I need a phone with raw camera capabilities, e.g. to be able to process the photos with darktable (I hope this is enough to be considered on topic ). I have once seen a website that has technical info on camera capabilities of smartphones, e.g. which cameras of each phone do raw, but, searching for days, I cannot find this website anymore. Maybe somebody here can help out and knows the website I am searching for?
Some more hints: When I visited it last, it had a dark design (but this may have changed in the meantime).
Hm, I think I found it again (as usual, you are searching forever, then you post the question, and immediately afterwards you find what you were searching for).
Itâs the website of a proprietary camera app, therefore I am not sure how much this tells on compatibility with e.g. open camera, but if you are interested, you can find it here: Herstellerliste - Camera FV-5.
Note that some more recent smartphone raw DNGs might not be supported by darktable yet, as mentioned in the release notes and the camera support page - e.g. Apple ProRAW and Samsung âExpert RAWâ from very recent firmware.
P.S. On Android phones, one can check the Camera2 API capabilities and install e.g. OpenCamera to get the raws if the stock phone does not have it.
Thanks for the hints! I am already using open camera, but I have to have the phone in my hands already to install it and check raw capabilities. Unfortunately I need to do a quick buy in the local electronics market today as my wife broke her phoneâs screen and I have little time to investigate the options. Unfortunately(2), the capabilities of phones seem to degrade, e.g. the Galaxy A series, a couple of years ago, they did raw, miracast, HDMI out etc., but it seems all these capabilities are gone . And the highest âSâ class skips the SD card these days. What a bs development.
The open camera DNG ârawâ files that come from my pixel phone are offâŚthey appear to be only 10bit, at least the raw white point is 1023. I think the Android function used to create them ie DNGcreate I think it is called in the code is not getting the right meta data or maybe there is another issueâŚthey also have weird illuminant data ie not the standard pair of D65 and tungsten⌠Also I think raw files now on the new smartphones are not that good at least the ones from the google app on my pixel esp my pixel 8⌠I could get decent images that were better than my jpg from my old lumia phone but the last two pixelâs I have had because they make computational raw filesâŚif you zoom at all you get a small raw file due to the crop. It behaves like the jpg doing a digital zoom. In the lumia I got the zoomed jpg and the full sensor image for the raw DNGâŚnow with the pixel if you zoom in 3-5 x you might get an 800K raw file⌠At the same time the quality of the jpg has gone way up and you can save HDR jpgâs now so for me at this point and on the pixel it is really not worth the effort to mess with the DNG filesâŚ
The pixel 8 Pro might save a full DNG but not my regular pixel 8 and not my 3aXL before thatâŚ
EDIT
To clarify it seems that opencamera does also save the full image in the raw it just seems to report a white point of 1023 where as the native app is 16383 and the native app on the regular pixel at least does not save the full imageâŚ
As far as I know, almost all Chinese phones released in the last 3-4 years have RAW support. Most of them also have Camera2api support. This means that you can use this hardware in third-party applications. However, the full resolution function is not officially available in almost any brand. For technical information, you can look at the website Kimovil, the information is 90% correct. However, I do not know of any website that gives information about which device has which RAW support.
Most of the smartphone sensors are only 10bit (maybe 12 if done by 48MPix->12MPix binning), everything else is done computationally by combining multiple frames, i.e. not really a single ârawâ shot.
So would you think then the raw point is wrong from the native Google app. I think the sensor is 14 bit⌠Iâd have to check⌠The open camera DNG just seem like an uncompressed tiff⌠I think that is why the RT automatic doesnât work with them
Youâre missing the point. Both white levels are correct.
The tiny sensor in a smartphone is most definitely not 14b like a DSLR. It is usually 10b, at most 12b.
Google (and others) does computational tricks to combine multiple 10b frames to create an âHDRâ 14b linear ârawâ that they can export in a DNG for further development. It might be better than 10b, but does not correspond to a single frame output from the limited tiny sensor.
OpenCamera can only provide a single frame output from a sensor into a 10b DNG, without intermediate post-processing. (The OpenCamera app might not get some other metadata perfectly though, and theyâre not privy to the details the manufacturer is.)
Point taken âŚit does have dro and HDR modes but maybe they are just blended at the same bit level thenâŚand not using any of the Google magic. I thought they were using an early version of it but maybe not
I feel you - we were in the same pickle exactly a month ago during a trip abroad. We just gave up on any camera requirements and got the cheapest option that can run maps, make calls and send messages.
As much as I really enjoy darktable, I wonât try to use it for my mobile photosâŚeven the RAW.
I just use a mobile optimized RAW processing app (Snapseed). Itâs not nearly as in depth as DT, but for edits on my phone it works fantastic.
Eventually we did something similar. It was already the (borrowed) backup phone that broke yesterday, and so we bought a cheapish option, as the original phone is still laying around and is waiting for its final display repair. It ended with the motorola g54 5g. For the 145 bucks we spent (âŹ, to be correct), it is really decent and â surprise â has raw support for front and back camera. However, not with opencamera, only with the stock app. Nevertheless, this will do until the original phone is repaired.
The phone is not even mine but the one of my wife. The reason why I even ask her to also shoot raw is 2-fold:
The aggressive noise reduction of almost any phoneâs jpg engine is insane. For A3 to A4 size prints, this is too much. Sure, maybe the higher end google phones are better, but most others are insanely muddy.
For collections such as photo books and calendars, I want to have a matching color look for all images. This can be better achieved with raw data.
So, for these print products, the raw data gives the little more latitude needed, even with comparatively crappy phone cameras.
However, for a few years now manufacturers have been using things like Dual ISO, Smart ISO, DCG, etc. These aim to achieve wider dynamic range by applying different conversion gains to a single frame. So 12bit single frame was something that was available for a few years, 14bit single frame has been possible for a while now. However, the problem is that the sensor modes that make these functions work can only be used in official camera software. In 3rd party software, image sensors will work like the old fashioned way. For this reason, there are modified libraries made for some devices so that we can use these functions in 3rd party applications. If we talk about Google Pixel devices, the Pixel camera uses stacking by default across the entire camera line.
just to add one data point to this: my xiaomi telephone has some weirdly named âultra rawâ mode in the stock app that will give me what looks like 14-bit dng files. normal raw results in 10 bits. the quality of the images is quite visibly better especially in the blacks.
I think as pointed out to me by @kmilos that mode likely a version of what google is doing to get that DNR from a 10 bit sensor. After checking my Pixel 8 uses this sensor Isocell GN2
I use a Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS. Pixel Camera is one of my few proprietary sideloaded apps. I use it because the output is far superior to the output from from Open Camera. The night mode is kind of amazing, but another reason is that colors from Open Camera are terrible. Donât know if a color matrix is missing for the DNGs is produces. Looks like it.
On a side note⌠True mosaicised raw bayer data is mostly not desirable from a sensor as small as the one in a phone. ProRAW (i.e. linear demosaiced DNG from a bunch of merged exposures) gives better results. Does darktable support them?
What I havenât delved into is how the amazing night mode DNGs from my Pixel camera can be the same size as the single exposure DNGs. To do exposure merging data usually has to be converted to a linear demosaiced DNG with three color channels at three times the size of a âreal raw fileâ.
GrapheneOS is amazing by the way. The Pixels are perhaps not the most cost efficient or desirable devices, but as long as they are the only way to run Graphene, I will likely stick with them.
Depends - it supports the demosaiced linear raw DNGs in general, but as mentioned not yet the Apple ProRaw (slightly unusual compression mode), nor very recent Samsung Expert Raw (new JPEG XL compression in DNG 1.7 level spec).
). I have once seen a website that has technical info on camera capabilities of smartphones, e.g. which cameras of each phone do raw, but, searching for days, I cannot find this website anymore. Maybe somebody here can help out and knows the website I am searching for?
. And the highest âSâ class skips the SD card these days. What a bs development.
