I applaud the effort to find another workaround!

This is interesting to me, however I must admit- those images have a lot of ugly artifacts that are now baked in. Yes, it appears to be getting around the NR smoothed look, but it looks like it is doing so by adding a layer of grain before the jpeg compression. Without the camera2 api, I'm not sure it is possible for an application to actually access the raw frame buffer before the chromatix, etc, libs get involved. My first hunch in that this look is artificially created by the app after the camera routine has done its processing.

In other words, it looks almost like grain is being added to give the illusion of details in much of the same way we can get details in lower color spaces via dithering. Even relatively well exposed parts of the frame that shouldn't have noise have noise. And then some heavy jpeg compression on top of it, so removing it in post with Photoshop/LR/etc is going to eat a lot of detail- arguably at least as much if not more than you were getting with moto cam. Have you tried to clean any up in post and compared them side by side with moto cam?



Interestingly, if you enable the camera2 API, there is a version of FreeDcam that can record actual sensor RAW from the G5+, and one of the only apps that can properly. But once you are doing that you are better off with any of the various Google Cam versions floating around for 32-bit Nougat. Root access isn't necessary, however in order to enable the camera2 api, you need to be able to change a line in build.prop. At the very least, you need to unlock the bootloader so that you can change a system file. You can remain stock and unrooted though. I know, not for everyone, but I recommend it if image quality is important to you.



I still think you need to enable camera2 at a minimum to get better image quality, if not just replacing chromatix libs. But this is an interesting find.