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Replies
Hi Boris:
Let me try this again. The last time I responded and hit Post, my post did not appear, so here goes:
A tripod was used for both shots and I used a Bluetooth remote shutter.
In both cases, I tapped on the center target and let the camera focus automatically. I also checked in manual mode to ensure that focus was achievable, but used auto for the actual shots.
I don't know what the light level was, but the shots were taken in a well-windowed sunroom on an overcast morning. Just to clarify, though, I first discovered this problem the day before on a sunny afternoon when I noticed that the PI shots were noticeably softer than the iPhone app ones.
Tried attaching the DNG but I got the following message:
- The attachment's lgle1478.dng content type (image/DNG) does not match its file extension and has been removed.
Regards
Gordon
By @gordonw60541095
Hi Gordon,
Thank you for your reply, and for your patience as I try to understand the use-case and where the problem may be. To that end, I have a couple more questions:
- Do you know how far away from the target was the device positioned?
- If you look at the image metadata for the Indigo and native camera captures in Apple Photos, which focal lengths get reported?
- I checked the metadata on my laptop in Preview for the two images you attached, and I get confusing results: Indigo is 24mm equivalent with digital zoom ratio of 5.0 (i.e., as if the image was captured with 1x lens zoomed in to 5x in Macro mode), while native camera says 121mm which corresponds to a 5x capture.
- Note that the native camera app sometimes changes the lens used for 5x capture to 1x without informing the user. This can ocassionally drastically improve the focus quality if the target is too close. On the flip side, if you use a 1x lens when the object distance is within the focus range of the 5x lens, that can result in a drastic drop of quality.
- There is a bug on the forum platform for posting DNGs - I've escalated it and hope there will be a solution soon. In the meantime, can you zip the DNG and add that to the thread?
Thank you once again for helping triage this issue!
Hi Boris:
No problem. Would like to see this product shine!
The target card was a little over 30 cm from the camera. I went back and tried to replicate the setup and now I remember that it prompted me to go into Macro mode then as it did today. I did select the 5x setting in PI, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get so close to the target. Does macro mode create the softness?
I went back and checked a photo I took in my back yard with PI and 1x (attached). Zoom in on the 'greenhouse' cover and you will see how soft it looks. With the native app, the weave pattern in the material was a lot more discernible (it's an HEIC so I can't attach).
Looks like .zip's can't be sent either. Is there another way to attach them?
Regards
Gordon
By @gordonw60541095
Hi Gordon - thank you for the reply. Until the DNG attachment problem gets resolved, the only way may be to put the files on one of the file sharing services (DropBox, Google Drive, etc.) and share that way. Can share a HEIC as well via that folder.
On the test captures, yes, Macro mode with the 5x lens will generally speaking add a lot of softness. Basically, what happens is that a 1x lens is used with 5x digital zoom. Our multi-frame super-resolution recovers some of the quality loss due to digital zooming, but not all of it. It is difficult to say whether keeping the lens at 5x and having a bit of defocus blur, or switching to 1x lens and using more digital zoom will be better, as it would depend on the exact object distance. In any case, for such a test, it is always good to check what the native camera did by looking at the metedata of the captured HEIC/JPEG, since it may use a 1x lens or keep the 5x lens.
Regarding the sharpness, one last test to do is to see whether loading the DNG from Indigo into Lightroom or another photo editor and playing with sharpness/detail results in a photo that looks similarly sharp to you as the HEIC. Because, if so, then all the perceived sharpness is from their (sometimes overly agressive) post-processing.
Hi Boris:
That's disappointing to hear that Macro at 5x is not very good.
Moving on, I know you're probably tired of looking at my back yard photos :), but I re-took images in PI (labelled PI_1x & 5x) and Apple camera (IMG files) at 1x and 5x. The Apple ones were shot in Most Compatible format to produce a simple jpeg. You're looking at all straight out of camera, but with some file re-naming on the PI ones.
I realize that the iPhone is doing some computational stuff, and has created a larger file size than PI for some reason, but if you go to 100 percent on the 1x shots (PI_1x... and IMG_0083), the iPhone native files look a lot sharper. Tried Unsharp Mask in PS on the PI file, but it still didn't look as good.
On the other hand, the PI file at 5x looked much better, but still needs a little sharpening to match the (albeit typically oversharpened) iPhone 5x image.
For whatever reason, overall the 1x camera with the PI app doesn't seem useable. Not sure why others don't seem to see this issue. I would be interested in your assessment of why that is the case.
Regards
Gordon
By @gordonw60541095
Thanks for your report Gordon.
"Macro" at 5x being lower quality is not that surprising. When you digitally zoom 2x, you effectivally drop 75% of all the pixels and go from 12MP to 3MP. When you zoom to 4x you drop almost 94% of all the pixels and go down to 0.75MP. And for 5x you have less than 0.5MP to work with. Our super-resolution recovers about 2x of the zoom, so at 5x zoom you get approx 2MP image out of it, but the rest of upscaling back to 12MP is pure digital upscaling.
On the perceived focus softness, we are going to keep tuning things continuously. Some of this is also a matter of preference: looking at your images, it looks to me like perhaps the most of the perceived sharpness for the native camera results comes from over-sharpening - I prefered the Indigo images (and yes, I admit to being biased on this one :)). Perhaps having a setting to control the amount of sharpening perfomed could help bridge the gap a bit.
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