Another looking for a decent RAW/DNG smartphone/mobilephone/cameraphone

Even if night mode is not enabled, those RAWs are still not generated from a single frame - they have a white level near 16384, so are 14 bit resolution. A single frame captured directly from the camera hardware, as output by Open Camera for example, has a white level of 1023 because the actual sensor is only 10 bit resolution.

2 Likes

What happens if you shoot with open camera or another camera app on your Huawei…just curious. It sounds like there is sharpening applied when you say worm like artifacts that is something RL deconvution that is too strong. Are the perhaps settings if you dig deep that you could disable?? Worth a try before spending more money

One other thought maybe try all the various demosaic options…you might stumble on better results?? Can you share one of those wormy shots?? My wife’s old LG doesn’t natively takes raws but when she uses a certain zoom and lens selection her JPG files are really bad with those artifacts…I’m just curious about what the choice of demosaic aligorithm might produce

Hi priort - thank you for suggesting to use a non native camera app for RAW. I did try that back in the day and ended up with only Adobe Lightroom Mobile being able to shoot in RAW - but only from the wide camera. I gave it another go now to see if something had changed over time - starting with the always mentioned Open Camera and then 4 others which supposedly also use the camera2 api. I then side loaded the mythical Google Camera in several versions after a bit of a dive down the rabbit hole made by numerous bloggers (oh dear) - best advices and links were on XDA - not surprise there. However none of them can take RAW on the Huawei P30 Pro as far as I can see (?). I should mention that the Camera2 test app only gives the Camera2 api a limited but I thought that meant RAW was fine but no bells and whistles otherwise (like the LRM camera).
Comparing the native and LRM RAWs in Rawtherapee look much the same to me. Native app lifts the light a fair bit more than the LRM but the funnies are the same. I am just not in over the technicalities enough to understand much of the inner doings of the sensor, quad, bayer, build, binning, stacking and all that so perhaps I simply expect too much from a mobile phone sensor (victim of the hype). Not giving up finding a better phone just yet, or least a phone which doesn’t make things up a long the way - would anybody be willing to point me to a sample gallery with RAWs of the phone you think is a good RAW shooter. At this point it seems like it could be a Pixel or perhaps a Sony?

That is really interesting that you cannot shoot a raw file in OpenCamera…there are a boatload of settings in there…it used to not select the API2 by default and so would not offer raw…just be sure you checked that I am sure you have …the DNG from open camera are different for sure. They are larger and have no preview when I use it on my Pixel…so behaves like a TIff packaged as a DNG from what I could see. THey did open fine in DT and they were clearly not the same colorwise or overall look…It seems really strange that open camera would fail to take raw photos for you??

Hi… I agree that it seem strange… But I did select Camera2 Api. I tried with and without a reboot but I new got a RAW choice and I have searched the phone for DNGs. Nothing. It is even stranger that none of the raw camera apps worked but LRM does work. And run around with Google doesn’t catch much light on the matter - except that OC appears not to support RAW while LRM does (as I have found). Still it is peculiar…

Camera2 Api status

Tried this one yet…https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.on1.onmobile

Yes and Hedgecam and 3 others with the name RAW in the app name…no go… Thank you for all the help and suggestions. I noticed that the jegs coming from the native camera app when you shoot in RAW (RWA+Jpeg) are softer than the normal auto “Jpegs” which are sharpened too much. I have found a few jpg and dng samples on the www taken by real people with their mobile phones…and it looks like the (old) Pixel 4a and (new) 6 does a decent job indeed with RAWs which are just soft as RAWs are but without strange artefacts, that the Samsung S21FE and the S21Ultra has similar looking RAWs but the S21Ultra produces far superior jegs than it’s smaller sibling, OnePlus 9 pro did not impress, Vivo x70 pro+ is over sharpening like the Huawei P30 Pro and the Sony Xperia 1 Pro probably makes the best RAWs I have seen so far…(but that model is so expensive that it is just silly)…

Ya as the computational stuff gets more and more intrusive there might have to be a third option for purists… raw + jpg = “real” raw…

My experience with my Pixel 3aXL is that to my eye the jpg, not always but for the most part are oversharpened and the color seems a bit on the cool side…I think they bump blue in a way to tweak contrast…

So for sure the raw are fuzzy but usually I can manage that and with the gainmaps applied the brightness and vignetting is corrected leaving me with something that has a nicer base for color.

Often when you first look at the jpg you say wow that looks great…until you look at it for a bit longer or pixel peep a bit and then the overprocessing usually is very obvious…

Good luck with your search… I watched a video on the new iphone 14 leaked …supposedly moving finally to a higher megapixel camera with some other new tricks but not sure how the raw situation is on iphones …never owned one…always seemed ridiculously expensive to me…

:slight_smile: iPhone 14…I have not owned an iPhone since the iPhone 3… It was a great little thing with round edges and a silver backplate. The way the OS works just isn’t me… Having said that Apple makes amazing consumer products no doubt about it and there are a few iPhones in the family and iPads. The latter is the big pro version used for drawing/painting and it runs rings around everything else in that segment.

Back to phones, I found some raw files from an iPhone 13… But when I wanted to take a look - wouldn’t you know if Apple hadn’t made their own container called HEIC which I not been able to open yet (the eco system thing again).

Keep looking indeed - well I think I may have found the best out there… The 1" sensor Xperia 1 Pro phone from Sony but it is sooo expensive that it makes even an iPhone 13 look cheap…

Thank you for your help and time.

BTW Are you supposed to close a question or are they just always open…

I know that the iPhone 13 Pro can save raw files as DNGs with the Halide app.

OK…thank you - and I just found that Gimp 2.10.25 (I think) and above can open HEIC files

HEIC identifies a HEIF container (ISOBMFF) in which a still image is coded with HEVC method (or H.265) . They are all ISO standards.
But, as usual, the spread of these standards are thwarted by the licenses burden.
Apple adopted HEIC in 2017. It’not a raw file.

1 Like

aha… yes…well I should have known that as they are way too small anyway…to be a raw that is…

and while looking on the www for ways to clean up my huawai p30 pro images from either dng or the pro mode jpegs using lightroom mobile, rawtherapee or darktable I found that Fuji cameras also are famous for the funky worm like artefacts in their raw files…as the only one in the real camera world it would seem. I haven’t found any mention of it in this forum searching fuji artefacts raw - but was a big enough issue for Adobe to make an enhance details mode especially for raws fra Fuji in their Camera Raw application for PS back in 2019. Has anybody in this forum perhaps found a solution using darktable or rawtherapee. I would love to hear from you…

Try some of the different demosaic aligo’s to see if any are better…if you go into art or RT and use the RL sharpening …crank up the radius and you will see it…not sure if it comes from some computational thing on your Huawei…but it might…I would not have thought if would be in the raw files though

DID you post one of these files yet…ie the raw with the artifacts???

Are you evaluating in RT with sharpening on?? Try turning it off for me I find this is the source of a lot of that type of artifact

Hi - yes I let RT (or ART) do its thing… But I will try and import/load without any sharpening and see…

Capture sharpening on RT seems okay. I would have to go back check again but I know that on my phone images the basic sharpening used by ART lead to wormy artifacts…at least at default values

@paolod Ok, now thanks to your tool I finally managed to process some Pixel 4a raws from holidays and I must say I’m impressed by the dynamic range. So now I fully believe you when you say the Google Camera raws are composed from multiple frames. Although nowhere as sharp, the photos I get from my GX80 do not offer such DR by any means.

Finally I had a bit of time looking at the sharpening and the many different demosaicking (UK spelling?) choices in RT - as suggested - to see if the worming artefacts from the Huawei sensor could be removed/used to produce a sharp Jpeg. I must admit I couldn’t find any which worked better than AmaZe. On googling huawei artefacts dng or such like I landed on DPReview where a pp3 had been uploaded - and I tried that. It was a definite improvement as to removing the artefacts (which I have not managed to do myself in RT)- but the compromise was a good deal of softening which seems more like smothering/mitigating than resolving the problem. So not that much further.
DNG in RT without loading the pp3 from the www with normal capture sharpening + AmaZe


DNG with the pp3 loaded