L Camera is an open-source experimental camera app for Android L devices using the new android.hardware.camera2 api. Currently, the only supported device is Nexus 5 running Android L preview.
Please note that this app is intended to test and study new features of the camera API, it is not for general uses as it lacks many basic camera features (location tagging, white balance, photo review, flash control, video recording, etc).
- True manual focus (adjustable focus distance)
- Manual exposure time (1/2, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/100, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/4000, 1/8000)
- Manual ISO (100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 10000)
- DNG output support
- Material design
You can either install the pre-built debug APK (lcamera-debug.apk) found in the repository, or build and install the APK by yourself.
Use it like any camera. Tap anywhere on the preview screen to focus on a specific point (if auto focus is on), and this will also trigger the white balance/exposure metering sequence if auto exposure setting is on. Clicking the floating action button will bring up auto focus and auto exposure options (and more options to come, hopefully). Turning off the auto focus will allow you to control the focus distance manually. You can also disable auto exposure and manually set the desired shutter speed and ISO.
After capturing, both DNG and JPEG files will be saved in /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/ directory. Note that each DNG image is 15.36 MiB in size, so make sure you have plenty of free space available!
Most RAW post-processing programs should be able to open them. While Adobe Lightroom is probably the most popular RAW editor, both darktable (Linux, Mac) and RawTherapee (Windows, Linux, Mac) are free alternatives that offers very powerful editing capabilities.
You must have both scala 2.11.2 and sbt >= 0.13 installed.
To build the app (the resulting APK will be placed in the bin/ directory):
$ sbt package
To build and run the app on device (assuming you have adb and developer mode enabled):
$ sbt run
The app is written in the Scala programming language and uses the following libraries/tools:
- SBT: build tool.
- Android SDK Plugin for SBT: for building Android apps with SBT.
- Scaloid: for UI layout and various helpers.
- Scala.Rx: for reactive value propagation.
- Floating Action Button: for the floating action button (FAB) featured in material design.
Currently it is needed to create a new capture session for the actual capture, as reusing the preview session for capture outputs garbaged JPEG images (and interestingly the RAW_SENSOR output is not corrupted). This will introduce additional shutter delay (<100ms on Nexus 5) into capture. Maybe there should be another mode with only RAW output which can directly grab images off the preview session.
The preview code probably needs some major refactoring to avoid calling setRepeatingRequest(), so we don't end up with unwanted requests in the pipeline.
To see debug outputs, set allowed logging priority of lcamera tag to DEBUG:
$ adb shell setprop log.tag.lcamera DEBUG
- Add burst capturing mode (30fps @ 8mp on Nexus 5, supposedly)
- Preliminary test seems to show that it is not possible to with JPEG outputs, try
ImageFormat.YUV_420_888? - Exposure/focus bracketing anyone?
- Add exposure compensation.
- Support portrait orientation.
- Simulate exposure compensation in preview? Currently setting a long shutter speed will throttle the preview frame rate.
- The new camera API is pretty unstable and will sometimes crash/reboot the device for no reason.
- Sometimes the lens will refuse to move while capturing, no matter how you specify the capture request.
source file '<path>/gen/com/melnykov/fab/R.java' could not be founderror while building- Just run the build command again.
- AWB does not work in manual exposure mode. You can workaround the problem by setting the white balance in AE mode and switching back to manual mode.
Please report any bugs on GitHub's issue tracker.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.