Nokia Lumia 925: Nokia Smart Camera features [VIDEO]

News Paul Briden 16:29, 14 May 2013

We check out the Lumia 925 and Nokia's Smart Camera capabilities

Nokia’s newly announced Lumia 925 introduces a slimmer, more lightweight casing for its already established and impressive PureView 8.7-megapixel camera technology, but it’s also the debut handset for Nokia’s Smart Camera app, which introduces a bucket-load of new camera capabilities.

Nokia Lumia 925 hands on review, pricing and availability

Nokia Smart Camera is primarily a built-in editing suite for your photos, however, it’s seamlessly integrated – you don’t have to open a separate app to access these features you simply edit right there in the gallery view and it’s been engineered specifically to be as easy to use as possible.

Like many of its competitors, the Nokia’s Smart Camera features a multishot capture mode which also incorporates a ‘Best Shot’ picker and a ‘Best Face’ tool which allows you to choose the best faces for people in your photos from a series of stills.

Action shot is rather similar to the ‘Drama shot’ mode found on the Samsung Galaxy S4 – it’ll capture a sequence of images and let you set up a time-lapse image. In Nokia’s main example you can see skateboarders in the run up to a jump as well as performing it and then landing.

Nokia has added a few extras to distinguish it from competitors though, mainly in terms of the freedom with which you can edit this footage – you can essentially add or remove as many of the frames as you like and set them to different levels of opacity, so if you want just two or three stages of the skateboarder jumping and only one of those to be fully un-faded you can do that with a few taps and swipes.

The most impressive thing here, and this applies to all of Nokia’s editing modes, is how fast and loose both the interface itself and the capabilities are. You’re pretty much free to chop and change everything on the fly but to also to go back, undo, re-edit and extensively alter footage you’ve already modified, because the phone keeps all the data for a whole sequence you can always start over with a new version of your pictures and videos.

Nokia has also followed BlackBerry and Samsung’s example by including an editing function where you can remove passers-by who block your shots on a frame-by-frame basis, though again, as all the information is retained you can also add them back in if you wish.

Another mode is Motion Blur, which you can add to varying degrees of intensity to create the illusion of movement.

The package also works alongside Nokia’s existing suite of built-in apps including Creative Studio and Cinemagraph. Creative Studio lets you do things like a TiltShift filter which lets you get that ‘model train set’ effect.

Another mode lets you change the picture into black and white before selecting which elements you want to ‘pop’ with colour. Cinemagraph can be used to create still images with moving components – GIFs, essentially.

Overall we were very impressed with Nokia’s new Smart Camera setup, not so much because of the features it introduces – many of these aren’t actually new – but the implementation is what’s so good. We’ve rarely seen a photo editing suite which is as well-integrated and easy to use as this one.