The future of photography .Part 3

Stacking
90% Mobile Camera Success

This computational photo began with stacking - overlaying several photos on each other. For a smartphone is not a problem click a dozen frames for half a second. There are no slow mechanical parts in their cameras: the diaphragm is fixed, and instead of the driving shutter there is an electronic shutter. The processor simply commands the matrix how many microseconds to catch wild photons with it, and reads the result itself.

Technically, the phone can take photos at video speeds, and video with photo resolution, but everything depends on the speed of the bus and the processor. Therefore, they always set program limits.

By itself, stacking with us for a long time. Even grandfathers put plug-ins on Photoshop 7.0 to collect a few photos in a vivid HDR or glue a panorama of 18000x600 pixels and … in fact, no one ever figured out what to do with them further. Rich times were sorry for the wild.

Now we are adults and call it “ epsilon photography ” - when changing one of the camera’s parameters (exposure, focus, position) and sticking together the received frames, we get something that could not be taken in one frame. But this is a term for theorists, but in practice another name has stuck - stacking. Today, in fact, it builds 90% of all innovations in mobile cameras

A thing that many people do not think about, but it is important for understanding the entire mobile and computing photos: the camera in a modern smartphone starts taking photos as soon as you open its app . Which is logical, because she needs to somehow transfer the image to the screen. However, in addition to the screen, it saves high-resolution frames in its own cyclic buffer, where it stores them for another couple of seconds.

When you press the “take a photo” button - it is in fact already taken, the camera just takes the last photo from the clipboard.

Today, it works like any mobile camera. At least in all the flagships are not with garbage. Buffering allows you to realize not just the zero shutter lag , which photographers so long dreamed of, and even negative - when you press the button, the smartphone looks into the past, unloads the last 5-10 photos from the buffer and starts frantically analyzing them and gluing. You no longer have to wait until the phone clicks frames for HDR or night mode - just take them from the buffer, the user will not even know.

By the way, it was with the help of the negative lag of the shutter that Live Photo was realized in iPhones, and on HTC it was still in 2013 under the strange name Zoe .

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