HDR+ magic will now be made available to all 3rd-party developers who use Google’s Camera2 API. That means any app, from 360 Camera for example, to Chinese stock camera apps.
One of the most coveted and tightly kept secrets of the mobile photography world is Google’s HDR+ in Google Camera. Up until now it’s mostly only been usable with Google’s phones. I say mostly because there are versions ported to a handful of devices, but this requires root and constant upkeep to stay updated with the phone’s OTA and new versions of Google Camera.
HDR as you probably already know is High-Dynamic-Range. It allows a phone to capture in one image a very wide range of light. This is achieved by taking more than one shot, each at different exposures, and then using software to intelligently combine the images.
The “+” in HDR+ signifies “+ low-light”. It’s the reason that Pixel and recent Google phones can capture higher quality low-light images. The magic is in Google’s algorithms which combine several shots into one image. This is very similar to HDR, but with low-light mode, there is not necessarily a change in exposure. In low-light mode, HDR+ takes several images in quick succession and through median-averaging determines what is detail and what is noise, then stacks them together to give us a cleaner, sharper image.
Leave a Reply