Why is this a common feature for smartphones but not cameras? How does the phone HDR mode determine the appropriate exposures for all regions of the picture?
daniel-man
@nathalyspham From what I understand, an equivalent "HDR Mode" does exist on many consumer cameras. However, I believe it is a more heavily-marketed feature for smartphones because 1. many smartphone companies put a lot of emphasis into computational photography (take Google Pixel phones for example), and even have dedicated chips designed for photographic computation. And 2. many of these computational photography approaches apply machine learning in order to train a system to not only recognize the subject of a photo, but then apply appropriate color/exposure corrections that users will like, automating much of the basic processing that a photographer with a traditional camera would have to do in post.
sha-moose
I think the big reason why multi-image fusion (and computation photography in general) is such a big thing on smartphones is because it is almost a necessity. There is a physical limitation on how much a sensor can be on a smartphone, whereas on a regular camera if you wanted better dynamic range you can simply buy a bigger camera with a bigger and better sensor. The other thing is that one of the challenges of something like mutli-image fusion for better HDR is that your hands are shaking when the multiple images are taken, which means they won't line up exactly. A phone has an accelerometer and split pixels to calculate that offset, but a consumer camera will likely not have that hardware built-in.
StaffDanCubed
I wonder if there are cameras that support built-in HDR then? Is it easy or difficult to add support for HDR? How much of it is in the software, and how much of it is in the hardware?
ClaireLiu123
There are some specific cameras that support built-in HDR. However, I think it was not popular with cameras because only a lot of pro photographers use cameras to take pictures. Those photographers are carefully crafting their best work using HDR techniques. And it was really hard to capture good pictures with movements.
Why is this a common feature for smartphones but not cameras? How does the phone HDR mode determine the appropriate exposures for all regions of the picture?
@nathalyspham From what I understand, an equivalent "HDR Mode" does exist on many consumer cameras. However, I believe it is a more heavily-marketed feature for smartphones because 1. many smartphone companies put a lot of emphasis into computational photography (take Google Pixel phones for example), and even have dedicated chips designed for photographic computation. And 2. many of these computational photography approaches apply machine learning in order to train a system to not only recognize the subject of a photo, but then apply appropriate color/exposure corrections that users will like, automating much of the basic processing that a photographer with a traditional camera would have to do in post.
I think the big reason why multi-image fusion (and computation photography in general) is such a big thing on smartphones is because it is almost a necessity. There is a physical limitation on how much a sensor can be on a smartphone, whereas on a regular camera if you wanted better dynamic range you can simply buy a bigger camera with a bigger and better sensor. The other thing is that one of the challenges of something like mutli-image fusion for better HDR is that your hands are shaking when the multiple images are taken, which means they won't line up exactly. A phone has an accelerometer and split pixels to calculate that offset, but a consumer camera will likely not have that hardware built-in.
I wonder if there are cameras that support built-in HDR then? Is it easy or difficult to add support for HDR? How much of it is in the software, and how much of it is in the hardware?
There are some specific cameras that support built-in HDR. However, I think it was not popular with cameras because only a lot of pro photographers use cameras to take pictures. Those photographers are carefully crafting their best work using HDR techniques. And it was really hard to capture good pictures with movements.