Now that everything runs smoothly, the stealth sections were some of the best and most suspenseful parts of the game. The graphics have also been completely redone for Observer: System Redux and the framerate has been upgraded to a steady 60fps. This game was already praised for its visuals before, but now they’re simply stunning. I was really impressed with how great the people and biological matter look too, especially since that’s usually the worst aspect in most indie games. All of the textures and details are gorgeous, which is an odd thing to say about such a visceral and disturbing game. It’s by far one of the most beautiful nightmarish hellscapes you’ll ever see. The sound effects are so convincing that they’ll make you uneasy at times. I have spent many hours at home during the past year creating focus stacked images of common household items – fruits, nuts, flowers. I used a DSLR initially, but later realized that my new smartphone was often surprising me with the quality and sharpness of pictures. So I thought of using it for focus stacking. Then discovered this camera app ‘Open Camera’ that made it quite easy and interesting.īelow are some of my learnings and tips for doing focus stacked photos with a smartphone and Open Camera app. I used the Android app, but the learnings should apply regardless of which smartphone app is used as long as it allows pro-mode controls and the camera hardware is reasonable. Open Camera does all that, plus has a special mode for focus stacking photography.Īre the final pictures comparable with DSLR or of professional quality? Probably not. You can take a look at some samples attached below. But I am not a professional photographer anyway, and am happy to produce nice pictures that look good just on a smartphone or a computer screen.Ī mobile stand to position the phone usually in landscape mode. Some improvised lighting and props found within the kitchenĪ linux laptop with gimp, rawtherapee and few other tools. You would certainly need a good camera app that lets you shoot in macro/manual/pro mode with some control on focussing distance, exposure etc. I found that many budget phones had budget camera apps that had fixed picture modes that did not allow much manual control. So I looked around and discovered this nice FOSS app Open Camera in Google play store. It allows a much greater control on manual mode settings, and most importantly, has a special mode for focus stacking photography. The other important thing is that this app can use Google’s camera2 API if the OS bundled with the android smartphone allows it. This was a key criterion for me for choosing a smartphone to buy. If the phone model grants this API access the third party apps (like Open Camera) could potentially exploit many more aspects of the settings that are ultimately implemented by the OS components. Such phones may also emit raw files (.dng) with the help of this API. But note that very few budget cameras may allow this API access, many flagships do, and some midrange phones also do. You can check the phone models that allow camera2 API access on the internet. There is also an android app that checks this for any android phone – See “Camera2 API Probe” on Google Play Store. The Open Camera settings are fairly generically named so should be self-explanatory for use on most other camera apps: Which Open Camera settings were useful or critical? Self timer : 2 or 5 secs - to avoid jerky clicking.įocus peaking - to clearly verify the focused portions of the objectģx3 guides - to help decide which areas to focus and how many shots per areaĮxposure lock - when you focus on diff parts of the object the camera would meter the light and could change the exposure. So this lock helped.Įxposure compensation - for the usual reasons. Manual focus - to manually focus camera on the selected portion of the object. Looks like presently it cannot span the frame for locating parts of frame for focussing.) JPEG used more often.įocus assist - ability to zoom in to the frame to check focus (Used optionally. Special focus-stacking mode of Open Camera app. This app additionally allows multiple pictures shooting by automatically varying the focus from the closest portion of the object to the farthest portion of the object. You set the focus of these two extremes by two sliders. Then the app clicks a specified number of pictures (can be changed) by varying the focal lengths (possibly linearly). Why not use just the focus-stacking mode of Open Camera ? It can also (optionally) take an additional picture at the end with infinity focus to bring the background in sharp focus. In some cases I found that the focus-stacking mode did not cover some portions of the object possibly due to the intricate shapes of the objects.
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