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Posted by sajomes 3 days ago

Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo(photosynthesis.camera)
294 points | 272 commentspage 3
eigenspace 3 days ago|
Very cool stuff, I've long thought there must be some fancy ways to get extra information for better image resolution by taking advantage of the other cameras.

That said, I must also say that most of the side-by-side comparison photos shown here are somewhat impressive, and in some cases, the photosynthesis one just looks worse to my untrained eye.

_______________

I'll choose to take this as evidence of the fact that you're tacking a very difficult problem, and you're also being honest in your comparisons and not cherry-picking too aggressively.

sajomes 15 hours ago||
As dole alluded to below, I have been going back and forth in balancing the quality of the example pictures with the data load. I've pushed an update to the site now that weighs much more towards quality for this exact reason! But you're right, I don't want to hide the fact that not all results are perfect.
dole 18 hours ago||
Some of the photosynthesis zoom-ins have overlays take a bit longer to load at higher resolution.
walrus01 16 hours ago||
I think this is actually how oneplus phones have taken 'night' mode photos for a very long time in their default camera app, it takes multiple exposures and uses the movement sensor in the phone to pick several which were taken with the least hand jitter, and then stacks them into the final result.
sajomes 15 hours ago|
I believe that's true for most/all night capture, but they take sequential frames from the same lens rather than combining multiple lenses.
tambourine_man 13 hours ago||
Nice idea.

On my phone, at least, I had to pintch-to-zoom to 2-3X to see the difference.

And at that size, the “synthesized” version looks much sharper.

You might need more cropping for the mobile version. At 1X I couldn’t tell them apart.

Haven’t checked the desktop version yet

xiaoyu2006 15 hours ago||
How is parallax error solved? The two cameras don't share the same optics center.
anthonyskipper 15 hours ago|
Parallax error decreases significantly when lens are close enough and these are mm apart. They are close enough that you can probably just play a perspective trick and hide any artifacts.
magarnicle 11 hours ago||
I want to know what is possible if there were triple the number of cameras on the back of the phone and every single one fired on every photo. If they all focused at different points, the telephotos zoomed at different lengths etc., maybe throw some infrared cameras on there as well, what would be the results when combined?
Gigachad 9 hours ago||
There is a much better way of doing this which some professional cameras do called pixel shift. It shifts the sensor a tiny amount in between multiple exposures to compose in to an absurdly high resolution image. The downside is it only works on a tripod since you need the camera perfectly still.

The obvious issue with multiple cameras at different focal lengths is they won't all cover the frame of the widest one so only parts of the image will be sharper.

But if this matters to you, just get a full frame camera. Any 33MP full frame will blow away a 200MP phone camera in sharpness and detail.

magarnicle 8 hours ago||
I wasn't thinking so much about resolution, but rather all the other things it might allow. Re-focusing after taking it, for example. 3D by default, since the width of a phone is basically the distance between your eyes. A host of other things the much-more-high-powered CPU on the phone can do compared to a camera.
Gigachad 6 hours ago||
For refocusing, you can achieve this with focus bracketing, the camera takes the same photo at different focus points in quick succession. The reason phone default camera apps don't have this as a feature is because their depth of field is so massive that pretty much everything is in focus all the time anyway. But it's a feature on dedicated cameras.

>3D by default

This actually is an option in the ios camera app if you switch to spacial mode. Though I think the only use case is they look slightly nicer on the Apple vision pro. And also the iphone can just fake 3D on any photo with AI.

If there was a compelling reason to cover the phone in more cameras and sell it as a feature, Samsung would have done it by now.

magarnicle 2 hours ago||
The Apple spatial photos are enabled by the depth camera, right? Which is kind of my point - more cameras mean more features!

> If there was a compelling reason to cover the phone in more cameras and sell it as a feature, Samsung would have done it by now.

I dunno, they generally tend to be a follower, not a leader. Even their new foldable is generally accepted as a tactical manoeuver ahead of Apple's foldable.

neom 11 hours ago||
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_(company)

Good review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3uUozW4zHc

magarnicle 7 hours ago||
That definitely looks like what I imagined.
levanlevi 4 hours ago||
you don't need subscription model, just one price for lifetime - that will be fair and convert better.

don't do trials - do refund within 28 days

gurjeet 14 hours ago||
I believe this is something similar to what Lytro aimed to bring to market.

Lytro, Inc. was an American company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng which developed some of the first commercially available light-field cameras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro

magarnicle 11 hours ago|
No, that's a fundamentally different kind of lens.
swiftcoder 16 hours ago||
This might be a personal preference thing, but in every single example photo on that page, I significantly prefer the colours in the "standard zoom" version of the photo. I wonder if they can figure out how to do this fusion without losing that beautiful contrast the zoom lens brings to the table?
sajomes 15 hours ago|
That's really interesting - the colour match attempts to find the best match between the two lens outputs, which frequently results in them 'meeting in the middle'. You can then manually adjust the output of each lens within the app's editing interface. I'll have a think about the weighting of the colour match.
gepeake 18 hours ago||
This was actually a purported feature of the Pixel 3 camera. Google said it would be constantly taking photos and the different information captured as your hand moved slightly could be used to create higher information density photos. It didn't work very well at that point but the idea was cool!
ipsum2 18 hours ago||
That's not what's being described here. It's just combining the telephoto and wide angle photos.
sajomes 15 hours ago||
I believe that's a similar idea to Apple's Deep Fusion which also takes multiple frames from the same lens then intelligently combines them for higher detail. As ipsum2 said below, that's different to Photosynthesis, which captures from different lenses simultaneously.
hnthrowawayacct 18 hours ago|
very cool app, a few questions: why does the color "temp" of the image change between traditional iphone photography vs your app? it appears to both warm and cool the images. Also why is the contrast decreased, specifically in the library/book store example?
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