Creating the Light Camera Tool

January 2025

Introducing The Camera

One of the most unique aspects of the Light Phone III is the introduction of a camera. In this post we'll share some image samples as well as some details on the process of tuning the camera and other specifications.

Sample Images

Though we're still fine tuning the camera, we wanted to share some of the unedited images we've captured over the past few months to give an idea of how the camera is working and reacting to different lighting environments and subjects.

Note: these images have been compressed for web.

afternoon light with plants in apartment

walking the bridge before the sun sets

an overcast, wet afternoon

the Light Phone II while riding the subway

a sunny winter afternoon on the waterfront

overcast indoor photo of our cat near the window

a more macro shot of window prism reflection on cat

sunset walking bridge

quick snapshot from car of an autumn sunset

sunset on the coast of Ireland

nightime outside a classic cajun restaurant

same day at two parks, one during the afternoon and one at night

at the waterfront on a bright winter day

fall in the east village

view from apartment window in different lighting

brooklyn street at night and a dark pub with christmas lights

shop window at night

indoor low light in art studio

waterfront at dusk

a friend in a cafe

friends on a winter day

Camera Tuning Process

Tuning the camera is quite the undertaking from a software perspective. Making sure the hardware works, the optical stabilizer, shutter button & flash, as well as getting the autofocus, exposures and processing pipeline ironed out. Then there is image itself - ensuring that colors are accurate in a variety of lighting scenarios, that the camera can properly white balance, that skin tones look right and optimizing for low light exposures.

We set benchmarks with the image tuning team over the summer and spent a few months getting the objective tuning process complete. We then did our own internal testing, as seen with some of the sample images above, and we've been sharing notes for some subtle tweaks to get the image to look the way we'd like in any given scenario.

example of some of the color accuracy testing

Here are two examples of how we've worked on improving the tuning this fall. As you can see the earlier images lack some of the radiance that the more final samples have:

Image Specifications

The sensor is 50mp and the default image resolution will be binned to 12mp (4,000 x 3,000 pixels), in which four adjacent pixels are combined into one pixel. This helps with low light and achieving appropriate frame rate. Without getting too technical, since the sensor does not use a traditional bayer pattern, it would need to be remosiaced via algorithm each frame and therefore around 10fps with full 50mps output.

User Experience

Going forward there are a lot of features we could consider with the Camera tool. We could introduce other resolutions and image ratio options, perhaps a monochrome setting. We could also explore other manual controls, grids and guides.

Here is an example of the focusing box. When you half press the shutter you will see the camera tool begin attempting to center focus/expose. Once the tool gets a lock, the focus box indicates that by filling in the border:

It's been so fun to experiment with the camera tool this fall. We're now beta testing the album tool for viewing, deleting, and sharing images from the phone itself. Looking forward to the next update!