Raw to Real and Green to Great: Open Source Camera Tuning for Linux Devices with libcamera

When you first power up a new camera sensor, the images often look green, noisy, and far from realistic. Getting from that raw output to a natural, high-quality image is a complex process known as camera tuning, and until recently, it’s been an opaque and proprietary part of the imaging pipeline.

This talk introduces the fundamentals of open source camera bring-up and tuning, using tooling provided by the libcamera project to illustrate the process. Through real examples, we’ll look at what early images from a new sensor look like, and how they improve through calibration and tuning steps. We’ll cover the basic equipment and workflow needed to get started, and highlight community efforts to create an open repository of tuning data for phones, laptops, tablets, and embedded libcamera powered Linux devices.