When the in-focus plane is quite near, the background has plenty of room to get that creamy out-of-focus look that is what the HTC One M8 camera is all about.
Unlike a true optical effect, though, the HTC One M8 is a bit limited in what it can shoot. You can’t use the uFocus bokeh mode if you’re out of the standard mode.
And if the phone reverts to night mode due to low-light conditions, it’s also game over for uFocus. To work within these limitations, we first went for a classic outdoors portrait shot – with the help of a furry friend. Without the Duo camera working its magic, the HTC One 8 can only produce a slight shallow depth of field effect. The flowers behind the blue monster are only a tad out of focus. But is it enough to give the subject an extra half-ounce of pop. With the uFocus mode engaged, we see a distinct defocussing of the background. However, there are several weird inconsistencies. There’s a flower to the left of the monster’s head that has been judged by the camera’s algorithm as being in the foreground (it wasn’t), and there’s a halo of ‘crispiness’ around the subject. This is where the M8 hasn’t been able to judge the edges of the monster accurately. The first Fuji shot immediately shows the benefits of natural, purely optical bokeh effects. Diffraction causes the background twigs to appear expanded, not only blurred. COMPARE: Samsung Galaxy S5 vs HTC One M8įor our second test we’re going to try something a little trickier.GUIDE: HTC Sense 6 Features: What’s New?.And there are no issues separating the furry edges of the monster from the background. It’s a close-up of a flower with much less colour contrast than the first test, and with a less well-defined subject – a flower head is pretty small. The fairly wide-angle of the HTC One M8 lens and (like most phones) limited close-up focusing abilities make it tricky to get good macro-style photos with the M8. The natural depth of field properties of the f/2.0 lens are not really enough to make the yellow flower stand out in this shot. The HTC One M8’s handling of this shot is quite bizarre. Note how the uFocus mode has de-focused the stem above the ‘main’ yellow flower even while it is in practical terms at the same depth as the flower and the stem below it. There is a marginal increase in the blurring effect of the far background, but it doesn’t really compensate enough for the ways uFocus has essentially broken this shot.Īs with the processed HTC shot, we see some of the flower stem going out of focus, but here it’s consistent with the depth of field and the object’s position in the field. Fake bokeh simply can’t reliably create truly narrow depth of field effects without making the wrong decisions – even with a second lens, apparently. Here we’re going to see how well the HTC One M8 can separate subjects when they’re not all that far apart, in terms of depth. Once again we’re calling on a few furry friends. We’ve lined up four in a row and are going to try and focus on each consecutively to see how the HTC One M8 deals with the task. It’s here that we come up against another limitation of the camera, though. uFocus can only de-focus items, not re-focus them. So to help out, the HTC One M8’s photos here are made using two ‘source’ shots – one focused on the nearest toy, the other on the furthest. This is perhaps the most successful HTC One M8 shot yet. Aside from some errant in-focus bits just to the right of the subject, the other toys are clearly blown out of focus.
0 kommentar(er)
