I often shoot small objects at short distance, and most of the image are further away and darker. It is irritating fighting the automatic and nedlessly tiem consuming focus-almost-always-wrong. Say documenting thin wiring and connections.
I often use HedgeCam2, which can be configured to have onscreen sliders for focus, zoom, ISO, and shutter.
Often I just want to set focus to closest possible, shutter for 50Hz, adjust ISO to suitable brightness for the objects, then easily take some pictures of a bunch of small parts in quick succession.
I have failed to find another camera app with such controls. In priority: quick manual controls of focus, shutter, ISO, zoom.
This seems to be a fork of OpenCamera (like the stock app, too). It has almost the same options arranged a bit different. The picture quality is comparable (because of probably exactly the same processing algorithms).
You could try sideloading a GCam port, which will be completely different. Depends on your device. I can’t say if such a port matches your needs better.
I also tried FreeDCam (from F-Droid).
Update: I just see FreeDCam has made some development since I saw it the last time. Not all is intuitive there, especially nobody tells you that there’s a full screen options panel when you swipe from the left. And it still seems to crash sometimes. Annoying is that you can’t shoot using the volume buttons, you must use the damned software button on the screen.
Thank you, FreeDCam seem to to what I need, and is reasonably fast
And thanks for the tip on swipe for options.
Weird it do not have 50 Hz filter, but 45 and 55… (100 Hz and 25 Hz works.)
I’m still doing experiments with noise reduction and exposure, I’m not fully satisfied. There’s also an algorithm active which intensifies edges in the picture by increasing the contrast there, this is not good because it sticks out. It seems to be not easy to take a picture which fulfills all expectations. And when you manipulate ISO and/or exposure time FreeDCam tends to crash again and again. – Ahm, I have only a 50Hz and a 60Hz option.
Until now I have the best results with a GCam 7.4 port. And I didn’t even change the default settings a lot.
The GCam app works perfectly and smoothly with e.
I took a night pictures (during a party in a garden) and compared it with exactly the same picture shot by my friend and his Pixel6. The two pictures were the same quality on screen. No difference, no noise.
But, the correct GCam hack is difficult to find for each phone.
I note there is in F-Droid: Gcam Services Provider, that is not a visible app, but just provides needed functions for stock Gcam.
I was thinking users can with it installed, then install and use google Gcam from Aurora store. But i fail to find google gcam, just some other…
Anyone tried this combo?
Are we using different versions? Mine is 4.3.65. From App Lounge. The slider, activated from an icon in the panel activated by swiping from left, contain more than twenty shutter times.
Interesting. Yes the latter is much more grainy. Can you see (i.e from EXIF data) what are the difference in shutter speed? Maybe the e app use much shorter shutter?
BTW i love being on ships (occasional speciality repairman)
Mine is also 4.3.65 but from F-Droid, build date is March 12, 2022. – A mystery.
I found out now: one of the options with a big negative impact is the one called “Vignettierung” (I can’t translate it, this is also not German and has no further explanation), the next option under “Wavelet noise reduction”. This is the algorithm I mentioned which tries to sharpen edges. If this is active you get lots of artificial pixels you never want to have anywhere.
That’s typical. OpenCamera and it’s derivates are not good in noise reduction, especially under low light conditions. You can try some settings for that but the result is either no noise reduction at all or a grade of blur which looks like not exactly focused at the end. I tried a lot to adjust that but I don’t get it. Shutter speed is not so important, the difference is the noise reduction algorithm: GCam does it out of the box in a very sophisticated manner.
