Photo Noise Reducer Pro aims to make your photos look even sharper [App Review]

Cameras on smartphones have become much more robust in the past few years, and most everyday users take photos with their phone or tablet rather than carry around a bulky, expensive camera. But even with the improvements in camera technology, we’ve all experienced the struggle of taking a photo that turns out to be filled with noise and discolored pixels. Enter Photo Noise Reducer Pro, an app in the Google Play Store that takes a photo and reduces noise by correcting miscolored or empty pixels within the image. If you consistently get noisy photos with your device, this might be the app for you.

Setup

Photo Noise Reducer Pro has the best setup we’ve seen in an app like this. That is to say, there is literally zero setup. You install the app, open it, and you’re ready to start doing some magic on your photos. There is no account to be made or information to be entered. We found this encouraging, considering the app has a very simple but important task that users just want to do without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Design

For what it’s worth, Photo Noise Reducer Pro is designed very well. It doesn’t incorporate those Material Design animations you may have come to love as of late, but it is very simple and easy to use. You’re presented with two large buttons upon opening the app — one to open the built-in camera app to snap a photo (more on that in a bit) and one to open a grid-style list of all your recent photos to apply noise reduction to via the app. A slide-out menu from the left reveals the Settings button, along with your usual buttons for rating the app and providing feedback. The built-in camera within the app is designed well, with a simple shutter button at the bottom and a flash button at the top, flanked by a camera-switching toggle and an “X” to go back to the main screen.

As far as colors and design language go, this app keeps it simple. Purples and blues dominate the color scheme, although there are subtle yellow highlights throughout the app. Overall, it isn’t going to win many awards for outstanding design, but it gets the job done so users can focus on improving their images and enjoying the functionality of the app.

Function & Usage

Photo Noise Reducer Pro is one of the simplest photo editing apps we’ve seen. In fact, it might be too simple. Beginning with the camera in the app, we found that it lacked a few features that we took for granted until they were missing. Namely, the camera does not give users tap-to-focus functionality or any real options other than switching between rear and front cameras and enabling/disabling the flash. There are no built-in filters or editing tools or even options to change the megapixel count before taking a photo. Most importantly, the lack of tap-to-focus or even autofocus left us with consistently blurry shots before we could even get to the noise reduction part of the app. As far as camera apps go, Photo Noise Reducer Pro definitely leaves quite a bit to be desired. Thankfully users still have the option to use existing photos, which more or less makes the built-in camera useless.

Once you manage to snap a decent photo with the built-in camera (which is nearly impossible) or select an existing image from your gallery, the noise reduction menu is fairly simple. There are two preset levels of noise reduction: light and medium. If neither of these suits you, there’s also a Custom button that brings up a slider, allowing you to adjust the noise reduction as you please. Below these buttons sits a Smooth slider, which does exactly what you’d expect: it smooths over sharpness in your photos. While we appreciated the simplicity here, it would’ve been nice to have a few more options for background noise vs foreground noise, or even some filter applications or brightness adjustments. Unfortunately, these are all changes you’ll have to make in your designated gallery app, or elsewhere. They’re simply missing in Photo Noise Reducer Pro.

The real question here is, does the noise reduction work? The official website for the app goes into more detail about the specific techniques for reducing noise, but the answer is “it depends.” Not every photo is suitable for noise reduction, and we found that about half of the photos we tried to improve ended up looking either the same or worse than the original. That being said, we tested the app on a Galaxy S6, which has been touted as having one of the best cameras on the market, so we aren’t entirely surprised that the photos taken with the S6 didn’t need noise reduction in the first place. But after manually adjusting our camera settings and capturing a few less-than-spectacular images, we did see a noticeable improvement once the noise filtration was applied. Check below for a few before and after shots. The photos on the left are the originals, and the photos on the right were all “de-noised” via the app using the Medium setting.

Beyond the effectiveness of the noise reduction, we did notice a few things that could be improved upon in future versions of the app. Namely, when you choose a noise reduction level for a photo, the application load time is quite slow. For some photos, it took upwards of two to three minutes before the photo was finished. While it’s at the loading screen, there is no way to back out of it, short of closing the app completely via the recent apps menu. What exacerbates this loading time is that there is no “apply” button or any kind of stopgap before the noise reduction is applied. If you accidentally press “light” instead of “medium,” you’ll have to wait until that level is applied to change anything. We would have also liked to select multiple things to apply at once, rather than just noise reduction. At the time of this review, all that’s available are noise reduction levels and smoothness, but even with just two adjustment options, an “apply” button seems like a simple fix. If you want to adjust a photo’s noise reduction and apply the Smooth feature, you have to do one at a time — and suffer through the slow loading time.

Another hole in the app is blatantly obvious when you open the Settings. The settings — or lack thereof — include, but are not limited to a single toggle to enable/disable a confirmation dialog when you save a de-noised image. This is apparently the only setting that users need when adjusting photos. Obviously we would like to see more options here for users, and it is disappointing that more aren’t included out of the gate.

What We Liked

• Simple, clean design
• Very intuitive and easy to use
• Option to use existing photos

Room for Improvement

• Extremely barebones built-in camera app
• Noise reduction only works half of the time
• Load times can be slow for some images
• Virtually no settings

Conclusion

In the realm of photo editing tools, Photo Noise Reducer Pro is off to a good start. The goal is to create better photos by fixing discolored or misplaced pixels that create noise in an image. But the execution is far from perfect, and there are quite a bit of places where the app needs some major upgrades to keep up with the competition. It lacks significant settings (or any settings, for that matter), additional photo editing options, like brightness control, that should be considered standard, and a usable built-in camera that takes better photos. This app most definitely has the potential to make a splash in the world of mobile photo editing, but it is off to quite a rocky start. If we had to put a number on it, we’d give Photo Noise Reducer Pro 3 out of 5 stars. If you’d still like to see Photo Noise Reducer Pro in action for yourself, you can pick it up from the Play Store below.

The post Photo Noise Reducer Pro aims to make your photos look even sharper [App Review] appeared first on AndroidGuys.

Astronomers find the first planet known to orbit a white dwarf

It’s virtually certain that some white dwarfs still have planets in orbit despite their violent histories, but seeing those planets has proven difficult… at least, until now. Astronomers using the Kepler space observatory have spotted a planet circling around WD 1145+017, a white dwarf 570 light years away. Not that it’s in great shape, mind you. The unusual light signature from the dying star hints that the planet is disintegrating under the star’s gravitational pressure, leaving behind a giant dust cloud. Researchers suspect that it fell into its fatal orbit after the star’s rapid change in mass triggered a planetary collision.

You should see more discoveries like this in the future, since the weaker light of a white dwarf is less likely to obscure planets. There’s even a chance (however small) that collisions have bumped some planets into habitable zones, giving scientists an unusually clear view of worlds that could support life. Either way, it’s evident that planetary systems don’t vanish simply because their host stars are running out of time.

[Image credit: SSPL via Getty Images]

Via: The Verge

Source: Nature

Simulated brain cells give robot instinctive navigation skills

A team of researchers at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) announced on Wednesday that they had taught a robot how to navigate on its own, in much the same way that humans and other animals do. They reportedly accomplished this feat by digitally replicating two types of neurons that help animals geolocate naturally.

These cells are known as known as “grid” and “place” cells. Place cells were first discovered in the 1970s by Nobel-winning Neuroscientist John O’Keefe. They fire whenever an animal passes a familiar spot in its environment. Grid cells, which were discovered in 2005, provide a detailed sense of position in three-dimensional space and help build mental maps. “Artificial grid cells could provide an adaptive and robust mapping and navigation system,” lead author Haizhou Li wrote to the MIT Technology Review. To test this theory, The A*STAR team built software simulations of these cells, wired them into a rough neural network for their wheeled robot and set it loose in a 35 square meter office space. According to the team’s report, as the robot moved about the space, its artificial neurons fired as they should.

Thought this system is still inferior to conventional machine mapping methods, the A*STAR team believes that it can both provide future robots with adaptive navigation abilities and help neuroscientists better understand the natural mechanisms on which this research is based.

[Image Credit: 4X-image]

Source: Technology Review

Jawbone granted injunction against Fitbit bound former employees

Earlier this year Jawbone filed a lawsuit against several former employees who left to join rival Fitbit. Jawbone’s lawsuit claims the former employees took confidential company information with them in a breach of their contract with Jawbone. A California superior court judge granted a preliminary injunction on Tuesday to Jawbone.

The former employees are required by the court’s order to turn over “confidential, proprietary information, technical data, trade secrets or know-how.” In addition, Jawbone will be permitted to examine personal computers and expunge information deemed to be covered by the lawsuit.

The information Jawbone claims was taken includes details on “the positioning of Jawbone’s current and future technologies.” Although Jawbone claims Fitbit and the former employees are “bitterly” contesting the issuance of an injunction, the employees in question recently returned copies of 18,000 confidential files prior to the injunction being issued.

source: Re/code

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How to make the most of USB-on-the-go

Long ago, the best tool for slapping two pieces of technology together was the mighty Roll of Duct Tape. It brought us such wonders as Flashlight Taped to Gun, Cardboard Taped to Broken Car Window, and even the ever-popular Command Module Carbon Dioxide Filter Taped to Lunar Module Receptor.

In these more enlightened days, the USB drive has risen as the primary mode of integrating two forms of disparate hardware. Unfortunately, Android devices come equipped with the far less-ubiquitous micro USB drive, so all that USB-ready technology lies just outside of reach. Except it’s not, really.

Even though it’s not being marketed or sold by any major phone manufacturers, a tiny little cable called the USB On-The-Go adapter can let you have a lot of USB-related fun with your Android device.

What is this thing?

USB On-The-Go is really just a micro USB cable that runs out to a female USB port. You plug it into your Android device, and it effectively gives your device a USB port. Now you can use a slew of different gadgets that weren’t necessarily designed with Android interface in mind. 

So, does it work on just about everything?

No, unfortunately. Compatibility is actually extremely hit-and-miss, because not a lot of Android device designers were really working with USB functionality in mind. Figuring out whether devices work with USB OTG has been a matter of trial and error, with some devices only having partial functionality and others taking to it like ducks to water. It seems like Samsung has the most USB capability overall so far.

Although Android devices have been USB-host-mode ready since Android 3.1, the problem is that hardware manufacturers have to enable that feature. If they don’t, then your device will just be mystified if you try to plug a USB drive into it.

How do I make it… do things?

Time to break out the hyperactive, tinkering little kid inside you, because there aren’t really any established instructions or best practices for USB OTG. You might as well just grab one and see what works with your device, but so far we’ve discovered some pretty awesome uses.

Card reader

Move pictures and video from your professional camera over to your tablet or phone with ease. If you’re someone who uses Adobe Lightroom on a regular basis or are an avid photographer, this might be a killer setup for you. No longer will you have to go through your computer as an intermediary; you can zip those photos right over to your phone for on-site review or retouching.

Full keyboard

If you’re someone who does a lot of writing, this is certainly an attractive capability. I’ve done some lengthy writing on my phone in a pinch situation before, and I can tell you it wasn’t the best time. Having the ability to write as freely and quickly on a phone as you can on a PC or laptop is a pretty awesome feature.

Camera control

With a USB OTG, you can attach your Android device to your digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera. This can let you use apps like DSLR Controller to give you full command over the camera from your Android.

Mouse

It’s a little bit odd that even the most compatible devices would have this functionality, but it seems like you can connect a mouse on most of them and have a pointer materialize on your screen. Use it just like you would on your computer. Doesn’t seem terribly practical, but it’s definitely interesting. Maybe you could use it to play old-school first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D or DOOM.

Speaking of games…

Game Controllers

With emulators and roms becoming increasingly popular, one of the only downsides to playing them on your phone has been the inherent clumsiness of using a touch screen to mimick something as complex and alien as the N64 controller. I mean, who designed that thing?

See also: 12 best emulators for Android103

Since retro gaming has gotten so popular, you can now buy USB retro controllers relatively inexpensively. Plug one of those guys into your USB OTG, and suddenly you’ve got nostalgia in your pocket whenever you need it.

As a plus, the PS3 controller, which has a USB end, is compatible right out of the box with a handful of devices including the Samsung Galaxy S III.

External hard drive

Although your Android device’s power output isn’t stout enough to keep an unpowered hard drive operational, you can use a plug-in-the-wall powered hard drive to move some files around. Great if you’ve maxed out your phone’s hard drive and want to make some more room.

Because your Android powers whatever device it’s connected to, a portable (not powered) hard drive won’t work. However, a powered hard drive will, since it relies on energy from an external source. With the hard drive connected, you can read, write, and transfer any stored files.

Flash drives

Although this won’t work for some devices, you can plug a thumb drive in and most compatible Android devices treat a USB thumbdrive just like your computer does. Check some files on the go or tuck others away for safekeeping.

USB-to-Ethernet adapters

Connect to the internet through your USB port with an ethernet adapter. This is a great option for someone who struggles with spotty WiFi reception. With this adaptor-on-adaptor setup, you can jack right into the wall for some of that Grade-A, primo internet. Delicious!

USB expander

Yep. If you want to do more than one of the above at once, like have two video game controllers or a mouse and a keyboard, then grab a USB expander and give them both a whirl. Who knows what you can come up with?

So those are some of the more useful things we found we could do with the USB OTG adapter. Do you have any creative favorites? How do you put USB OTG to work for you?