I’m a big fan of creating good quality photos, especially portrait type where you can focus in on a subject and make them stand out. Of course to do that properly you need a DSLR with a good lens. But the latest batch of smartphones have been coming out with features to help you recreate the same kind of blur effect, and they all have their own unique way of helping you achieve the image you want. So let’s do a quick comparison in what I call the battle of the blur! The three phones I’ve chosen are the HTC One M8, the Galaxy S5 and the Nexus 5.
The technology behind the blur effect for HTC One M8 is the Duo Camera and Ufocus feature. There’s one camera that actually takes the shot, and another that is a depth sensor, that helps fill the image with information about what is foreground and what is background. The cool thing about the HTC is that the info is grabbed by default, there’s no setting you need to apply.
I like the HTC version because you can take pretty spontaneous shots – sometimes you may not get the ufocus but other times you will and if you actually want it you’ll plan to do it anyway. The software is very fast too – you’ll get the blur effect applied and rendered pretty much instantly. HTC has done a pretty good job with this effect.
The way the Galaxy S5 gets the blur effect going is by taking a few shots rapidly, each at different focus points, then combining those shots to give you an image which you can then use to select your focus highlight.
Selective focus isn’t the default shooting mode so you need to switch to it, and you have to be less than half a metre away from the object or person you want to snap, and the background needs to be one and a half meters away.
The one thing I did notice on this phone was there was some slight difference in images when selecting the different focus points in images with movement, and that’s because it’s a little like burst mode with multiple pics taken. So the best shots are ones that are planned. The resolution of the camera, at 16 megapixels, also provides great clarity.
Then we have the Nexus 5, and I’ve chosen to demo the blur effect on this relatively older smartphone because its camera software has been updated to the latest version of Google Camera, which is an app available in the Google play store, but is also native to the Nexus 5. Now the the technology driving this blur is again quite different.
Press the shoot icon and you’ll be instructed to move the camera up while staying centred on the foreground object. The phone software then uses an algorithm developed by Google scientists to determine the distance of each pixel based on the movement as seen by the camera.
So again, you need to be in a planned shot so you can move your camera with the composition reasonably still, and then you edit the shot. One thing I did notice right away was it takes quite a while for the software to develop the initial working image. What you do have though after that is the ability to change the range of blur effect – from only slightly out of focus to a background that is indecipherable, something that comes closest to a DSLR. You can save your images to gallery and go back to the original shot via the camera slide-in to edit another version.
So which is best for portrait style or creative photos? The HTC certainly has the best system with the Duo camera setup. The S5 blur effect feature is fairly restrictive and limited in how you can use it in real life situations, and the Google camera is a bit of a novelty but again it requires a patient set up, good light and a steady hand, plus you can take blurred background selfies.
None of these methods are as effective as using a bona fide DSLR but with smartphones packing everything in, blur-based pictures were never going to be far. None of these smartphones are perfect, and remember the phone software is merely manipulating pixels after the fact so its still a simulated depth of field effect based on info it’s taken from the environment.
[…] said before that I really like the large aperture, depth of field shots that the HTC One M8 can deliver using its Duo camera setup. One thing about this feature has always […]