About cameras and lenses
On November 6, Russia officially launched sales of new Lumia smartphones - the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820. As you know, Nokia has been using Carl Zeiss optics in its smartphones for many years, the very name of which guarantees quality. The tradition of creating phones with built-in cameras, as they like to say now, is deep in our DNA - we are the largest camera manufacturer in the world. And, as in the case of geolocation, we take this direction more than seriously. Today we talk about what PureView is in the Lumia 920 and what Lenses are.
So what exactly is PureView? This is not the name of the 41-megapixel sensor, as many could decide after the release of the Nokia 808 PureView. PureView is a whole range of hardware components and software solutions that allows you to take high-quality images.
The Lumia 920 uses a “floating” lens to stabilize the picture, paired with a gyroscope (the so-called OIS), a 1/3 inch sensor with a normal resolution of 8.7 megapixels and a pixel size of 1.4 microns with BSI backlight technology ( Backside illumination) of the new generation, as well as, frankly, a large f / 2.0 aperture. We already talked about these technologies in more detail in our review of the Lumia 920 and 820 .
We should also dwell on the software component, in particular on a number of programs, under the general name Lenses. By the way, as many as five lenses were used in the optical stabilization module, but this is not about them. Lenses were presented during our September press conference and will be available on all Windows Phone 8. Phones.
Some of the “lenses” were developed by Microsoft - Bing Vision, CNN iReport, Panorama, Photosynth, Blink, FXSuite and PhotoStrip. Some add augmented reality elements to the camera, while others add advanced filters and advanced features such as automatic panorama splicing. Third-party developers can also create their own “lenses”, which will be available to users in the Marketplace and will be displayed in the “Lenses” menu of the Camera application.
At Nokia, we, in turn, continue the good tradition that we started with Camera Extras on Lumia phones based on Windows Phone 7, and present to you a few of our own lenses that are already built into our new phones. They are a collaboration product of a dedicated research team that included our engineers from Tampere, Espoo photographers and developers from our recently acquired Scalado company from the Swedish Lund. Mention of the latter and its developments met on Habré, and we are proud that our new phones embodied the most impressive of them.
An interesting feature of “lenses” is their close integration with the system application “Camera”. Photographs taken with the help of “lenses” are marked in the gallery, which indicates which lens was used to take the picture. This allows you to re-open the picture in the same lens application and edit it again by changing the settings.
Sometimes we all come across this situation: we go to rest, we see an interesting and picturesque place and we want to take a group picture with our friends. And so we ask someone to take a picture of us all together, the person presses the button and we get a magnificent photo in which one of the friends blinked, and the second decided early that the picture was taken and turned away. The photo is spoiled, as well as the mood.
Using the “lens” “Smart Shoot”, the camera takes several frames at the time of the shot and allows you to choose the most successful one. In addition, several pictures can be combined by selecting a picture of a blinking comrade with his eyes wide open from one of them, and turning away still looking at the camera - from another shot from the series.
The second, but not least, function of the Smart Shoot lens is the removal of moving objects from the captured image. Her prototype - Remove - was demonstrated in February as part of the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona. This function works on the same principle as the previous one - the application takes several pictures, then with the help of recognition technology determines the moving objects that fell into the frame, and offers to choose which object you would like to remove from the picture, circling it with a contour.
You just need to click on the selected path so that the program removes the character that got into the frame from the picture, in fact, also collecting the final frame from several and substituting in the place of the selected object an empty space from another frame of the series.
As you can understand, to implement all this magic, the software divides the frame into two parts - “stable” and “unstable”. And here our optical stabilization is needed more than ever, since any jitter of the phone greatly complicates the work of the algorithm that analyzes the frame.
Another “lens” developed by us is called Cinemagraph. Many of you have already heard about cinemagraphy and cinemagraphs - stunning images combining photos and videos. If a regular photo captures a static moment, then a cinemagraph is a moment in motion. A breath of wind chasing foliage down the street, a passing car, a fallen lock of hair, water dripping from a faucet - examples of a thousand. Jamie Beck, one of the founders of the direction and co-author of the term “cinemagraph,” described this genre as follows: “They have a cinematic quality ... like a living photograph. It is always a photograph first. ”
More recently, creating such beautiful images required a clock in front of the monitor and a good knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. Today, if you have Lumia on Windows Phone 8, just a few seconds is enough.
Suppose you travel, take pictures in memory of cities and countries visited, and at some point come across a picture that would be especially good in motion. For example, a waving flag on the flagpole of an old castle or a lizard climbing onto a stone to bask in the sun, etc. Great, run the Cinemagraph “lens”. As soon as you press the shutter, it will generate a 5-second file at a frequency of 15 frames per second. Then, by analogy with Smart Shoot, it will highlight moving objects, and you can choose which ones you want to leave static, and which ones - move. The output is a 1-4 megabyte GIF file.
Here are some sample photos taken with the Cinemagraph - on the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820.
As with the other “lenses,” you can always go back to editing the captured image, change the animation settings, select not one but two moving elements, after which the file can be uploaded to SkyDrive and shared with friends.
Such a combination of software and hardware solutions will allow you to get even better pictures with your new Lumia, which will delight you and your loved ones for a very long time.
So what exactly is PureView? This is not the name of the 41-megapixel sensor, as many could decide after the release of the Nokia 808 PureView. PureView is a whole range of hardware components and software solutions that allows you to take high-quality images.
The Lumia 920 uses a “floating” lens to stabilize the picture, paired with a gyroscope (the so-called OIS), a 1/3 inch sensor with a normal resolution of 8.7 megapixels and a pixel size of 1.4 microns with BSI backlight technology ( Backside illumination) of the new generation, as well as, frankly, a large f / 2.0 aperture. We already talked about these technologies in more detail in our review of the Lumia 920 and 820 .
We should also dwell on the software component, in particular on a number of programs, under the general name Lenses. By the way, as many as five lenses were used in the optical stabilization module, but this is not about them. Lenses were presented during our September press conference and will be available on all Windows Phone 8. Phones.
Some of the “lenses” were developed by Microsoft - Bing Vision, CNN iReport, Panorama, Photosynth, Blink, FXSuite and PhotoStrip. Some add augmented reality elements to the camera, while others add advanced filters and advanced features such as automatic panorama splicing. Third-party developers can also create their own “lenses”, which will be available to users in the Marketplace and will be displayed in the “Lenses” menu of the Camera application.
At Nokia, we, in turn, continue the good tradition that we started with Camera Extras on Lumia phones based on Windows Phone 7, and present to you a few of our own lenses that are already built into our new phones. They are a collaboration product of a dedicated research team that included our engineers from Tampere, Espoo photographers and developers from our recently acquired Scalado company from the Swedish Lund. Mention of the latter and its developments met on Habré, and we are proud that our new phones embodied the most impressive of them.
An interesting feature of “lenses” is their close integration with the system application “Camera”. Photographs taken with the help of “lenses” are marked in the gallery, which indicates which lens was used to take the picture. This allows you to re-open the picture in the same lens application and edit it again by changing the settings.
"Smart shooting"
Sometimes we all come across this situation: we go to rest, we see an interesting and picturesque place and we want to take a group picture with our friends. And so we ask someone to take a picture of us all together, the person presses the button and we get a magnificent photo in which one of the friends blinked, and the second decided early that the picture was taken and turned away. The photo is spoiled, as well as the mood.
Using the “lens” “Smart Shoot”, the camera takes several frames at the time of the shot and allows you to choose the most successful one. In addition, several pictures can be combined by selecting a picture of a blinking comrade with his eyes wide open from one of them, and turning away still looking at the camera - from another shot from the series.
The second, but not least, function of the Smart Shoot lens is the removal of moving objects from the captured image. Her prototype - Remove - was demonstrated in February as part of the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona. This function works on the same principle as the previous one - the application takes several pictures, then with the help of recognition technology determines the moving objects that fell into the frame, and offers to choose which object you would like to remove from the picture, circling it with a contour.
You just need to click on the selected path so that the program removes the character that got into the frame from the picture, in fact, also collecting the final frame from several and substituting in the place of the selected object an empty space from another frame of the series.
As you can understand, to implement all this magic, the software divides the frame into two parts - “stable” and “unstable”. And here our optical stabilization is needed more than ever, since any jitter of the phone greatly complicates the work of the algorithm that analyzes the frame.
"Revived photos"
Another “lens” developed by us is called Cinemagraph. Many of you have already heard about cinemagraphy and cinemagraphs - stunning images combining photos and videos. If a regular photo captures a static moment, then a cinemagraph is a moment in motion. A breath of wind chasing foliage down the street, a passing car, a fallen lock of hair, water dripping from a faucet - examples of a thousand. Jamie Beck, one of the founders of the direction and co-author of the term “cinemagraph,” described this genre as follows: “They have a cinematic quality ... like a living photograph. It is always a photograph first. ”
More recently, creating such beautiful images required a clock in front of the monitor and a good knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. Today, if you have Lumia on Windows Phone 8, just a few seconds is enough.
Suppose you travel, take pictures in memory of cities and countries visited, and at some point come across a picture that would be especially good in motion. For example, a waving flag on the flagpole of an old castle or a lizard climbing onto a stone to bask in the sun, etc. Great, run the Cinemagraph “lens”. As soon as you press the shutter, it will generate a 5-second file at a frequency of 15 frames per second. Then, by analogy with Smart Shoot, it will highlight moving objects, and you can choose which ones you want to leave static, and which ones - move. The output is a 1-4 megabyte GIF file.
Here are some sample photos taken with the Cinemagraph - on the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820.
As with the other “lenses,” you can always go back to editing the captured image, change the animation settings, select not one but two moving elements, after which the file can be uploaded to SkyDrive and shared with friends.
Such a combination of software and hardware solutions will allow you to get even better pictures with your new Lumia, which will delight you and your loved ones for a very long time.