Probably one of the most annoying things to happen in concerts or in any low light situations is for you to be blinded by a flash going off somewhere in the area or you yourself taking pictures with flash and having it come out uglier than expected. A new video ad that Google released is highlighting the Night Sight feature of the new Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL which they say will solve all of your low lighting mobile photography problems.
The 35-second ad basically shows how a flash can ruin the moment or ruin your subject’s eyesight during times when regular light isn’t enough to take good pictures. And the resulting photo is of course not that great anyway so all that flashing wasn’t worth it. It’s usually too bright, out of focus, and the subject is the only thing that’s visible amidst all the darkness.
Then Google shows off the Night Sight feature which makes everything sharper and generally better. It ends with a tagline, “Lose the flash, not the moment”. How it works is a combination of shutter magic and also machine learning. It keeps the shutter longer than the normal rate so it can capture more light. It captures 6 to 15 frames then aligns and merges these multiple frames either through HDR+’s merging algorithm (Pixel 1 and 2) or the Super Res Zoom’s merging algorithm (Pixel 3).
It also uses the Fast Fourier Color Constancy algorithm to choose the best colors for your photo and then ideal light-to-dark tone mapping so it won’t look overly bright. Then it will show you the final photo and you can see the per-frame exposure time. Of course all this happens in a matter of seconds or even split-seconds so you won’t really feel or see the entire process.
The bad news, at least for non-Pixel owners, is that it seems to be a Pixel-only feature. Hopefully, Google will see fit to roll it out to other devices or even future smartphones as well that have the technical capability to executer this.
