Develop Bugs

[Q] Camera doesn't focus well

Ok, I'm having a hit or miss problem with the camera. I have fresh 3.1, btw.
I'll try to take a picture of something, for example, I have a rubix cube here. keeping the camera about 8" away from the cube, trying to get a picture of the word "Rubix". I tap the button to take a picture. the camera goes in and out of focus, it focuses the word "Rubix" perfectly, then goes out of focus and snaps the picture. I've tried tapping the screen to focus on the specific area, and it still does it. I've tried holding the button down until the picture takes, but it still goes in and out of focus, then snaps a blurry pic, or at least the area I want focused is blurry. Another issue with the flash... When the flash goes off, the camera will focus in and out on the object, and usually hold until the flashed area is focused and not washed out. But the camera just snaps the picture without focusing.
Like I said, both problems come and go. Any ideas?

I've searched and I still don't see any answers. Anyone?

The camera on the phone is pretty bad IMO. Typical results.

supdawg said:
The camera on the phone is pretty bad IMO. Typical results.
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Yeah what he said. It's almost like some htc exec said on the day before launch, "you guys did put a camera on this thing right?" And some hung over strung out engineer was like "um.."

Did you try changing the settings to Macro for close up shots?

nbajwill55 said:
Did you try changing the settings to Macro for close up shots?
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Im pretty sure there isnt a macro setting.

jasongthang said:
Ok, I'm having a hit or miss problem with the camera. I have fresh 3.1, btw.
I'll try to take a picture of something, for example, I have a rubix cube here. keeping the camera about 8" away from the cube, trying to get a picture of the word "Rubix". I tap the button to take a picture. the camera goes in and out of focus, it focuses the word "Rubix" perfectly, then goes out of focus and snaps the picture. I've tried tapping the screen to focus on the specific area, and it still does it. I've tried holding the button down until the picture takes, but it still goes in and out of focus, then snaps a blurry pic, or at least the area I want focused is blurry. Another issue with the flash... When the flash goes off, the camera will focus in and out on the object, and usually hold until the flashed area is focused and not washed out. But the camera just snaps the picture without focusing.
Like I said, both problems come and go. Any ideas?
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Indeed Jason, indeed.
The TTF utility is very hit and miss. As is the entire camera functionality.
See here for more interest on this topic:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=782211
Sent from my Fresh 3.4 Evo (2nd refurbished unit) with major light leakage, crappy camera, and lag switch enabled.

The camera focusing algorithm appears to be flawed.
It will take someone to completely rewrite the camera app code to make this right with the evo camera.
It's clear to me that the AOSP camera code doesn't work well with the Evo camera. And unfortunately, HTC chose not to use a new code, but rather use the default Froyo code with this new piece of hardware.
Until someone takes the time to write the proper code for focusing the Evo camera, you are stuck with trying to manually focus the camera, multiple times, until the good looking focus is achieved.
It takes me good 5-10 times to manually focus the camera until a good sharp image is seen...

GS3 Camera Issue:take picture but when shows up in gallery much darker

I've tried to change the settings including the mode and exposure but same issue. Like I said when I am about to take a picture and looking at the screen, lighting is great, I take the picture but then when it hits the gallery it is so much darker.
Any ideas? I changed over from the nexus s which always took awsome pics and this is supposed to be better so any help would be appreciated.
I have not gone to a custom rom yet fyi.
appreciate the help

I notice that too. I think it's because the phone automatically turns brightness all the way up in the camera app, then it goes back to the brightness you set to when you exit the camera app. So that makes the picture turns out to look a lot darker.

try wiping the app data

dr.devman said:
try wiping the app data
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bit of a novice so if you might explain the steps involved would be appreciated thank you in advance...
seems like the first suggestion helped the gallery show up brighter. what I did was go in and uncheck the automatic display and just set at a higher brightness.
any other suggestions always welcome

go to setting>apps>all>scroll and tap camera app>wipe data

dr.devman said:
go to setting>apps>all>scroll and tap camera app>wipe data
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thank you I will try that. low light shots seem to pose some challenges...and the flash washes out..gonna have to play around a bit with this to see if I can improve. Doesn't make sense that my nexus s seemed to take better shots but sure if I tweak some things I can get this on track

Camera preview is cropped

For quite a while, I have noticed that the preview in stock camera app which comes with several ROMs is simply not full screen, but rather cropped. Final images looks fine though.
I'm currently on latest nightly Rootbox and problem still persists. Is that normal behaviour?

krneki10 said:
For quite a while, I have noticed that the preview in stock camera app which comes with several ROMs is simply not full screen, but rather cropped. Final images looks fine though.
I'm currently on latest nightly Rootbox and problem still persists. Is that normal behaviour?
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Well if you refer to the fact, that the final images include a wider/higher(depending on orientation) image than the previewed, it's because the camera sensor has a different aspect ratio than your screen. This means that either google had to put 1cm black bares on the top and bottom of the screen in preview mode or they could use the entire screen to show a cropped preview. They chose the latter, and in that case they could either crop the final image as well or include the full photo. Again they chose the latter option.

mortenmhp said:
Well if you refer to the fact, that the final images include a wider/higher(depending on orientation) image than the previewed, it's because the camera sensor has a different aspect ratio than your screen. This means that either google had to put 1cm black bares on the top and bottom of the screen in preview mode or they could use the entire screen to show a cropped preview. They chose the latter, and in that case they could either crop the final image as well or include the full photo. Again they chose the latter option.
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That was a foolish choice then. The point of a preview is to show what your photo will look like. The gallery displays photos properly and so should the camera. I don't need a full screen camera display, but I do need to see what my picture will look like before I take it.

Well I'll have to disagree with you on that one, we are talking about a mobile camera, and a bad one at that. This is no expensive high end dslr. Your image includes everything shown in the preview and more, allowing you to crop the image if you coincidently included something not meant for the picture.(the phone even includes an easy tool allowing you to do this) This fits the usecase in which a smartphone camera will actually be used, e.g. point and shoot to save the moment, perfectly.
Had they thrown in huge black bars everybody would hate the camera app, and to me a cropped 16:9 image is horrible, leaving only one viable option. I get that you disagree, but that doesn't make it a stupid decision.
edit: Even apple was forced to make the same design choice on the iphone 5 because they switched to the 16:9 screen ratio:
http://blog.crushapps.com/2012/09/with-the-iphone-5s-camera-app-what-you-see-is-not-what-you-get/

mortenmhp said:
Well I'll have to disagree with you on that one, we are talking about a mobile camera, and a bad one at that.
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Just because it's not a good camera, no reason to make it worse.
Had they thrown in huge black bars everybody would hate the camera app, and to me a cropped 16:9 image is horrible, leaving only one viable option. I get that you disagree, but that doesn't make it a stupid decision.
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I can't agree with that at all. The old camera was not full screen and I liked it much better because it was easier to use. The current one it seems to be all form before function, this full screen preview being just one example.

Just because it's not a good camera, no reason to make it worse.
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Correct but that wasn't at all the point i made, which you would have known, had you read more than the first sentence in that paragraph. The point is that this is not a camera used to take high quality precision photos. This is a point and shoot camera, and for that purpose you don't lose any function, making it perfectly justifiable to prioritize the ui.(hence that is what the average user would prefer, since they would never notice the preview being cropped)

camera after August update

I don't know if it's just me but after the August update the camera seems to be taking really washed out photos, it's like they have turned down the saturation, photos that would usually be punchy and colourful are appearing bland and washed out.
Anyone else notice ?
Thanks Andy

BackDaws said:
I don't know if it's just me but after the August update the camera seems to be taking really washed out photos, it's like they have turned down the saturation, photos that would usually be punchy and colourful are appearing bland and washed out.
Anyone else notice ?
Thanks Andy
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I thought i was the only one..

Have you guys checked to see if the screen colour settings have changed?

Checked that as well, I'm going to do a full factory reset and I'll let you know, the camera is really mediocre now compared to the first couple of weeks of owning it.

Factory reset seems to have done the trick.

BackDaws said:
Factory reset seems to have done the trick.
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Good to know

So a factory reset is needed after the august update? And that'll bring the cam back to what it was?

Sorry to double post but you can't add attachments from the lab app.
These are sample shots I just did to see if it's bad. No filters and shot in auto mode.

thegreatkazoo said:
Sorry to double post but you can't add attachments from the lab app.
These are sample shots I just did to see if it's bad. No filters and shot in auto mode.
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They look fine to me

Can anyone else confirm the camera looks good after the ARF7 update? (t mobile here) I'm tired of having the update notification, but don't want to risk a messed up camera.
I did read on reddit that the 240 slow mo recoding is messed up though and stutters. Anyone else?

danman132x said:
Can anyone else confirm the camera looks good after the ARF7 update? (t mobile here) I'm tired of having the update notification, but don't want to risk a messed up camera.
I did read on reddit that the 240 slow mo recoding is messed up though and stutters. Anyone else?
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There are only 2 members out of the entire S9 forum who have reported anything being wrong with anything after the August update, one of which was fixed with a reset, just update
August update running fine here, no issues with camera at all

Question Pixel 6 Pro gcam mod?

Whilst this may initially seem pointless, given we have the Pixel gcam of course, has anyone found/tried any gcam mods for our device? The reason I ask is I'd maybe be interested in adjusting some of the saturation/sharpness levels saved as a profile, to suit my personal preferences

I haven't seen any yet. I'm sure there will be in time.

I'm very keen on seeing this as well. Especially the ability to turn down sharpening and noise reduction (so that it can be done more elegantly in post).

Gnaius said:
I'm very keen on seeing this as well. Especially the ability to turn down sharpening and noise reduction (so that it can be done more elegantly in post).
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If you are planning to go post, why not use the DNGs in the first place? They offer way more room for adjustment.
The main use I peronally got from the modded GCAM on my Pixel 3, was to get better JPEGs out of the box that retain the level of detail and natural sharpness off the DNGs. I so hope to be able to do this for my 6 soon. The DNGs are AWESOME, but the JPEGs are just weak.

cd993 said:
Whilst this may initially seem pointless, given we have the Pixel gcam of course, has anyone found/tried any gcam mods for our device? The reason I ask is I'd maybe be interested in adjusting some of the saturation/sharpness levels saved as a profile, to suit my personal preferences
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I experimented a bit (since the new P6 GCam is oversaturating/HDR-ing the s*it out of every picture), and people had some discussion about this in the P6 Dev group - summary: Nope, previous mods/versions don't work properly, just sideloading them doesn't give good results.
We'll have to wait for "decent" custom GCam mods that are tuned for the P6. As far as I know, there are none (yet).

Morgrain said:
I experimented a bit (since the new P6 GCam is oversaturating/HDR-ing the s*it out of every picture), and people had some discussion about this in the P6 Dev group - summary: Nope, previous mods/versions don't work properly, just sideloading them doesn't give good results.
We'll have to wait for "decent" custom GCam mods that are tuned for the P6. As far as I know, there are none (yet).
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I'd like to adjust some levels too so yeah looking forward to seeing what can be done!

ThoroSOE said:
If you are planning to go post, why not use the DNGs in the first place? They offer way more room for adjustment.
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Can you explain/link to what are these DNGs please?
EDIT: nevermind, found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative

ThoroSOE said:
If you are planning to go post, why not use the DNGs in the first place? They offer way more room for adjustment.
The main use I peronally got from the modded GCAM on my Pixel 3, was to get better JPEGs out of the box that retain the level of detail and natural sharpness off the DNGs. I so hope to be able to do this for my 6 soon. The DNGs are AWESOME, but the JPEGs are just weak.
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Well, by "post" I sometimes just mean sharpening a bit in Snapseed or Instagram; and adjusting levels. I like to set the jpegs to be slightly soft, with a bit more noise than most find acceptable, and with lower contrast. Frankly, once I had the modded GCam set up correctly, the 3XL did a great job with the rest of the parameters. You have to do a *lot* of work on a DNG just to bring it up to the level of Pixel's computational processing (once you've dialled down the overprocessing). After which, yeah, you have a 16-bit image with much more latitude, but that's not generally how I use my phone.
I try to do critical work with larger cameras. And on anything larger than a phone, I never shoot jpegs — only raw. Although even that may change if the big camera makers start getting serious about computational photography; Olympus is making noises in that direction. I'm old school, when it comes to working with unprocessed files, but there's a lot to be said for relying on the latest cameras' computational wizardry.
Anyway, I sense that we basically agree here.

Hmm ... I find, that mostly dialing down lighting and highlights as well as pushing saturation and vibrancy by about 10-20 in Lightroom mostly brings Pixel DNGs to a reasonable base, where editing them is not more work than touching up the JPEGs - albeit with much more latitude for edits. But I get, that everyone has their own workflow and baselines.
I just am glad, that we have these possibilities at all

Sine. said:
Can you explain/link to what are these DNGs please?
EDIT: nevermind, found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative
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Glad you found it. If you set your camera app to also take the RAW files, you can find them in the pictures -> RAW folder on your phone. Try it, it really is worth it. They look not that nice at the beginning. But turn down lighting and highlights a bit, push up saturation and vibrancy a notch and you will see, that the details are WAY better.
Free tools to do that on your device are Snapseed and Lightroom.

This mod works pretty good with p6p:
https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/dev-MWP/
in Mod Settings -> Developer Settings : untick "segmenter_use_darwinn_tpu_delegate" to avoid app crash whenever you shoot a face.
out of this small but fixable bug, with this mods default settings, there are a lot more details vs the stock google camera app.
As always, more details = a bit more noise.
But noise is not a big problem when it's controlled, especially if you make prints.
The xhdr processing in settings increase the dynamic range further too.
Everything can be adjusted in the settings, this mod deserve to be known.

All of you concerned about the over-processing issue, please weigh in here, so that Google can see our complaints: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/208860802
The more people who post, the more likely the complaint will be noticed. (I posted this on similar threads. Apologies if this looks like spam — it's strategic.)