Let Mobile Photography Say Goodbye to "Digital Taste"
—— The story behind Xiaomi × Leica Image Quality Experience Improvement Project
□ Our reporter Peng Xie
"Is it correct to make the night scene as bright as the day? At night, is there at least a’ night sense’? " This is a question raised by Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Company in Weibo. In fact, it is not difficult to brighten the night scene for the current mobile image photography equipment, but it is not easy to restore the "night feeling" seen by the eyes.
In the eyes of the industry, "lighting up the night scene" is the inevitable result of some mobile phone manufacturers’ over-reliance on computational photography and post-optimization, with the aim of lowering the threshold for taking a "good" photo. These so-called "good" photos are brighter than the colors seen by the eyes, brighter than the real light, and the details are still clear when magnified several times. But in the eyes of photographers and enthusiasts, there is an unreal "digital taste".
Say goodbye to the taste of digital and return to the real world of light and shadow, which is what users expect from the image experience. In July, 2022, Xiaomi Company announced the strategic cooperation with Leica, the leading brand in the global imaging field, to realize the original Leica image experience on the mobile phone, form Xiaomi’s unique image quality style, and redefine "good photos". Behind it, it is Xiaomi people’s diligent pursuit of image quality style and the ultimate exploration of digitizing style.
Call up the user’s favorite "Leica flavor"
For more than 100 years, Leica cameras have formed a unique "Leica flavor" by virtue of exquisite optical engineering design and powerful manufacturing technology. After a year-long in-depth communication with Leica, Xiaomi explored the key elements of "Leica flavor"-three-dimensional tone, telepresence color and soft and realistic details.
But this is far from enough. The real "Leica taste" is not counted by Leica, nor by Xiaomi, but by users.
The project team spent a lot of time and energy to screen out a group of professional photographers and enthusiasts who are familiar with Leica and agree with Xiaomi, conduct in-depth interviews, and define the Leica style in the eyes of users through the comparison and selection of a large number of proofs. The process of deep communication with users is like building a city of light and shadow, brick by brick, interlocking and striving for perfection, just to make professional photography simpler and images more realistic.
In this process, the project team made a new discovery-on the basis of ensuring authenticity and naturalness, many users also like the samples with fuller and sharper colors compared with the original Leica samples. Therefore, the project team decided to develop two styles of "Leica Classic" and "Leica Vivid" simultaneously. The former perfectly reproduces the imaging style of Leica camera, abandons the effect of forcibly brightening the traditional mobile phone image, makes the darkness dark, and the color is full of "German flavor"; On the basis of maintaining accurate restraint, the latter moderately brightens and adjusts the saturation of the picture, showing bright and sharp tones and vivid and full colors.
After the dual-style route was clear, the project team and Leica reached a consensus, and the raw images of Leica M series cameras were used as input, and intelligent processing was carried out through machine learning algorithm. Dynamic brightening technology, deepAWB technology, extreme image quality technology and efficient computing technology were innovatively used to create a material library for hundreds of subdivided scenes such as portraits, blue sky, sunset, green plants and flowers, and all the materials were disassembled according to the dimensions of exposure, contrast, color and noise.
The quality of images is not only a standard, but also a promise to users. In the technical adjustment, the project team chose the most difficult and least tricky way-brand-new pipeline and parameter design, and distinguished "Leica Classic" and "Leica Vivid" from the bottom parameters. It is several orders of magnitude more difficult to do this than to adjust the surface parameters, and it also brings huge workload to the later adaptation, but only in this way can "Leica Classic" and "Leica Vivid" truly achieve their own wonderful.
Taking the birthday cake as an example, Leica Classic adopts neutral white balance to make the picture and color more calm and objective. "Leica Vivid" uses white balance parameters that are more suitable for human eyes and emotions to enhance the sense of atmosphere and make the picture warmer, "equivalent to adding a warm filter to the picture".
Let the public take good photos at will.
Optical problems must be solved in an optical way. In the cooperation between Xiaomi and Leica, the two sides have a consensus that excessive use of computational photography due to insufficient optical quality will cause irreversible damage to the picture, which is tantamount to quenching thirst by drinking poison. This means that Xiaomi is going to change or even subvert the aesthetic habits that the public has long cultivated by "computational photography" and "post-optimization". Photographer Huang Cao questioned: "It takes a lot of courage and determination. Will there really be mobile phone manufacturers who dare to do this?"
In June, 2022, Xiaomi invited 25 professional photographers, including Huangcao, to attend a closed-door communication meeting, and took out the unreleased 12s Ultra engineering machine for trial use. The purpose was to let everyone judge whether this mobile phone was "Leica" or not.
After taking a few photos with Xiaomi 12s Ultra engineering machine, the weeds feel that the texture is completely different from that taken with a mobile phone. Li Yue, the product manager of Xiaomi Camera Department, was surprised by a car photo taken by a photographer. "It’s better than I expected!" He said.
At this closed meeting, Xiaomi collected some opinions and suggestions from photographers, including the problem of "white balance adjustment of multi-focus switching" put forward by weeds-when shooting the sea with a short-focus lens of a mobile phone and a small boat in the sea with a telephoto lens, the color of the sea surface will be deviated due to different focal lengths. For ordinary users, this is a subtle difference that needs careful comparison to find, but for photographers, it is an unavoidable problem.
Li Yue and his colleagues believe that these 25 photographers are heavy users of Leica, and the problems they found may not be the most sensitive and concerned by ordinary users, but they are very critical to the image quality and Leica style, and have a "high priority". Although it is difficult to change, they are willing to face the difficulties. "Our goal is to let the public take good photos and get the best photography experience, so the first thing we have to do is to tell everyone what a good photo is." They said.
Subsequently, according to the photographer’s opinion, the project team set up a special group such as "multi-camera consistency" to focus on tackling key problems, from camera adaptation to chip debugging, and make all-round improvement. When Xiaomi 12s Ultra was officially released, Huangcao was pleasantly surprised to find that Xiaomi had solved almost all the problems mentioned at the press conference. "In addition to the rapid improvement, Xiaomi’s emphasis on photographers’ ideas is also very touching." He said.
Thanks to the efforts of the project team, Xiaomi 13 Ultra, the latest flagship of humanities imaging specialty released in 2023, was officially defined as a "fantastic historical work" by Leica, and the praise rate of the self-operated flagship store in JD.COM was over 99%. It is Xiaomi people’s persistent pursuit of "quality" to take users as the center and take user satisfaction as the goal, so that users can take pictures of the most beautiful scenery at will. Saying goodbye to "digital taste" and returning to "optical taste" is Xiaomi’s pursuit of moving images and the definition of "good photos", which has been verified in Xiaomi 13 Ultra.
The cooperation was praised by the German team
Xiaomi joined hands with Leica, which promoted the deep cooperation and mutual appreciation of engineers from two different countries. It is precisely because Xiaomi and Leica attach equal importance to the user’s experience and actual needs, pay more attention to quality from the user’s point of view, and pay more attention to aesthetics and humanistic feelings, so the cooperation between the two sides will be so efficient and successful.
In the cooperation, the dedication and seriousness of Leica engineers left a deep impression on Xiaomi engineers.
At the beginning of the cooperation, Xiaomi sent a Xiaomi 11 Ultra mobile phone to Florian, a Leica camera expert, and happened to meet Florian on vacation. Unexpectedly, in the first week after he came back from vacation, he sent a 128-page image quality evaluation report PPT-the result of his vacation with his mobile phone.
Before each meeting with Xiaomi, Leica engineers will communicate relevant information, reports or target maps internally. After the meeting, they will hold another round of resumption and planning meeting. Minutes of each meeting are very detailed and can be issued immediately after the meeting; Reports and materials used in the meeting will also be sent out before 24: 00 on time.
Every time the Xiaomi project team puts forward a product functional requirement, the Leica team will "ask three questions"-do users really need it? What benefits does this have for users? How to improve the effect of taking pictures? "Treating every question of users with caution and echoing everything is also a tacit understanding that we complement each other with the Leica team." An engineer of the Xiaomi team said.
In cooperation, collision is inevitable. According to Li Yue’s recollection, the project has to complete Leica certification for more than 200 sub-items including basic scenes and special scenes. For the Xiaomi team who is good at "grabbing time", so many projects should have "priority" to ensure that the most important problems are solved in the shortest time. But in the eyes of German engineers, every project is equally important and should go hand in hand.
In order to convince German engineers, Li Yue took advantage of the convenience of living in the same community with them, and took a walk with Leica engineer Florian at the weekend, explaining why he should give priority while walking. Walking for more than two hours, German engineers told Li Yue a message from all dimensions-NO (No), which made Li Yue unable to refute.
To Li Yue’s surprise, as soon as he started work on Monday, the German team produced a report of more than 200 pages, analyzed the importance of each certification project, and determined the problems and objectives to be solved in each project. The two sides discussed the report from morning till late at night, and finally determined the "priority" of each project. Strict management and strict requirements in research and development are the consensus of the two teams. Only by being strict and sincere can we be worthy of making friends with users.
It is said that people with the same gas field will attract each other, and the engineer culture respected by Xiaomi has made the German team find a full sense of belonging. The dedication of Xiaomi’s team won the respect and recognition of German engineers, and also changed their working methods imperceptibly.
For example, in Xiaomi Science and Technology Park, the two sides often have to discuss for most of the meeting, which often delays eating. As a result, the Leica team quickly developed the habit of bringing their own energy bars and chocolates to the meeting. For another example, at the beginning of the cooperation, Leica HR agreed that they should not work more than 7 hours a day, but after arriving in Xiaomi, they unconsciously adapted to Xiaomi’s working mode and even blurred the "concept" of vacation, and they would also do shooting tests and reports on weekends. "No one asked them to do this. I think this is a kind of like-mindedness." Li Yue said.
Youth is fleeting, but style lasts forever.
Leica is far more beautiful than it looks at first sight. It is durable, and you can look at it again-this is Leica’s confidence.
Clearly know and insist on what to do and what not to do, without losing focus and being disturbed by noise-this is Xiaomi’s certainty.
Simpler and purer, Xiaomi’s understanding of a good photo has also become Xiaomi’s unique image quality style through excellent lens and precise interactive solidification, making future moving images more "millet flavor". This cooperation between Xiaomi and Leica has been well received, which is a model of the perfect combination of innovation and quality of Xiaomi.
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