HUAWEI and Leica: Love at first snap

HUAWEI & Leica reinvent smartphone photography to change the way you see the world

Camera is one of the main things that defines a premium smartphone and it is one of the most significant key selling points for consumers. During the past 2 years, HUAWEI has built a strong competitive advantage in smartphone photography through the core technology, improvements in image qualitythanks to its exceptional partnership with the photography giant Leica, and the adoption of AI technology, substantially enhancing its overall photography experience.

How it all started…

The P9 is the first fruit of the HUAWEI – Leica collaboration with its dual-camera milestone delivering Leica color and monochrome modes and wide aperture bokeh effects to bring artistic quality and redefining mobile phone photography. The P9 is a stunning device with ground-breaking dual-lens 12-megapixel camera technology redefiningthe optical photography quality in the digital field.

Captured by Alex Deng with Mate 10 Pro

Leica’s Film Style, which depicts the visual sense of an oil painting, first came true on a smartphone with the model P9. “The Leica Style” brings high color saturation but a natural look with no overflow effect. The overall hue makes the photo look like an oil painting. The transition of the color is natural, the image is sharp and the details of the lowlights part are well taken care of.

Captured by Alex Deng with Mate 10 Pro

The second-generation Leica camera

The HUAWEI Mate 9 sports a second-generation Leica Dual Camera with a 12 MP RGB sensor and 20 MP monochrome sensor. The RGB sensor captures vivid colors, while the monochrome sensor picks out the finer details.

HUAWEI achieved the breakthrough on dual-camera zoom on the Mate 9 by increasing the megapixels of the monochrome camera from 12 megapixels to 20 megapixels. By amplifying the 20 megapixelmonochrome camera, retaining the detail information of its 12 megapixel outline, superimposing the color information captured by the 2 megapixelcolor camera,HUAWEI achieved for the very first time a 2X smooth zoom on a dual-camera set-up, removing the constraints of distance from your photography capabilities.

Captured by Alex Deng with Mate 10 Pro

Breakthrough in portrait photography

The P10, focuses on portrait photography, creating portrait mode, introducing precise 3D facial detection, dynamic illumination and natural portrait enhancements to produce stunning artistic portrait shots.It’s been a revolutionary step in the field of portrait photography, making smartphone photography more humanistic.

Captured by Max Li with the Mate 10

The HUAWEIP series has always been committed tothe pursuit of excellence in artistic expression. P10 made a breakthrough by bringing Leica’s portrait mode, which continues to build a system of skills including blurring, monochrome, color and zoom to deliver the best portrait. These skills give each portrait photo rich expression and emotion.

Through 3D detection technology we can fully understand basic feature information of faces, calculate the face contour information and implement intelligent additional light, so that the nose looks to have real depth and the forehead and cheekbone look more realistic and rounded. Askin enhancement solution designed by HUAWEI Aesthetics Research Center in France is also applied to improve the skin tones of different ethnicities.

From traditional photography to smart photography

The latest HUAWEI product co-engineered with Leica is the Mate 10.It also creatively introduces AI into smartphone photography. By using image recognition, you can automatically produce the best image effects for different objects and scenes, which combines big data processing and professional aesthetic optimization. Moreover it can also learn to make mobile phones photographs better and bring more enjoyable shooting experiences to consumers, once again bringing technical breakthrough to smartphone photography.

Captured by Max Li with Mate 10

Combining a 12-megapixel RGB sensor with a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor, the HUAWEI Mate 10 new dual cameras co-engineered with Leica features 2x lossless zoom, optical image stabilization, and lenses boasting the “world’s largest aperture” of f/1.6. The Mate 10 series also has 4K video recording. The new AI tech creeps into the camera too. The Real-Time Scene and Object Recognition feature allows the smartphone to automatically choose camera settings based on the actual object or scene it’s photographing.