Countless shots, just to create a perfect memory

Memories are irreplaceable. Money can buy a new TV, a house, even an island. But money can't buy the thrill of a first kiss, or the smile of a grandparent who's passed away, or the joy of becoming a parent and feeling a world of difference.

These are precious memories, memories that can be preserved in photos. Our brains are not perfect recorders, so we need photos to help us recreate bits and pieces of our lives and fill in our vague memories. Just like that ridiculous haircut you had in high school, when you see it again, you will recall that embarrassing time. Whether it is happy or sad, that photo in the yearbook will always make you feel something. .

Hence the stories of parents running from burning houses with their children under one arm and photo albums under the other. Fortunately, in the digital age, preserving images has become easier, and taking better-looking photos is no longer a difficult task. Gone are the days of using bulky point-and-shoot cameras, buying rolls of expensive film, and going to the photo studio to develop photos. Today, we take photos with our smartphones, which can store thousands of photos, not to mention cloud storage that makes capacity nearly unlimited. In less than a minute, smartphone users can take a high-quality photo, edit it, and share it on social media, the modern photo album.

Better photos mean better memories, or more accurate ones. Professional photographers scour the web for expensive digital single-lens reflex cameras (often called "DSLRs"), interchangeable lenses, and controllers with complex aperture and shutter speed settings. Of course, pros and enthusiasts still prefer to take their photos with DSLRs. The highest quality professional images still rely on DSLRs. But how do you capture the fleeting moments of everyday life? How do those of us without professional photography training or learning techniques take good photos? Can our smartphones take photos that come close to pro-level quality?

• "People expect their phones to have multiple cameras and they want to capture multiple images quickly without having to do any processing themselves."

Rahul Desai

Director of Software Product Management, Motorola

Today, high-end phones like the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro™ and Motorola edge+™ have multiple cameras that can switch between mid-range focal lengths at speeds that are imperceptible to the user. Both phones use a technique called “computational photography,” in which the phone’s smart cameras automatically apply settings to take better photos. Algorithms read light, depth of field, and other factors to adjust settings that were previously only available on expensive digital cameras and required skilled operators. These cameras are guided by software to take several images and select the best one, so users don’t have to repeatedly press the “delete” button to get the best shot from a large batch.

Rahul Desai, director of software product management at Motorola, said this is just one example of how camera phone technology has advanced so rapidly in a short period of time, helping you become a better photographer without a DSLR.

“It’s often said that the best camera is the one in your pocket, and now it’s arguably the smartphone in your pocket,” he said. “People expect their phones to have multiple cameras and they want to capture multiple images quickly without having to do any processing themselves.”

Modern smartphone cameras are far more capable than they were just a few years ago. Both the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro and Motorola edge+ feature software not often seen on DSLRs, including night modes, panorama settings, document modes, and the ability to stack multiple images to create the best photo. Both phones use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the types of images a user prefers.

Xiaomi Group Vice President Chang Cheng said the launch of these phones can quickly improve the photography skills of non-professional photographers.

Chang Cheng said: "Ordinary users don't need to know what kind of light or composition is needed to take a good photo. Instead, they can easily take high-quality photos with just one click."

That camera in your pocket is a technological marvel. Taking low-light photos or close-up shots requires advanced camera hardware and cutting-edge, smart software. But importantly, it requires your hands and your brain to work together. Here’s how to do it with the Motorola and Xiaomi smartphone cameras.

With smartphones featuring more and more cameras, you no longer need other photography equipment!

Smartphones aren’t getting smaller. The Motorola edge+ has three cameras, while the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro has four. Both phones have sensors large enough to take high-quality photos in low-light environments. In the past, smartphones could only take good photos within a limited depth range. Now, the edge+ can take panoramic photos from a distance or close-ups within 2 cm.

Matt Biggerstaff, director of imaging hardware engineering at Motorola, said people scoffed at the idea a few years ago when phone makers started putting multiple cameras on their phones, but that quickly faded as users realized that a smartphone in their pocket was like having a full-blown camera kit.

“Now, phones are modeled after DSLR cameras, with different lenses and multiple focal lengths,” he said. “They all have their own job and are important for capturing whatever image is in front of them.”

More memory means better graphics and faster speeds!

More powerful camera features require more DRAM to run shooting and editing applications smoothly. This is where Micron comes in. Both the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro and Motorola edge+ are equipped with up to 12GB of Micron’s next-generation low-power DDR5 DRAM (LPDDR5), even more than some desktop computers. As a result, these two phones have powerful computing power to incorporate artificial intelligence and other complex algorithms into camera functions. With the advent of 5G connectivity, the demand for larger capacity DRAM in mobile phones continues to increase. From 2018 to 2020, the capacity of low-power DRAM on high-end flagship phones doubled from 8GB to 16GB.

• "The Micron brand and its LPDDR5 memory are already widely recognized and have become standard in flagship phones."

Chang Cheng, Vice President of Xiaomi Group

Micron’s LPDDR5 DRAM accesses data 50 percent faster while consuming 20 percent less power than previous generations, opening the door to better cameras and smarter apps.

“Xiaomi was one of the first companies to use LPDDR5 memory, which laid a strong technical foundation…providing an efficient and convenient user experience,” Chang Cheng said. “At the same time, as Xiaomi’s flagship products continue to be popular, the Micron brand and its LPDDR5 memory have become widely recognized and have become standard for flagship phones.”

Motorola edge+ reserves a portion of memory specifically for camera functions and camera operations to ensure that the user experience is not greatly compromised by massive data processing.

“By fixing the amount of memory required, it’s much easier to take pictures,” Biggerstaff said. “Sometimes we can stack up to 12 frames at a native resolution of 27 megapixels. That’s very DRAM-intensive. But the user gets a better picture and it’s faster.”

With 5G, powerful cloud-based imaging software can free up smartphone capacity

Until now, the internal storage space of smartphones has been a limiting factor. But in the near future, when 5G connectivity is expected to become mainstream, these limitations will no longer be an issue, allowing phone designers to move the largest digital content to the cloud instead of storing it on the device. (The Motorola edge+ and Xiaomi 10 Pro already have 5G capabilities.)

Phones have limited space and battery life. Even with low-power DDR5 DRAM, phones are not supercomputers. On the other hand, combining smartphones with the cloud and 5G networks can make full use of the space, battery, and computing power provided by service providers. 5G is expected to be 20 times faster than 4G networks and can increase data transmission to the cloud to 20 gigabytes per second, which means that the next generation of computational photography can more effectively utilize the power of the cloud. Therefore, Motorola plans to overlay these 12 frames without taking up phone resources, or develop more complex photo applications in the future to overlay more images.

Computational photography allows you to capture colorful, vivid photos of flowers in your favorite park. The photo on the left was taken with a 2014 flagship phone. Note that the highlights are overexposed and the blurred background (bokeh) is achieved through traditional mechanical means. The photo on the right was taken with a 2020 Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro using computational photography using a high dynamic range (HDR) approach to combine multiple images for better exposure and intelligently blur the background to focus on the flower.

Chang Cheng said that 5G will open the door to artificial intelligence for computational photography. The algorithms on mobile phones can handle many intelligent tasks. In the future, mobile phones will truly tailor their functions for each user. This is the power of artificial intelligence.

Chang Cheng said: "With the help of high-speed, low-latency 5G networks, more powerful computing power and faster transmission speeds, AI operations that cannot be completed or are difficult to complete on mobile phones can be transmitted to the cloud for operation, thus pushing mobile photography to a higher level."

Today, phones have AI features like the rule of thirds image correction and cropping, which is a core concept in understanding photo composition. If you’re like most people and your beautiful fireworks photos are terrible, computational algorithms can identify less-than-ideal photo conditions and adjust settings to make those images shine.

“[Using AI], we can intelligently determine if this is fireworks or not… Night Sight stacks multiple frames to give you a brighter image at night, but we want to make sure that doesn’t get triggered when you’re taking a picture of fireworks because that would be bad. So there’s a prioritization algorithm going on in the background,” Desai explained.

Desai says this is just the beginning, and expects the cloud to take computational photography to new heights in the coming years.

“You can take a full image and send it to the cloud for tweaking,” Desai said. “People don’t like a flat, featureless image. They want it to be more vivid, and sometimes even fake, to make certain parts of the photo stand out more, and so on. We can do that in the cloud.”

Using computational photography to remember special stories

Old photo albums are living memories. Photos of grandparents or children remind us of moments in our lives. These links to the past are valuable treasures…even if, in many cases, the photos aren’t quite as good as we’d like them to be. Maybe the photo was underexposed, a relative wasn’t in the full shot, someone blinked when the shutter clicked, or the photo has yellowed over time. We’re okay with imperfect photos because most of us aren’t great photographers, and paper photos do deteriorate over time.

Portrait mode uses computational photography to intelligently blur the background and focus on the people we want to remember. The photo on the left was taken with a 2014 flagship smartphone, before Portrait mode became a standard feature in mobile cameras. The photo on the right was taken with a 2020 Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro in Portrait mode.

It won’t be like this anymore.

Digital files backed up in the cloud are dated and located so they won’t be lost in a fire. Computational photography will make each of us a better photographer, meaning that photo we take of Grandma on the porch at dusk will show her eyes open, not closed, as we want to remember them.

Smartphones don’t mean we can live a more exciting and fulfilling life, that still depends on us. But smartphones and advanced technology will ensure that we can draw memories from more beautiful images and relive the beautiful moments in our lives. There is no substitute for that.