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Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

diyphotography.net

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Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#51

Post by wpietri »

sandworm101 wrote: post #15
ancorevard wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They reflect company values and culture. If this was the first incident, then I would tend to agree with you. But this is just one of a long string of similar incidents that together form a pattern that reflect on the company values.

>> They reflect company values and culture. If it was from Samsung. This could have come down to a single decision by a very low-level person, or likely a contractor. Samsung's marketing execs dropped the ball in not supervising the campaign properly, but I'm not ready to fault Samsung generally because of a dozen poorly-managed publicity shots. Instead, I judge them by how they react to this mistake. Do they pull th…

This sort of thinking on brands is always a puzzle to me. Samsung certainly takes credit for every good thing done by their employees and contractors. Why does a radically different standard apply when they do something bad?

Even if it made sense in some light, it's still a bad approach, because it means people with power and money are never held accountable for things that happen on their watch.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#52

Post by adetrest »

21 wrote: post #41

Does anybody buy a phone/car/... based on manufacturer ads? In a sense this is a self-selecting scam. If you don't check 3rd party reviews, then well, you get "advertised"

> Does anybody buy a phone/car/... based on manufacturer ads? In a sense this is a self-selecting scam. If you don't check 3rd party reviews, then well, you get "advertised"

Yes, and that's exactly why ads are regulated (there are limits to what you claim your product can do), and why there is so much money in ads: they're designed to influence you and make you buy things that you might not otherwise.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#53

Post by ilamont »

ur-whale wrote: post #19
amatecha wrote: post #2

Ah man, I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). Just a single instance of this kind of fraud is enough for me to write off a brand forever, frankly. If you're lying to my face before I even bought your product, who knows how much else you're lying about. Zero trust for companies like this. [0] https://www.diyph…

This is a reaction I see a lot (and used to be tempted to have as well), but it is imo a mistake, grounded in the fact that we tend to think of companies as individuals whom once they've betrayed us, are likely to do so again. Companies like Samsung, while they claim to have a "culture" are, at the end of the day nothing but a large group of ever changing people, whose responsibilities in what the company does is qui…

Organizations most definitely have their own cultures including codified practices, management frameworks, and a culture of "X." Patterns of behavior emerge from those cultures, and can lead to success or failure. It's been studied quite extensively - browse HBR.org to see research and theory about this.

If you're fortunate, the company you deal with as a customer or employee has a culture that rewards competence and high standards of behavior.

If you're not, you as an employee or customer or member of the public may suffer. Look at recent scandals involving Wells Fargo, Uber, police forces in certain cities, and others. Or companies that release crappy or copied products time after time. These aren't cases of "rogue employees" or "isolated cases." It's often a broken culture or one that encourages people to break rules, or even break the law. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace... about how this manifested itself with Uber.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#54

Post by craftinator »

spuz wrote: post #11

There is a small disclaimer on Samsung's site: > The contents within the screen and images are simulated for illustrative purposes only. I don't really have a problem with Samsung using a higher res DSLR photo for the purposes of illustration of their background blur technology. I will always check review sites to get real sample images to evaluate a phone's camera technology. Edit: I assume this was downvoted becaus…

To do the Portrait Mode post processing, I believe that they need a depth map to separate foreground and background elements. So, unless they use a phone with the hardware to capture this depth map, then it's impossible to use that post processing technique.

Instead, they found a photo of trees, duplicated it, applied a gaussian blur to the duplicate, then cut the girl out of the original picture and pasted her into both tree photos.

The final product has nothing to do with Samsung or it's products; it wasn't taken on a phone, nor processed on a phone, and there is no way you could use a Samsung product to capture of photo of that quality, since it was taken on a DSLR, and the post processing that they used is NOT Portrait Mode, it's Photoshop.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#55

Post by Mikeb85 »

amatecha wrote: post #2

Ah man, I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). Just a single instance of this kind of fraud is enough for me to write off a brand forever, frankly. If you're lying to my face before I even bought your product, who knows how much else you're lying about. Zero trust for companies like this. [0] https://www.diyph…

While Huawei may have cheated that particular phone's photo taking ability, I have a Huawei P20 Pro, and can vouch it's easily the best phone camera I've ever used or seen (it has triple Leica lenses). It doesn't match my Fuji mirrorless camera in some ways, but its shockingly good for a phone.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#56

Post by mattnewton »

josho wrote: post #39
mc32 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes mfgs don’t have enough oversight over their creative agencies. Often agencies use interns for these kinds of image search —and things fall through the cracks. Not exculpating the mfgs or agencies just putting it out there that sometimes it’s some poor schlep who ends up holding the bag.

The poor schlep did what his manager told him to do. The manager used the schlep because he wasn’t given budget to do it right. So, don’t excuse the behaviour the organization enabled it.

Can confirm at least that it can be done better than this. I used to work at Apple and you better believe they cared about details like this all the way up the chain. Every photo we used had to come from a marketing-blessed source, all modifications were auditable in source control, and the end result was blessed again by marketing.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#58

Post by cgriswald »

peterangular wrote: post #25
amatecha wrote: post #2

Ah man, I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). Just a single instance of this kind of fraud is enough for me to write off a brand forever, frankly. If you're lying to my face before I even bought your product, who knows how much else you're lying about. Zero trust for companies like this. [0] https://www.diyph…

Yep - zero trust is exactly right... I bought a Samsung smart watch for Black Friday for $280-ish. Figured "hey - this will probably have better calendar/application support than my Garmin watch!" Nope. Literally can't get it to vibrate/alert when a notification comes through unless it's through Samsung's SPECIFIC applications. So my HipChat messages, Gmail inbox, etc have ZERO notifications even though it WILL show…

Samsung is completely untrustworthy. I might buy another television from them in the future as the screen quality on my Samsung televisions has always been great. But their smart appliances are a joke. Read the reviews for any of the required Samsung "Smart" Apps and you'll find terrible software that doesn't work. Where it does work, at best it technically meets the advertised criteria, but in other cases it seems like bald-faced lies.

I've got a Samsung washer/dryer. They're fine. But the advertised smart features don't work without the app, the App basically doesn't work, and while they say they can be connected to the Wi-Fi, they can only be connected to Wi-Fi via WPS. If that was ever justified, it certainly wasn't justified in 2015/2016 when I bought them. Had I bought them for these features I'd have been furious.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#59

Post by oh_sigh »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #40
bryanlarsen wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd write off an entire massive company for the mistakes of Hauwei Egypt or Samsung Malaysia? It's not like this is central company policy, it's the people localizing the marketing.

How many fuck-ups do you require before writing off a company? Would the entire board have to personally come and shit in your mailbox?

The question isn't how many, but the scale of the fuck-up, and what it represents about the company. Maybe 5 people would have known that this ad campaign was using a non-phone-produced photo. Apparently that is enough for you to indict the 300,000+ people who work there.

Re: Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

#60

Post by kakwa_ »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #6
lostlogin wrote: post #4

The crazy thing is, their phones take amazing photos. Why do they need to fake it?

The same reason anybody uses a stock photo for anything. You can spend $10,000 and a bunch of time to rent a set, actors, techs and a photographer or you can spend $200 to buy a stock photo in a few minutes.

The partial counter argument to that is $10000 is nothing compared to a promotion campaign for a product which usually costs millions.

The time and delay argument is a bit more valid. But if it is at the risk of such bad press, not sure it's a good idea.

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