If you do statistical modeling, you have to watch your priors. Orange skies are very rare, so the priors in the camera image processing software are off.
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone with a professional photography background, this article was actually super upsetting. The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result. The thesis of the article "I don't understand white…
Smartphone cameras are not for people who know what white balance is, so that's a very solid thesis.
Unfortunately this reality applies to _all_ digital cameras, not just the oversimplified versions found on many smart phones.
Also, with smartphone sensor/lens quality improvements as well as computational photography enhancements, smartphones are for _all_ picture takers. Point and shoot cameras are no longer relevant.
A better version of your reply is: Expecting accurate results in photographs is not for people who are ignorant of general photographic principles and technology.
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#73One 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…
There is a science of color reproduction. It is quite tough because they way we perceive colors is amazingly complicated. But it is quite possible to make an effort. Of course, most photography is not about color reproduction but about telling a story. And automatic cameras (like the way phones are mostly used) take a way a lot of control when it comes to deciding how color look in the photo. On most phones you can f…
One note on the phones thing: some camera apps (on Android, dunno about iOS) provide additional settings. For example, the Samsung stock camera has a "pro" mode, which lets you adjust the white balance, exposure, metering, and "ISO". Third party apps will provide histograms, long exposure, time stamps, etc.
It's all similar to how many people used disposable film cameras (no options except aim and push the capture button) or cheap reusable cams (zoom, maybe exposure, etc) but film cameras that let you adjust everything existed at the same time
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#74it's understandable given our relative disempowerment on the matter, but it feels a little bread-and-circusy to focus on picture-taking rather than a real-life approximation of an airborne toxic event[0]. in LA, we had a bit of a clearing yesterday, but the bobcat fires (and others) have turned us hazy and slightly orange again. i can feel it in my airways. it's more worrisome than the corona everyone else seems to b…
I don’t think this article is bread and circusy. I think it highlights how absurd this situation is. Our denial and assumptions about the world are so deep, they are encoded in our algorithms to the point where we can’t even record this event accurately.
sure, but that's because you've interpreted what is otherwise a pretty banal piece. you've said something more interesting in a sentence than that whole "article".
(i didn't even see the photos because google amp infests the site and i block it out of principle. not a fan of leading every paragraph with bold in an effort to be hard-punchingly pithy either.)
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#75This article is awful. It's about smartphone cameras not being able to capture, but the three photos included are all ones that at least somewhat worked. Seems like it would be better to include one that failed?
As someone with a professional photography background, this article was actually super upsetting. The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result. The thesis of the article "I don't understand white…
I think you're multiple steps ahead of the curve here. Most people think that an ideal camera captures things the same way you see them with your eyes, and any differences reflect a flaw in the camera. (I personally thought that was true until yesterday!)
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The top level comment was making a more general claim than just color balance. There are a lot of weird artifacts in phone pictures introduced by image processing overfitting.
I didn't really agree with the top level comment either. This isn't an artifact of sensor size or A/D conversion or any of that. You can encounter the exact same issue with a $40,000 medium format camera if you don't understand photography.
What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait garbage for the photographically and technologically ignorant. The replies to it are disappointingly similar.
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone with a professional photography background, this article was actually super upsetting. The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result. The thesis of the article "I don't understand white…
I think you're multiple steps ahead of the curve here. Most people think that an ideal camera captures things the same way you see them with your eyes, and any differences reflect a flaw in the camera. (I personally thought that was true until yesterday!)
Yeah, I can agree with that. Before I got into photography I believed the same thing. In fact I was driven to it by the disparities in my own images when compared to professional examples.
The reason this article is so frustrating to me is that instead of the author highlighting what has been true since the dawn of photography - that cameras never truly capture the scene as we view it - they chose to baselessly attack a specific set of devices which happen to have cameras attached to them.
If this were to happen 10 years ago to someone using a Nikon Coolpix 1234Whatever, they would be equally disappointed, and someone using an Olympus Stylus somethingorotherD may have been very pleased. The color representation in images has always been the property of the medium's manufacturer, from Kodak to Polaroid and so on.
It would have been nice to see the author share information instead of just ignorant disappointment
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
IMO the orange car had little to do with the output color grading. The real color temperature anchor is the bright foreground illumination.
Yes, with the brightly-lit white undersides of the awnings.
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#79Are there no apps for iPhone with the ability to manually adjust white balance?
There are many; VSCO and camera+ for example.
Even in the default camera app you can point at something white, like white paper lit with white light, and long-press to get an auto focus and auto exposure lock. Then you can get a picture of the orange sky / landscape and it will use the locked white balance setting.
Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really agree with this. I'm not sure what my definition of lying is but of course it entirely depends on the purpose of the photo. A photojournalist cropping out an important piece of context is definitely lying. Me cropping out another tourist of a photo I took of a friend is not lying. If I'm editing photos and someone has a temporary blemish or a pimple, I'm more than likely to edit it out. We don't rememb…
>A photojournalist cropping out an important piece of context is definitely lying. Me cropping out another tourist of a photo I took of a friend is not lying. Rules are even stricter than that for photojournalists. Photographers have lost jobs just for editing out extraneous objects (like a telephone pole "growing out" of someone's head) to make a photo look better. The thinking is likely along the lines of it's a sl…
Even within journalism there is a world of difference between cropping and outright manipulation.