alt Hacker NewsShow HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo
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I just assumed this was what all phones with multiple rear cameras were doing, is it not? What are the multiple cameras for other than that?
Neat work, but the free tier lets you export 3 images a month and the alternative is a subscription? No thanks.
It’s weird, because the center of the image will be more detailed, so how are they dealing with the “grid of pixels” that is on the display. Are they doubling up the wide angle.
“Easy-to-understand framing The brackets over the viewfinder indicate the area covered by the more detailed lens. Frame your subject inside them to capture the best detail.“
Reminds me of the old 3d cameras that took two photos at once through 2 lenses (on film)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/206409326865?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%...
I'm confused. So this is just producing a single photo that is clearer in a middle rectangle and blurrier outside that rectangle?
Of course the extra detail in the middle is nicer, but won't the edge of the "detail rectangle" be extremely obvious and distracting? Like when you zoom into satellite view on Maps and it's clear that there's a blurry area and a sharp area?
I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image. I can understand why you'd want to snap photos with both lenses simultaneously as save them as separate photos, but I don't understand why you'd combine them.
I believe this is something similar to what Lytro aimed to bring to market.
Lytro, Inc. was an American company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng which developed some of the first commercially available light-field cameras.
The principle is similar to foveated imaging [1].
Recently, Samsung introduced the ISOCELL platform which allows to select the area which will be recorded at higher resolution compared to other regions.
There can be all sorts of different applications build around such as extracting higher resolution of text regions, etc [2].
Of course, the lens needs to support this resolution but I think that will be default in the mid-term future.
I think this is actually how oneplus phones have taken 'night' mode photos for a very long time in their default camera app, it takes multiple exposures and uses the movement sensor in the phone to pick several which were taken with the least hand jitter, and then stacks them into the final result.
How can you in good conscience charge a subscription for this? It would be one thing if the app relied on infrastructure, but it's a one and done algorithm that runs on entirely locally on device!
Subscriptions are charged because the developer needs to maintain the upkeep and cost of running the service, but that's not applicable here. The algorithm is local, and it's capable of taking a million photographs on-device without any assistance from an online service.
Shame on you, honestly. This is exactly what's wrong with modern software nowadays. Just like Adobe and all these other greedy companies, taking advantage of people to milk them dry forever. You'll lease a product, you'll own nothing and be happy about it.
How is parallax error solved? The two cameras don't share the same optics center.
Pretty cool -- I built see ya' an app which allows you to connect N number of phones locally, and use one phone as the view finder + shutter, and the other(s) as the dedicated camera. I'm just using Apples native API, so it'll connect over bluetooth, wifi, direct, whatever pretty seamlessly. I don't collect any data, and it's 100% free.
Left side and the right side look the same to me except some subtle differences in the color of shadows…. And another waitlist? Nein Danke.
Very cool stuff, I've long thought there must be some fancy ways to get extra information for better image resolution by taking advantage of the other cameras.
That said, I must also say that most of the side-by-side comparison photos shown here are somewhat impressive, and in some cases, the photosynthesis one just looks worse to my untrained eye.
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I'll choose to take this as evidence of the fact that you're tacking a very difficult problem, and you're also being honest in your comparisons and not cherry-picking too aggressively.
This might be a personal preference thing, but in every single example photo on that page, I significantly prefer the colours in the "standard zoom" version of the photo. I wonder if they can figure out how to do this fusion without losing that beautiful contrast the zoom lens brings to the table?
I am co fused, 50% of photos look better in standard zoom and 50% of them look better woth photosynthesis. This is like an anti campaign for the app hinting "in the end it doesn't really matter"
This was actually a purported feature of the Pixel 3 camera. Google said it would be constantly taking photos and the different information captured as your hand moved slightly could be used to create higher information density photos. It didn't work very well at that point but the idea was cool!
very cool app, a few questions: why does the color "temp" of the image change between traditional iphone photography vs your app? it appears to both warm and cool the images. Also why is the contrast decreased, specifically in the library/book store example?
I like the idea of this app and the website is well done. Subscription isn't for me, but for folks who take a lot of photos and need this sort of thing, I can see it. Free tier could offer a few more photos per month.
Anyone know if they’re using the native camera resolution for the zoomed part or doing sensor fusion to get better quality than either alone?
Interesting. I wonder if this could be extended to take MPO 3D photos.
That demo looks like Minority Report level enhancement. Amazing if it really works, but I'll be damned if I'm paying for a SaaS camera app.
Isn't quite a lot of modern smartphone photography post-processing? Yes camera SAAS is extremely funny but I can kinda see it maybe
This appears to use a naïve masking approach (using ML to find the edges of the mask) which seems to suffer from slight uncorrected differences in lens distortion. There's a fairly obvious feathering around the edges of the detailed area, objects shift quite dramatically, and overall I feel like I'd do a better job of this manually. It is a cool idea, but flawed execution. I would prefer something like using ML to generate a displacement map between the wide angle and the narrow angle parts. That way you can map the higher details down faithfully without having to feather the edges nearly as much or compute any mask. That would also solve parallax which I see also looks unaccounted for.
My hesitations on this are it stores data in a proprietary format that I may not be able to export to another common format if the product disappears in a few years.
For something personal like photos and the memories they capture, that's not ideal for me.
While the app is still with us, I'm not sure how much it will cost me to export to my photos to my photo library each month.
Weird issue: The iPhone dropdown doesn't include the iPhone XR. It's not like I expect it to work, I'm just curious what the app does.
"This site was paused as it reached its usage limits. Please contact the site owner for more information."
This whole thing feels wrong. OP should be working for a phone manufacturer, not trying to sell this as a subscription. How much is it worth to be able to squeeze a little more visual clarity out of my phone? Maybe $20 maximum? And I feel like I’m on the generous side of the population here. Most people will say $0. But if you’re inside of Apple and you can tell them you can add an average of $1 of perceived value to each of their millions of phones sold each year they’ll be over the moon and you can get a fat salary.
As an Android guy and not an iPhone, or phone pic guy...
What do the multiple lenses do then, if not this? Like,I presumed that was the point.
Are they LITERALLY just decoration for me to make fun of?
Similar idea to the discontinued Light L16 camera https://petapixel.com/2017/12/08/review-light-l16-brilliant-...
Anything like this for Android or Pixels?
Not just the app idea … but the WEBSITE — is VERY WELL DONE.
I immediately signed up. (And offered to help bring users to this thing.)
Is it just me or do the original photos look better overall?
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple isn't already doing this and just doesn't say so explicitly. There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone photo. Would be interesting to compare a photo taken with the native camera app and photosynthesis to compare. I'm assuming your demo images on your site are the raw and processed images from your app that don't go through Apple's "secret sauce" processing pipeline.