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Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

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Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#41

Post by nomel »

thelean12 wrote: post #4

I found that bumping up the saturation and "warmth" got a more accurate color to what I was seeing. Other colors sucked but it was good enough to communicate to others what I was seeing.

I did the same. I held the phone up to the sky while moving the sliders around so I could match the color. It worked pretty well, but also made me realize my eyes are also trying to correct. Standing outside and looking up looks very different than standing inside and looking out, with some artificial lighting and white walls acting as a reference.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#42

Post by sudosysgen »

jeffbee wrote: post #20
gambler wrote: post #13

This is the dark side of "smart" devices that replace high-quality physical sensors with clever algorithms. When something weird happens, they might misbehave in the most bizarre fashion. The general pattern will hold for AI. If you give too much control over things to software that you don't really understand or control, it will behave unpredictably when you need it the most and there might not be a way to correct o…

This doesn't have anything to do with the sensor. How sensor outputs are mapped to display inputs lies 100% within the domain of software.

The fact that the sensors and lenses in phones are so small is why the software has so much less to work with and what allows so much more to go wrong.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#43

Post by sudosysgen »

mrob wrote: post #26
jxcl wrote: post #12

One thing that I had to get through my head when I was learning photography was that there's no such thing as "no filter". Every image you take is an interpretation of the scene, either through digital signal processing or film chemistry or retouching. When I spend time editing photos my dad would claim I was "lying" by editing them, he thought any modification to digital photos was wrong because the jpeg the camera…

I draw the line at object recognition. If the processing involves semantic meaning (e.g. this is sky, this is a face) instead of geometric meaning (e.g. this is an edge, this is a Bayer filter artifact) then it's lying. It doesn't matter if the object recognition is done by AI (e.g. faking depth of field by blurring background) or by humans applying selective processing (e.g. painting out red-eye effect, or using a g…

The line is still very blurry. How about a camera using the depth information that is already necessary for AF to automatically crop out of process differently out of focus areas, thus detecting objects? How about a camera automatically focusing on an eye?

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#44

Post by doc_gunthrop »

geocrasher wrote: post #9
mholt wrote: post #3

My Pixel can't even capture sunsets because there's no way to turn off the HDR processing anymore :(

Try the app called "OpenCamera". It does a lot of things that built-in camera apps won't.

It's a great app and open source: https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/code/ci/master/tree/

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#45

Post by 30minAdayHN »

photoGrant wrote: post #17
30minAdayHN wrote: post #10

> This was a moment for my Canon to prove that, despite its bulk, it can't always be replaced by a smartphone. Such a naive statement. Once those phones' white balance is corrected, they should be able to capture the orange tinge. Even in a DSLR, if the white balance is set to auto, it would not capture the orange tinge. Cloudy might be a good starting point.

Your statement is also naive. White balance set in camera does not affect the raw capture. Only how it’s represented.

Fair observation. I was talking about what photographer sees on the DSLR display immediately after capturing similar to how a mobile photographer sees.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#46

Post by beenBoutIT »

geocrasher wrote: post #9
mholt wrote: post #3

My Pixel can't even capture sunsets because there's no way to turn off the HDR processing anymore :(

Try the app called "OpenCamera". It does a lot of things that built-in camera apps won't.

Open Camera via Fdroid comes free without ads.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#47

Post by blahblah4332 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #42
jeffbee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't have anything to do with the sensor. How sensor outputs are mapped to display inputs lies 100% within the domain of software.

The fact that the sensors and lenses in phones are so small is why the software has so much less to work with and what allows so much more to go wrong.

Unless I missed something in the article, this has nothing to do with sensor or lens size. This is purely an artifact of default image processing settings and ignorance of white balance. Any user with any digital camera can perfectly capture the color of the scene by simply setting the white balance manually to daylight.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#48

Post by jxcl »

interestica wrote: post #40
jxcl wrote: post #12

One thing that I had to get through my head when I was learning photography was that there's no such thing as "no filter". Every image you take is an interpretation of the scene, either through digital signal processing or film chemistry or retouching. When I spend time editing photos my dad would claim I was "lying" by editing them, he thought any modification to digital photos was wrong because the jpeg the camera…

It's actually pretty interesting how much processing goes on in the brain for images. We do a sort of equivalent to the phone in compensating for the colour to make it 'right'. The orange car in the article image acted as kind of an 'anchor' for the colour compensation. The blue/white-black/gold dress [1] controversy kinda illustrates that 'anchoring'. The 'Checker Shadow Illusion' [2] is another instance where our b…

> The orange car in the article image acted as kind of an 'anchor' for the colour compensation.

It's funny that you mention this because to me the car kind of looks like it's grey, lit by orange light from all sides except the top. Edit: after looking at it a bit more I think you're right and I'm wrong

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#50

Post by jasonpeacock »

jxcl wrote: post #12

One thing that I had to get through my head when I was learning photography was that there's no such thing as "no filter". Every image you take is an interpretation of the scene, either through digital signal processing or film chemistry or retouching. When I spend time editing photos my dad would claim I was "lying" by editing them, he thought any modification to digital photos was wrong because the jpeg the camera…

Even our eyes/brain interpret what we see differently from others - the famous blue/gold[1] dress is a great example of this.

And then there's color blindness or tetrachromacy where some people see less/more colors than others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

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