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ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2018 11:27 am
by aluminumwelder
Even if you have decent lighting the ipad front facing camera uses a shutter speed that is around 1/10 of a second which results in motion blur with just a little bit of movement. I knwo using a dslr is a big selling point, but some people just want a simple app that takes good photos.

Is there any way the app can specify at least a minimum shutter speed of 1/30th of a second? Other apps like isit /ipix or slideshow photo booth allow you to set the iso and shuter speed. the iso setting is nice but not a must have.

if you are not using a dslr the output of this app is not that great.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2018 11:51 am
by tim
Hey can you please try out the remote iphone functionality and tell me if that is the same in your lighting condition? To be clear i mean tell your ipad to connect to your iphone camera. You use blueprint on your iphone to share the camera

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2018 2:45 pm
by aluminumwelder
ok I will give that a try in a little bit.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 9:04 am
by aluminumwelder
I upgraded to ios 12 on iPhone 7 and ipad pro 9.7, both full batteries, and good network.
I was surprised to see the auto exposure lock, and flash functions on the iPhone. I thought for sure this is going to work well.
But unfortunately I was wrong. I tried it with flash on or off and the camera gives blurry photos with even modest movement.
Moving your head back and forth at 1 hertz causes blur. For example count to ten seconds and move your head from one side to the other every second would be one hertz.

Now if you have bright lights you can use the iPhone lock exposure button to keep the iphone on a fast shutter speed,
But my guess is many novice users will be using regular room lights and not be savy enough to do this .

in fact IMHO most users don't even want to dink around the a second iPhone, the front facing cameras on the ipad pro 9.7, 10.5, 11 and 12.9 are all great and the rear cameras on the iPhone 4, 5, 6, air, and air 2 are great (but the front camera on these older ipads is lacking)

the rear cameras on the pro ipads have an led light that other apps use to help in dark situations.

Having app do auto face exposure or minimum shutter speed would greatly simplify things for the general public.

also the GIF's generated from this app look really wierd because they use the live photo effect that apple uses, so it is not your traditional gif made of still frames, but rather a gif made up of short 1 second movie clips and still frames. Maybe it is not a big deal, but all the other photo booth apps do nto work this way and I think itlooks better with stills only.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 9:45 am
by tim
Hey glad you tried it. Let's pick apart things separately:

1) in my normally-lit house (old house: kinda dim), I don't see any motion blur if I act as a normal person who is having a photo taken (ie. look at the camera and say cheese). I expect that if you are moving around during the photo, then no matter what you're going to get motion blur with normal lighting - even a pro DSLR would need to be set to a very high ISO to capture this, and iPhone/iPad cameras are not yet capable of this (to my knowledge, happy to be proven wrong).

If you are trying to make an "action photobooth" that has lots of movement, then good lighting is key: you're going to need to go beyond ambient room lighting. If you go strobe then you'll need a real camera: you can't really sync iOS with a strobe flash. If you're going constant lighting, then wifibooth should work well.
Normal users are not making "action photobooths" though... and re "auto face exposure or minimum shutter speed", those are two different things. What you have right now in wifibooth is basically auto-face exposure. If I implemented a minimum shutter speed, then you'd be able to make the shutter faster -- but then your photos would be too dark to use in ambient lighting, so how would that help?

2) re the GIFs: what is happening is that wifibooth is mixing frames from the live-view and stills like this:
liveview1-liveview1-liveview1-liveview1-still1
liveview2-liveview2-liveview2-liveview2-still2
....
last gif is a mix of all of them.
If wifibooth only mixed in stills, the gif would have only 3 frames. It would not show any movement, just jerkily snap between 3 stills.
If you want to explain what you're expecting, maybe I didn't understand you correctly?

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 11:40 am
by aluminumwelder
iso can be controlled on the ipad on other apps like slideshow photobooth lite, which you can download and see the iso range is 34 to 2176
shutter speed range is 2 seconds to 1/1000 of a second when one chooses manual exposure.

yes I agree lighting is key, but even with a 55W led light you get blur.

in normal usage a shutter speed range of 1/15 to 1/200 is fine and an iso range of 34 to 400 is fine. 800 gets pretty noisy. Over 1000 just gets ridiculously grainy.

Basically your average person would rather have a sharp photo that is a little grainy, than a blurry photo without grain.

Yes normal person standing relatively still is fine.
normal drunk person at a party swaying back and forth to the music slowly at one hertz which is NOT fast at all is blurry. It's not super bad, but it's bad enough to notice.

you really need to check out how other apps do it to see how much better the final results are using the ipad camera. I know this apps forte is to be used with wifi dlsrs, but if there are connection issues then the ipad camera is a nice back up.

I realize how your gifs are made, I"m sahying it doesnt' look good the way it is implemented compared to the competition. especially when using the iPhone camera with led flash as the last flash shot looks different than the ambient light pics. Perhaps a boomerang vidoe slip comprised of much more still shots would be something to consider.

Anyways, please take above as constructive criticism. I like the app over all, but this is the feedback I am getting from people that I sell photo booths too.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 11:47 am
by tim
Thanks this is great feedback. I'll definitely take a look at offering more camera settings - if that is actually something people are using, I'll build it.
Re GIFs, yeah if your actual photo is with flash, it's gonna look weird. I guess I could offer an option to NOT add the still/photo, that would solve this... right?

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 11:48 am
by aluminumwelder
if you want to keep it simple and not have people screw with iso and shutter sliders perhapsyou can have a fast shutter speed mode like 1/30 or 1/60 with a warning that they will need more light.

One thing I have noticed with ipad camera is you can use pretty slow shutter speeds and get useable results. I have used 1/25 before which I would never do with a dslr.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 11:52 am
by tim
Well, the camera API in iOS is quite difficult to use well. It's quite possible some app is telling you it's using 1/25, but it actually is not...

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2018 8:17 am
by aluminumwelder
the competing apps I have used have a live view preview of how the shutter speed or iso changes affect the photos. and one can clearly see using a shorter shutter speed results in more motion stopping ability, so I'm positive it can be done.
never mind I understand your poit now.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2018 8:59 pm
by tim
Hey aluminumwelder i've implemented some of your feedback - at the moment just into BluePrint but it's coming into wifibooth too soon.
I'm just waiting on apple to fix something so I can make the update, but can I get your feedback on a testflight build once it's available? I want you to tell me if what i've done is understandable, and whether it solves the original issue (camera has too much motion blur)

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2018 10:28 pm
by aluminumwelder
sure just pm me how to test the testflight. someone told me testflight doesn't need invites anymore? if that is the case then I can just log into testflight I guess.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:08 pm
by tim
Correct when it is ready i can post a link.
One piece of bad news though: just for this one beta, you will probably need to delete any existing wifibooth install first. So maybe try it out on a different ipad etc

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 9:42 pm
by tim
... PM'd you the beta links

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2021 7:35 am
by MattyM
Hi, quick question about the app.

I've noticed that the mp4/gifs are blurry when they are captured but the live view and pictures come out looking good. I have the canon M50 and an ipad pro 4th gen.

What can I do?

Thank you,

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2021 7:40 am
by tim
Hi this can happen if you are using strobe flash or your constant lighting isn’t bright enough. Try to increase the amount of light available during countdown.

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2021 9:02 am
by MattyM
Thank you for the tips. I will test it out with added lighting.

Also, can both mp4 or gifs be added to google photos library. I think I was only able to see the gifs added when I was testing a few weeks back.

Thank you,

Re: ipad camera has too much motion blur

Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2021 9:28 am
by tim
I'm sure MP4s can be added to Google Photos library by Wifibooth. I cannot remember right now if it is possible for GIFs - not sure if they are supported by Google Photos.