Nokia just officially unveiled the Lumia 1020 PureView with its 41-megapixel camera after months of leaks, confirming much of what was already suspected. One such revelation was the previously rumoured Nokia Pro Camera app, a follow-up on Nokia’s Smart Camera app seen on the Lumia 925. But what exactly does the Nokia Pro Camera app and Nokia’s other bundled-in imaging software offer? Read on to find out.
Nokia’s Pro Camera app is primarily designed to take advantage of the fact you’re dealing with a camera setup that’s virtually on the professional level, the clue is in the name, and what that means is a series of settings specifically tailored to let you use it as you might a DSLR.
The app allows precise control of highly influential camera settings such as the ISO, shutter speed, exposure, white balance and focus. It also includes framing grids to help you with composure.
Shutter speed and exposure allow you to do some pretty fancy and creative stuff simply by adjusting the amount of time the phone’s mechanical shutter is open for and as a result how much light it’s exposed to.
This means you can manually create motion-capture images with blurred movement, but extends even further – if you’ve ever seen those artsy images of city traffic at night where all the lights stream into ribbons, or those shots where people write and paint in the air with torches, that’s exactly the stuff we’re talking about here.
More precise control of the ISO, exposure and white balance is going to help when you’re dealing with awkward lighting scenarios to keep everything looking natural.
Automatic white balance can often be inaccurate or temperamental at best, so being able to dial it in should allow for better quality images.
The same is true of automatic ISO, which has a tendency to overcompensate for very dark conditions – this can result in extra noise in the photo and that’s a bad thing. Manual control allows you to lower it to something more contextually appropriate, offsetting the dark environment but without ramping up the noise. The Lumia 1020’s ISO setting goes as high as 3,200, much higher than the Lumia 925’s 1,200 which was itself an improvement on the Lumia 920.
Manual focus is going to be a boon for anyone who wants to get extreme close-ups without relying on automatic macro modes.
Nokia’s presentation of these controls is impressive indeed. The app shows a series of concentric rings emanating from the right-hand side of the display (in landscape orientation). Each ring can be dialled up and down for its respective setting, and you’re easily able to toggle different rings on or off to de-clutter the interface depending on what you’re using at the time.
There are other advantages too – because the Lumia 1020 captures both a 5-megapixel and 32-megapixel images at the same time and preserves these in the photo data you can do some clever post-production stuff. You can capture a photo while zoomed-in up to 6x, but then go back to that photo at a later date and zoom out of it to see more. This also works the other way round and you can fully edit, crop, rotate and generally faff around with it to your heart’s content.
The Lumia 1020 also features a panoramic capture mode, Nokia’s Creative Studio which lets you apply filters on the fly, Cinemagraph which lets you create and edit animated .GIFs and last, but by no means least, Nokia’s existing Smart Camera app.
As with the Lumia 925, Smart Camera lets you do further editing on the fly by letting you capture a sequence of images in burst mode before and after the main photo. This means you can select best faces and compose a perfect group picture, remove unwanted moving objects or people which intrude on your shot, or create time-lapse movement photos where you can add, remove or edit individual frames and event tweak levels of fade per frame.
Not bad, Nokia. We look forward to testing the Lumia 1020 out very soon!
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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