PixelCam

An Android camera app that takes better pictures, especially on Pixel phones. It mimics the "latest generation" iOS camera feel with built-in photographic styles (color grading) and real on-device scene modes powered by the CameraX vendor extensions found on Pixel devices.

Features

• iOS-style photographic styles — Standard, Vibrant, Warm, Cool, Rich Contrast and Mono applied as subtle color grading. Styles are shown live on the preview before you shoot.
• HDR mode — multi-exposure high dynamic range via the CameraX extension.
• Night mode — low-light multi-frame enhancement via the CameraX extension.
• Portrait mode — subject-in-focus background bokeh via the CameraX BOKEH extension.
• Pinch-to-zoom with double-tap to reset.
• Smart default processing — a punch (saturation + contrast + a hint of warmth) applied to every shot by default.
• Auto-save — every photo is saved straight to DCIM/Camera, no confirmation needed.
• Front / back camera switch and flash toggle.

HDR / Night / Portrait are always selectable. On devices without the vendor extensions (only Pixel and a few others implement them), the app falls back to a regular high quality capture.

Getting the APK

The repo builds debug APKs automatically with GitHub Actions. The release APK is signed with a debug key so it installs normally.

1. Open the Release tab of this repository.
2. Download the app-debug.apk artifact and install the APK of your choice (allow "install from unknown sources").

Building locally

Requirements: JDK 17 and an Android SDK.

./gradlew assembleDebug

The APK is written to app/build/outputs/apk/debug/.

How it works

• CameraController binds CameraX Preview + ImageCapture. For HDR / Night / Portrait it queries ExtensionsManager and binds the extension-enabled camera selector, which activates the Pixel vendor extension for that mode.
• PhotographicStyle defines each style as a combination of color matrices (saturation, contrast/brightness and warm/cool tint) — the same technique iOS "Photographic Styles" use under the hood.
• After capture, PhotoProcessor re-encodes the image with the selected style and inserts it into MediaStore.

License

Apache-2.0

---

For an overview of all my other projects, see https://adegard.github.io/blog/