Greys in skies

I've been messing with sky photos to try to make them look better algorithmically and realized they have greys in them more than I realized (I thought my histograms of saturation were wrong at first).  Here's an example that shows a grey region between blue and orange (full at John Roever's flickr)

And one over the ocean (full photo at this Carmel page):

 And even when there is even the slightest hint of orange (from here), although there is a slight green bias:

So greys are just more common than I realized.

More real-world lighting that looks like a graphics bug

Here is a scene from my house.  No nightlights or floor lighting.  These pictures are not exaggerated.

That looks like there is a light!

The light actually comes from the window but still it looks like there is a light under the couch

Another view.  The sun on the couch is just very very bright

A curious search fail

I have just moved from a Windows Mobile Phone to an iPhone, and I am super-impressed with both devices' hardware and software.  However, I am equally surprised at the failure modes of Apple's and Microsoft's app stores.  We have a Windows app called "Pando".  If you search for "Pando" you don't find it.  Apple manages to fail as impressively on our app "Pic!" which one cannot find searching by title.  In each case, you can find it by searching under "Pixio", our partner whose app store portal we use (Pixio had 2 of the first 300 apps on the Apple app store, and we love the name!).  If anybody knows what channel to submit a bug report on either of these things, let me know.  App discovery is hard enough if you ARE in the index :)

Smartphone camera ratings

Mike Herf pointed me to a really serious evaluation of the iPhone6 where it came out the current leader (dxomark link).

Their numeric ratings I collected from their various pages (take with a grain of salt as any single number has issues-- look at their detailed tests before you buy anything based on it):

1. 86  iPhone 6
2. 79 Galaxy S5 
3. 79 Galaxy S4
4. 76 Sony Xperia Z1
5. 76 iPhone 5s
6. 74 Nokia Lumina 1020
7. 73 LG G2
8. 72 iPhone 5
9. 63 HTC One M8   

Bottom line appears that everybody has caught up to the 5s, but Apple has created a gap again.  

A Rebuttal to the Daily Mail

Having just got out an app to beat the iPhone6 launch (Pic!  try it!),  I am catching up on all the reading I haven't done the last few months.   People who know me well will not be surprised that the Daily Mail is my favorite paper.  I try to be intellectual enough to read The Guardian and the FT, but the Mail is my kind of paper.   I was pleased to see an app by my buds at Pixio featured in the Mail during my news blackout.  Further, it got trashed by the Mail, which I know often says good things about a person, place, or thing.  I actually had never used the app, so I bought it for 99 cents US and in fact I think it is a nice little app that you can use to teach yourself how to use an abacus.   Further it was one of the first 300 apps on the store!  Not sure what the Mail has against the abacus, maybe some left over animosity from the Roman Empire (being stuck on the wrong side of that wall would make anyone mad). It’s cheaper and easier than going out and buying a physical one, the counters on it make it obvious how it works unlike the real ones which I never  understood before today.   So you can make yourself smarter for 99 cents, or you can buy a Sunday Daily Mail for $2 and make yourself dumber reading stories about Honey Boo Boo and seeing pictures of buxom Octoberfest waitresses.  Or you can spend $3 and come out exactly as smart as you were before you started.  That being said, I will use the language I have learned reading the Mail and tell them that on this issue they are a bunch of stupid gits that should probably be using two cans and a string instead of a reviewing apps for smart phones.

While I am talking about Pixio, let me tell you that its co-founder, Lorenzo Swank, got in line 33 hours before the iPhone6 was available, and he got one.  Exactly 33 hours later he dropped it in the toilet.  I think that he is probably the first person on Earth to test an iPhone 6 with a toilet dunk, results as expected (it does come with a prize: paying Apple more money).  Maybe the Daily Mail should do a story on that, because things involving idiocy and bathrooms seem to be more up their alley.  Like what ever happened to Honey Boo Boo for example...

More iPhone6 tests: app using the camera

As I thought about how almost absurdly good the iPhone6 is in low light, I became concerned this was only available in the Apple camera app.  I just took pictures on the inside of my cabinet (it's quite dark) and did a side-by-side test of the Apple Camera app and an app taken inside Pic!

taken inside Apple Camera app

Taken inside Pic!

Thankfully, whatever low-light mojo is going on under the hood, is the default for 3rd party developers.  For fun I also tried posterizing it to see how the noise looked, and the "random dithered" nature of the noise has a cool look to my eye.

Posterization inside Pic!

Just so my blog doesn't devolve into a Apple Fanboy festival, note that as an App Extension our app often crashes in the real phone but is fine with all the simulators.  Not surprising for a new feature (and in our case a new language: Swift), but it appears this is Apple's bug.  We eagerly await iOS 8.01.  But the app seems to work great as an app, so far from a wipe-out.  The other two apps with photo extensions we are aware of (Camera+ and Fragment) are faring a little better, and it would be nice to see if they are written in Swift or Objective-C.  Further if you search the Apple Store for "Pic!" it doesn't find our app.  Talk about an app discovery problem!  So search for "Pixio" or use this link.

A test on moving objects and the iPhone 6+

Here is a low-light moving object (2 on the stand mixer scale).  Impressive!  I will not include my real camera until I find the charger :)

iPhone 5c

iPhone 6+

And here are some 200x200 pixel close-ups with the 5c on the left of each

Here is the post on the right

Moving object (farthest white part on the left of paddle)

Clearly the 6+ is way better.  But interesting that the noise is really at the pixel level with smaller blobs you see there is a better dithering effect.  As a Monte Carlo guy, I like the path tracing look, and with so many pixels it will work.  Whatever is going on under the hood it is impressive, because as far as I know the sensors are not that different.