Microsoft adds noise reduction to its Blink photo app for Windows Phone in pursuit of clearer GIFs

Microsoft’s Blink burst mode camera app for Windows Phone devices has been updated today with a feature specifically designed to make your GIFs look better.

While we took a look at Blink’s redesign and new features back in March, there has always been one small issue with using to create a moving image from a series of stills – if the image quality isn’t exactly the same, it’s obvious where each frame changes, which somewhat ruins the overall effect and efforts of the image stabilization algorithm.

However, following today’s update that should be less of a problem as there’s a new algorithm that runs after image stabilization to significantly reduce the ‘noise’ in any images, Microsoft explained in a blog post.

Blink automatically analyzes the motion in the scene. Where the motion can be stabilized the algorithm effectively performs a very long exposure by merging the entire Blink sequence, where the motion can’t be stabilized the sequence is left untouched. One way to think of this is optical image stabilization on a region by region basis.

You can see the difference in the before and after below. A spokesperson confirmed the update will be available from the Windows Phone App Store later today.

➤ Blink [Windows Phone]