Nokia compiling VS Photoshop down sample.

[shadyghost]

I can say without a doubt that Nokia's compiling is blurring my photos enough where its very noticeable. For example, I can take an image with Nokia Pro Camera, view the compiled pic then open the hires version and the image looks significantly sharper instantly. The easiest way see the difference though is download it to your computer both the hires and the compiled one and preview them one after the other. I opened the hires in photoshop and simply changed the size of the image to match the Nokia compiled image and the photoshop version is superior to Nokia's with similar file size. Anyone care to try this out themselves? I will upload examples later. Don't have a lot of time at the moment.

 

[ParoleGA]

I would have to say no, I do not see any blur. I used Bicubic (Best for reduction) setting in photoshop. I am not a pro, so just tell me if that is not the best resize option. I do see a ton more pixelation, upon zooming, on the photoshop resize though. Probably the sharpener on the PS resize?

The PS resize was over twice the file size, too, at same resolution.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=A0FF9C28060D5C47!1808&authkey=!AK-zru64zm5ID_o

 

[tgr42]

shadyghost: I think it works opposite from what you described...? You are viewing the original images at 1:1 zoom level for sharpness comparisons, right? If not, you're adding another resize algorithm to the mix, which is a very bad idea.

In my experience so far, the phone is resizing the image down to 5MP in a way that aggressively sharpens the image. If I resize the high-res pic down to 5MP with say, Paint.NET, and then flip between both images while viewing at a 1:1 zoom level, the phone's resizing is clearly sharper than Paint.NET's resizing. Paint.NET's resizing looks superior to me. I'm not sure if the phone is just being too aggressive in its pursuit of sharpness (I guess people complained about their pics being too soft in the past?) or if they're also using a lower quality resize algorithm, possibly for performance reasons. Resizing from 38MP down to 5MP is a reasonably computationally intensive task, and it's not clear (to me) what kind of hardware is actually performing the task.

Anyway I think the 5MP pics should be "good enough" for most purposes, but clearly you'll want to resize the high-res pics yourself when you want the best possible quality. It's a little unfortunate to be put in this situation but not very surprising. It would be cool if they had resize sharpness and/or quality settings for the 5MP pics. And it would also be helpful if they offered three settings for saving ("5MP", "38MP", "5MP+38MP") instead of just two ("5MP", "5MP+38MP"), but I'm guessing the rest of the phone's infrastructure is not up to that.

 

[shadyghost]

I would have to say no, I do not see any blur. I used Bicubic (Best for reduction) setting in photoshop. I am not a pro, so just tell me if that is not the best resize option. I do see a ton more pixelation, upon zooming, on the photoshop resize though. Probably the sharpener on the PS resize?

The PS resize was over twice the file size, too, at same resolution.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=A0FF9C28060D5C47!1808&authkey=!AK-zru64zm5ID_o

Ok thank you for checking that out, I'm an *****. I had the hires and pro pics mixed up so the blurring I was seeing was the lack of the sharpening filters on the hires photos (which I thought was the Nokia sampled ones). Sorry guys. I still can get better results with Photoshop though. Not really drastic but its noticeable to me. Having the pics as pngs are a plus as well.

 

[TemjinC]

Ok thank you for checking that out, I'm an *****. I had the hires and pro pics mixed up so the blurring I was seeing was the lack of the sharpening filters on the hires photos (which I thought was the Nokia sampled ones). Sorry guys. I still can get better results with Photoshop though. Not really drastic but its noticeable to me. Having the pics as pngs are a plus as well.

Ya, of course. JPEG codec in general destroy the image, but it is the most distributed image format.

 

[vlad0]

On the 808, the Nokia's oversampling algorithm is better than any post process I've tried.. especially in low night.

The closest I've gotten to it is using Lanczos3, which as far as I know is the closest thing to Nokia's own implementation, so I recommend using that one whenever you downscale.

From my own tests, the full res images from the 1020 respond very well to Lanczos3... I did a couple down to 8Mpix and they look very good.