Landscape photography can be said to be a photographic art that pays the most attention to the exchange of “landscape, camera, photographer” among various types of photography themes.
The essence of photography is to record. In fact, the essence of photography can also be selection in front of the scene, the photographer chooses the scope of the things in front of him (framing the picture), chooses the best state of the camera (pre-adjustment parameters), and chooses the best according to his own understanding of beauty. The timing of the shutter (press the shutter to shoot), so photography also has a slightly modest pronoun, called “glance”.
In the era of traditional cameras, a piece of landscape photography requires the mutual fulfillment of landscape, camera and photographer. In front of the beautiful scenery, the photographer’s aesthetics and technology are important, but their ability will be limited by the upper limit of the camera. It is necessary to know and control the performance and imaging style of the camera, and make accurate judgments and adjustments before pressing the shutter.
In the past, it was difficult for mobile phone cameras to control landscape photography in the face of complex and changeable natural environments and urban environments, the most taboo for mobile phone cameras with small bases, small apertures, and low sensitivity happened to be landscape photography.
The most common high-brightness and extremely dark scenes cannot obtain light well at all, so the photography of mobile phones at that time is directly blocked from landscape photography.
Then the camera modules of smartphones began to develop in the direction of large base and multi-camera. Small mobile phones began to capture light better, and their ability to cope with strong light and dark night scenes became higher and higher.
Using an outsole and a large aperture lens to increase the amount of light entering the CMOS has the most direct and impressive effect. The Samsung GW1 of the wide-angle main camera of the vivo X30 Pro series in 2019 uses a 1/1.7-inch CMOS, the rear vivo X50 Pro+, vivo X60 Pro+, and vivo X70 Pro+ use a 1/1.3-inch Samsung GN1 sensor for this year’s vivo X80 Pro, vivo asked Samsung to customize a GNV outsole with a size of 1/1.3-inch.
vivo directly revealed at imaging strategy conference that the next generation will use a larger bottom CMOS, and the photosensitive area is 77% larger than that of the previous generation GNV. Here is a translation for everyone, the next generation of vivo X90 series is very likely to use 1 inch size CMOS is used for the wide-angle main camera.
There is actually a precedent for the application of 1-inch outsole in mobile phone images, and it has received a good market response. Although vivo is not the first domestic manufacturer to enter the 1-inch outsole, some of vivo has accumulated technical barriers in imaging software and hardware for a long time, the superior integration capabilities of upstream and downstream manufacturers, and the results of cooperation with partners.
The cooperation between vivo and Zeiss started with the vivo X60 series in 2020. So far, each rear camera of all vivo X series uses Zeiss T* optical lens group, high-transmission glass lens, and Zeiss T* coating, which directly reduces the stray light and ghosting.
This year, the GNV wide-angle main camera of the vivo X80 Pro uses a 7-lens lens group of 6P (resin) + 1G (glass). It has been upgraded to 7P + 1G, and has a larger equivalent aperture than the current vivo X80 Pro high lens, large aperture and outsole, which directly greatly improves the ability of the camera system to capture light from the physical optics, while making the phone more It is easy to create an optical blur effect, and even in a dark night environment, it can shoot clear, clean and artifact-free natural night scenes or urban night scenes.
If today’s smartphones only do this, it is nothing more than miniaturizing traditional cameras. In order to popularize and popularize mobile photography, it is necessary to reduce the cost of driving for users, and even take over the work of original professional photographers and even part of the photography team. At the moment of pressing the shutter, the photographer has already taken over the photographer to do the parameter adjustment and even the post-production work, lowering the threshold for obtaining landscape works. This is the work that computational photography needs to do.
vivo will define what is a good landscape photography from the three dimensions of color, tone and image quality color and tone are the keys to reflect the aesthetics of the work, and image quality is the most basic effect of the work guarantee. In the past, this required photographers to have a cognition of the scene in front of them, an understanding of the performance and parameters of the professional camera on hand, and to control the camera to shoot landscape works based on this cognition. This is a photographer/post-production, camera.
The process in which the three parties of the landscape cooperate and complete each other. What vivo does is the takeover part, which is responsible for the perception and judgment of the environment, taking over from the three aspects of color, tone and picture quality. Just press the shutter.
In vivo’s eyes, color has both subjective and objective sides. The subjective side is based on vivo’s understanding of user needs and memory color in recent years, forming a vivid, bright and textured color system. vivo vivid color, which is the default color system of the X series, the color saturation will be slightly higher, and the scene will be rendered, which is more pleasing and satisfies the most intuitive expression of images by ordinary users.
On the objective side, it is the result of the cooperation between vivo and Zeiss Natural Color. It is said that the style is formed by engineers fine-tuning more than 200,000 parameters of 140 typical color blocks. In terms of color, it is objective and scientific, and it can be obtained by tapping ZEISS on the camera interface.
Personally, I prefer this set of natural colors. In terms of color, it is really difficult to express it accurately in words. It is not deliberately rendered, and the color balance and transition are delicate in the finished film, which is in line with the imaging style created by the Zeiss lens on the camera, and is very close to the real color of the subject of the picture. It doesn’t look too bland, and even a bit like a Pentax film.
It is clear at a glance to compare the same set of light box proofs of two colors. The X-Rite standard color card on the right is a little duller, not as bright as the left one. In fact, this is the real color of the standard color card, and the right. The lower black color block is also significantly more recognizable.
From the perspective of camera debugging alone, it is not easy to achieve ΔE color accuracy. This year’s vivo X80 series is even better than last year’s vivo X70 series.There is no right or wrong in the subjective and objective aspects of color. Both sides meet the tastes of various consumers, and can also adapt to the shooting needs of more scenes and more scenery.
Shadow Tone emphasizes the three-dimensionality and layering of the image, as well as the rendering of the atmosphere of the image. For example, if the layers of the sky and water surface in landscape photography are monotonous, dim, and without layers, the work must be difficult to reach the hearts of the audience. Behind this, the camera needs to record as many colors and depths of light and shade as possible, that is, to have the ability to record raw data with a sufficiently high bit depth.
vivo uses the dynamic capture capability of up to 10 frames to perform RAW fusion processing of up to 22bit in the RAW domain, which can cover large light ratio scenes with a dynamic range of up to 15 stops, providing enough data for the camera to process the next step. To ensure the restoration of color and the realization of high dynamic range of the picture, and create a sense of layering in the image.
In addition, based on the ability of multi-frame fusion in the RAW domain to output high-bit-depth raw data, vivo’s SuperRaw can output 14-bit RAW information to meet the needs of more professional users for more advanced processing in the later stage, to meet more personalized colors , tone needs.
In today’s era of computational photography, optical hardware alone cannot support the image quality of the entire imaging system. In all aspects of image processing, vivo is supported by computational photography technology. For example, in the optical perception link, the deconvolution method is used to perform the inverse operation to reconstruct the data loss from the unavoidable optical loss of the lens group. to repair the loss of image quality.
It is said that vivo can “recover” about 35% of the loss information on the periscope camera in this optical super-resolution algorithm. The algorithm system has done more than 100 million scene training, and uses AI to assist in repairing the lost picture data, and finally to enhance the picture quality. It seems that we can expect the picture quality performance of the vivo X90 series at the telephoto end, and we will also use it at that time. Take it out for comparison.
At the level of optical perception, the image sensor also needs to undergo color correction, white balance and other processing in order to restore the information perceived by the human eye, and this process of continuous subtraction will inevitably cause a certain degree of picture deterioration and loss of picture quality.
vivo tries to solve this problem from the material of the image sensor, so that the image sensor can directly receive the picture information close to the human eye without experiencing picture deterioration caused by excessive correction. After Color Filter, the signal-to-noise ratio will increase by 20%, and the color reproduction ability will also increase by 15%.
The best way to test the comprehensive strength of a camera is the “Hard Mode” for night scene landscape photography. This year’s vivo X80 Pro night vision device, I believe that you have seen our previous evaluation video, and this time vivo has introduced a new “sky night scene system” in the next-generation X series of outsole.
It is said that a super-sensitive model with an ISO equivalent of 102400 is trained based on millions of night scene photos, and a fully-segmented semantic and color-tone AI network model with adaptive tone and color adjustment capabilities is realized to achieve multi-frame noise reduction and multi-frame. The basic image quality reconstruction capabilities such as pixel shift and HDR can even achieve the function of shooting the starry sky for a few seconds without the tripod.
Everything about algorithms and AI models is backed by the support and drive of vivo’s next-generation self-developed chips, which will be built on the new AI-ISP architecture, allowing the entire chip to better serve the AI calculation of computational photography. If nothing else, according to vivo’s conventional naming rules, this self-developed chip is likely to be called “V2”.
Regarding the next-generation X series of vivo, that is, the imaging system of the vivo X90 series, through vivo’s imaging strategy conference this year, we have already glimpsed the outline of it. A new generation of self-developed chips with a new architecture is almost a certainty.
vivo does not overemphasize large-size CMOS, but emphasizes a complete set of imaging technology matrix that integrates software and hardware, self-developed and cooperative, and will serve this 1-inch CMOS. The 1-inch CMOS will carry the mobile imaging technology of vivo to achieve the next leap of vivo imaging and the further establishment of technical barriers, and practice humanized professional imaging, whether it is an ordinary user or a professional user, let scenery blockbuster become more accessible.
With a larger hardware base, newer and more efficient self-developed chips, and further software and algorithm collaboration, what kind of answer will vivo’s next-generation vivo X90 series give. The answer may soon be revealed.
Terry Ts