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Android 5.0 Lollipop brings tons of improvements to the Android OS. From improved security, added features, bug fixes and general polishing of the OS to a completely redesigned “Material Design” UI which brings along a skeuomorphic approach to animations. Basically whatever you touch on the screen will move something else, every animation will move somewhere, on other words you’ll see elements on the screen moving around. We already have tons of coverage on the Android 5.0 Lollipop which you can check out in in the link above. We’re here to talk about a rather unexpected addition to the OS which was uncovered recently.
As you probably already know, Google is bringing support for RAW image files at the OS level along with the Android 5.0 Lollipop. This feature might actually improve captured images on every device running Android 5.0. What are RAW image files? Well, they’re basically a dump of all the image data capture by the camera’s sensor. Some of that data gets lost in the conversion into much smaller JPEG files which basically means we’re losing data we captured with the camera’s sensor. Android 5.0 Lollipop brings RAW image files support and that might improve our images considering it will allow us to perform the conversion ourselves by giving us access to the original RAW image we captured.
PkmX is a developer who released an app called “L Camera” which is an experimental camera app which is meant to shoot and save images in Adobe’s DNG format, reports Forbes. This is a rather popular RAW images format which you can edit all you want via third party apps. The developer used Nexus 5 running Google’s Android 5.0 developer preview in order to shoot these images and compare them to the original results of the Nexus 5’s camera. DNG files were converted manually into JPEG files via an editing app called RawTherapee, you can check out the results here.
Forbes’ Paul Monckton was intrigued and did a comparison of his own between the standard Nexus 5 camera app and the images which were taken in DNG format and then converted manually into JPEGs via Photoshop Lightroom. You can check the images in a gallery down below, first image is the standard JPEG while the other one is the RAW version manually converted. If you’d like to check out all his remarks visit the source link below. In short, he concluded that Nexus 5’s camera with access to RAW files actually shows potential though it didn’t help with every image. On the other hand, he was amazed by the difference in some images. In any case, such option is definitely good to have.
