known as "bracketing”. After pressing the fire button, the app can take up to 64 photos in a row, which are subsequently fused by means of special algorithms to reduce noise to a minimum and eliminate any blurry area, so you will not have to have the tripod with you.
Night photo taken with the Google Pixel
In the tests carried out with the Google Pixel and the Nexus 6P, the results are observed to be quite good, although it is still not a perfect solution, since the application puts a lot of pressure on the hardware while it processes all the photos.
Unfortunately, the application is not publicly available yet, but we hope the developer will continue to optimize it so that it does not use so many operating system resources when processing photos.
You can see a more detailed explanation about how the new application works in the Google Research blog, or you can go directly to Photo album which brings together all the images created using this technique.