From Nokia Developer:
The beta release of the Nokia Imaging SDK 1.2, now ready for the converged Microsoft Windows platform, gives you access to a powerful library of exciting image-manipulation tools, which makes creating the next generation of imaging apps for Windows and Windows Phone 8.X devices quicker and easier. Designed from the ground up with performance and a low-memory footprint in mind, the library’s functions don’t put a strain on the device, which makes editing high-resolution images swift and engaging.
In terms of what's actually new, digging deeper, we find:
- Support for moving pictures.
With the 1.2 beta update, you can create shareable animated sequences similar to cinemagraphs using the Animated GIF API and the Image Alignment API, which helps stabilise the resulting image. With the Windows Phone 8.1 photo sequence mode, creating mini-movies is now very quick.- Selective editing.
Local Blending and Custom-effect Block Processing make the SDK even more efficient by allowing selective processing of image regions instead of requiring full-image processing.
And there's a new example app too, at least in source code form:
Image Sequencer
This demonstrates the use of the Image Aligner and Gif Renderer APIs (new in the 1.2 SDK) for creating cinemagraph-style animations in animated GIF format. The application has a set of image sequences to be used as basis for the alignment and animation. User can manipulate the animation by limiting the animated area to a small rectangular section, and by stabilizing the images in order to eliminate unwanted shaking.
The new SDK 1.2 can be downloaded here.
Whatever you think of Cinemagraph-like animations (like the one above) and sequences (they're not really for photo purists!), the more imaging capabilities the better, obviously. In fact, with applications like 1Shot and ProShot already available, imaging on the platform is already in a pretty healthy place, I'd argue.