This reminds me. How do you actually take astro-photos on a pixel? From what I’ve read, you just need to point it at the sky and the star button should appear. I have the 8 pro and have never seen it.
You need a tripod or something to rest the phone against. The prompt to take an astrophotography photo doesn’t come up until the phone had been held VERY still for 5-10 sec.
The maximum amount of light that can get in your camera is determined by the aperture size, meaning how large the hole in front of the sensor can open, also commonly called f-stop. Smaller f-stop means more light (as it’s a ratio)
The Realme’s regular wide-angle back camera has a maximum aperture of f/1.8, while Pixel has f/1.85. Meaning technically, they’re more or less equivalent, you shouldn’t get that much more light in so little time. This could be the Realme camera software making really shit post-processing…
The astrophotography mode on Pixels (the only way to get 4 min exposure in the default camera app) works by taking quite a few photos with shorter exposures and then matching them up in post processing.
You even get a short animation at the end where every captured photo gets processed using the rest, so you can see stars moving around during the capture.
Wait there’s an astral photography mode on the pixels? I’ve gotten some half decent star photos with just the night shot mode and 2 second exposure, but I’ll have to look for it next time I’m outside at night.
It’s somewhat hidden if you don’t know where to look. You have to switch to Night sight mode, turn on astrophotography in the settings, and then set the phone down on a stable surface. After a few seconds without any movement, the capture button will change from moon to three stars and pressing it will start the 4 minute capture.
I just made a bunch of Pixel 7 astro shots in the last week.
I’ve found the bright spot in the middle to be consistent enough that I added a mask to my Lightroom preset to cancel it out. I’m not really sure what they were going for there. I suppose it could be some sort of lens or stacking artifact. I just don’t get it. With all the processing they use to make these captures, you’d think they would’ve evened it out themselves. Either way, it’s simple enough to work around.
I’ve always been really impressed by astro mode. I had a 3a before, and even that produced stunning starscapes.
The Realme photo looks fake. You just don’t get that much light at night from a 30 second shot without a lot of post processing. You’d probably get blurry stars too, depending on your location.
It’s great if you want to take photos of your friends at night, but if you’re trying to get genuine photos of the stars, I wouldn’t trust it.
I think any and all comparisons of modern smartphones are worthless beyond personal preference. All of these phones do massive amounts of filtering and post processing which makes any direct technical comparison a waste of time. With equal exposure you could get either of these results with either phone by taking the raw image and doing the right editing.
Comparisons are helpful to find which matches my preferences, and it’s helpful to know which phone will process the images in a way that I can get images I like without doing the processing myself.
Yeah thats what i meant, ofcourse you wanna pick the phone that takes images in a way you like, but from a technical point of view its just hard to get real numbers.
Yeah the Pixel does stacking and other processing. It can produce similar shots with much shorter exposures, too. It just keeps going for minutes of you let it.
I think it’s a deliberate choice to not turn night shots into day.
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