A few hours ago a night photograph was shared in which no flash was needed. The comparison between the two photos taken by the Google Pixel 3 with that flashless mode called 'Night Sight' reveals the enormous step forward by Google in software photography. And it is that you only need a single lens for it ... Crazy.
Google has made it clear that its intentions are more to improve the software of its phones and leave used hardware in the background. That is, while the rest of the manufacturers insist on I do not know how many lenses and RAMs with more GB in their phones, the big G works in the sum of Artificial Intelligence + Software + Hardware. And the Google Pixel 3 photography is the result.
A photo is worth a thousand megapixels
That photo is the one published a few hours ago by Sebastiaan de With, or what we can say as if it had been done by Google. It is the perfect photo to show everything said so far and since Google is almost light years above the competition; just now when we have seen Samsung with its 4 cameras in the new A9. The same happens with the spectacular group selfies of the Pixel 3.
We are facing a comparison in which a photo taken with the new "Night Sight" mode of the Pixel 3 and another without that mode activated. The differences are more than visible for a photograph that has not used the flash for it. It uses algorithms and software so that it "intelligently" takes that magnificent photo that it leaves behind the drag of the competition; do not miss the appointment and install the port of the Google camera app on your mobile.
It can be said that this photograph could be taken by any other high-end phone with a lens that obtains more data on the brightness of the moment, but the magic of the Pixel 3 is that there is no noise. I mean, what has completely reduced it, when it should be taken for granted that raising the ISO parameters, at the same time increases the amount of noise. What we have is a very clean and perfect image to share on social networks.
The magic behind Night Sight Pixel 3
To understand the magic behind Night Sight we have to go to an article that published by Google on April 25, 2017. One called «Experimental night photography with Nexus and Pixel ». It cites a photo that was taken with a DSLR of the night sky of the Golden Gate in San Francisco, United States.
Here you can see the photos in their real size:
By taking it to the Google research team, which handles the computational photography and develop algorithms To "help" take pictures on mobile devices, one of the members encouraged Florian Kainz, a Google software engineer, to take it again, but this time with a mobile camera.
In this article he recounts part of the research process, starting from a base: the flow of image processing that is capable of activating the HDR + mode. This HDR + mode in the Nexus and Pixel camera app allows taking photos at low light levels by quickly shooting a series of 10 shots at different exposures. A final is taken as the result. Although in this workflow there are limitations in what the HDR +.
And here the result a posteriori with the various experiments. The last photo on the right shows the great result obtained:
The experiments went further to achieve excellent results in low-light photography, as shown in some of the images in Kainz's article. Finally, Kainz was able to tell that the phone cameras to take night photos; always with the appropriate software on a mobile that was capable of eliminating steps such as "painting" the layers of masks by hand.
That hardware that we have today is capable of processing all that workflow to take photos with the Pixel 3's Night Sight mode, as in the comparison shown in which flash is not used and this fact can hardly be perceived. Anyone who was taught and told that no flash was used simply wouldn't believe us. Here is really the giant step taken by Google in photography.
