Comment by eth0up
15 hours ago
I've been using open camera on android since 2019.
It's far superior to anything I've seen natively installed on any device. It has a lot of options, which I suspect can be confusing to some, but they're worth familiarizing with.
My favorite feature is the macro, which when coupled with the right UI settings produces photos that when I have printed, result in the person saying "wow! You took that with a phone!?". And I say "yeah. Open Camera. It's great, try it sometime".
Highly recommend.
What phone do you have?
I havent tried Open Camera in a while, but my conclusion is that the phone's camera app is best.
Unable to afford a Google-free phone, I strictly use Moto, which with a bit of adb work and a lot of disabling shitware, gets close to actual Android. They also have excellent glass, aside from doing all I require of them.
I see criticism of Open Cam already, but I recommend trying it, with patience, and seeing what it can do. All my art images, all my videos, are all taken with open camera.
Edit: for the macro setting, it allows fine tuning, but the manual focus and manual zoom functions are superb for my purposes.
Edit2: Maybe irrelevant, but I always disable the stock camera and anything camera related. Not sure if that helps, but I know I don't want any fucking thing to do with shitware, so go as nuclear as possible.
Dismissing the stock apps as "shitware" without bothering to try them or offer specific examples of areas where Opencam is better does not inspire confidence in your opinions.
Full manual controls does not mean "better". I've been a photographer for more than 20 years using everything from fully-manual (no battery) film setups through modern mirrorless bodies. I know the tradeoffs between shutter speed, ISO, and aperture, I know how to manual focus.
....and most of the time I don't want any of those, especially on a phone, where I want a clear photo of a stationary object and the phone's automatic settings get it right the first time.
If something allows full manual controls but takes two seconds longer to be ready to shoot it is significantly worse as a camera for most of my use cases.
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Is it really as good as Google Camera at computational photography; noise reduction, night mode, deblurring, stacking, etc.? That would be very impressive.
No. It actually kinda sucks.
Its the same way that the Pinephone is "usable" but really, it sucks.
Depends on specific purpose and values. And it's a simple installation away from empirical validation.
Edit: one feature I'm fond of, when posting images on the Internet, is disabling exif data. I don't always want to put my coordinates on the Internet.
Disclaimer: I last used it years ago.
My experience was that while it was great with all the features, the photo quality simply was worse than the stock manufacturer app in newer phones. Only in my old Samsung Galaxy S5 was the quality on par.
Yes, by all means, everyone should try and compare.