Since RAW DNG access was unlocked on the Nexus 5 via Camera FV-5, we’ve been playing a bit with it. What we didn’t expect were some incredibly versatile RAW DNG files with very good highlight recovery and pretty good shadow/black level recovery. After bringing the DNG files into Adobe Lightroom 5, we were able to see what the camera’s small sensor is capable of doing.
This is the original file in Adobe Lightroom. The first thing that I wanted to test was the highlight recovery from the RAW DNG image.
After suppressing the exposure and the highlight recovery details, we were able to bring back all of the details in the brick wall behind Asta.
But in an attempt to get more details from the shadows back, we also needed to push the black levels, shadows and specific luminance levels up. This is the best that we could do.
This is another image that we shot in a very dim bar and where it was super tough to focus the camera.
As you can see, by nerfing the highlights we’re able to get back lots of details.
Then we decided to mess with the white balance and tint a bit more. No excessive image noise was created.
Want to try them for yourself? We invite you to download the images for yourself from this Dropbox folder.