I wanted to try other camera apps. I’ve tried to install 3 different ones so far, but Aurora reports that “App not available for your phone”.
Does anyone know of another camera app that works well?
For privacy respecting there is also OpenCamera from F-Droid.
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Thanks! OpenCamera looks good
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There are some processing options hiding in Aperture if you get to the advanced settings, open camera has more toggles, make sure and increase quality settings as a minimum.
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Is there some guide to using the camera? Or maybe I just need to read somewhere about smartphone/Android cameras in general? This is my first smartphone, and I’m honestly just baffled about something that seems like it should be simple. (One of the reasons I finally got a smartphone was to use the Canon app to send GPS coordinates over Bluetooth to my actual camera, which I did get working, but sometimes it may be nice to not get out the camera and just use the phone.)
There seem to be two options, “.6x” and “1x”, which I’m guessing correspond to which of the two back cameras is being used? Choosing .6x gives me an image which is out of focus unless very close to the subject, and doesn’t seem to let one use the flash? If I use the “1x” mode, it may be giving me a 50 megapixel image but clearly doesn’t have that much actual quality, since if one looks at the image at 100% there are just swirls of color that look like a painting rather than actual detail. I can upload some examples if it turns out that it’s just me. I have “Capture mode” set to “Maximize quality”. The advanced settings I’ve just left on default for now, but would be willing to change them if I knew what to change to to in order to actually get a focused high-resolution quality picture.
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I just discovered the focus issue like you described. Id like more documentation also on the camera, and for things in general. I’ll keep poking around.
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The camera app is BASIC at best, and with some bugs.
The .6 is the Macro lens, which is 2Mp. It takes pretty decent macro pics very close up. Don’t try to use it in video as it will crash the app. I posted in another article the bug on that, and work around.
The camera also doesn’t support anything above 1080 or HD. So while the chipset supports higher, the app does not.
This is a plague in the Lineage OS world, I feel. The only one with a good app right now is e/OS and that is because Fairphone let them use theirs.
I have heard that there is a Google camera fork that is pretty decent, but I have not tried it.
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Thank you for explaining this, especially the macro feature. I didn’t know about it. Just thought the camera can’t focus.
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Thanks for mentioning that.
I just looked on fdroid. There is an iodé fork of Open Camera. It has more features than the stock app.
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I definitely agree that Open Camera from F-Droid looks to work much better. It also lets you write the “raw” (DNG format) sensor data. I noticed that the raw file gives a resolution of 4096×3072. If I lower the resolution setting in Open Camera for the JPEG to that same resolution, it gives a much better picture, without the painting-like smearing that the default resolution gives when viewing at 100%. I’m assuming that there just isn’t really 50 megapixels worth of sensor data to make an image from. It still has some smears, though. The DNG file looks much better than the JPEG in just the Windows 11 built-in image reader (I mean other than the lighting, just in terms of the details actually being there instead of smeared), so I’m assuming that I can get the raw pictures from the phone to actually look half-decent if I actually learn how to use software like Darktable. And maybe JPEGs from the phone with an even lower resolution might be okay, or will improve with later software upgrades?
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I just stumbled across the “Open Camera Help” page, which I find really helpful.
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What is the difference between “Open Camera” and “Open Camera iodéOS version of Open Camera” in the F-Droid app store? I sit best to utilise the latter on the BraX3?
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@Mycenius
The iode version of Open Camera is suppose to be tweaked to run better with the iode OS and hardware.
I use the the original version with no issues.
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Thanks - I’ve gone with the same…
Is it me, or if you are using gestures is there no way out of the settings once you access them in Open Camera? Like it expects you to have the old style 3 symbol navigation menu? Or am I just missing a swipe gesture for going “back” inside an app?
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@Mycenius
Hmm. I just went into settings, then I swiped to the left to exit and it brings me back to main camera screen. Is that what you’re trying to do?
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Hmm, oh right that’s working… It didn’t seem to be be previously… But looks like its very sensitive to where you do it on the screen (e.g. if it’s over an area you tap to drill down to sub-menu it doesn’t seem to respond for me). But all good - Thanks - at least I know I wasn’t going nuts… and it does work.
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@Mycenius
Another crisis averted. lol.. 
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party!
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Do you mean specifically better with the BraX3 hardware, or with the other hardware that iode supports?
The plain “Open Camera” is on version 1.55 (released this month), whereas “OpenCamera iodeOS version” seems to not have been updated as recently and is on 1.52-iode.12 (released over a year ago). I’d tend to go with the version that looks to continue to be maintained, unless there’s something specific about the iode version that makes it better and they’re intentionally not including newer changes for some reason?
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