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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

#91

Post by xsmasher »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #15
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.

How would I do this on iOS, if I had just my phone and no CaptureOne on a laptop or the like? Are there apps that let me use a gray card to set the white balance of raw photos?

In the iOS camera 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 take a picture of the orange sky / landscape and it will use the locked white balance setting.

A white countertop lit with fluorescent light would work.

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

#92

Post by sudosysgen »

blahblah4332 wrote: post #86
sudosysgen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a competent camera, you actually wouldn't. You would take a picture in RAW format, and change the White Balance afterwards. Whereas in a tiny phone, the RAW images are of exceedingly low quality.

That's not generally how it works. Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a pr…

> Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process.

Of course, but when issues arise, you can always change it in post. Also, you can batch set Auto WB in pretty much any competent image editor. But yes, in the vast majority of cases one would set a given WB.

> Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.

I totaly understand that too, whenever I can I try to use vintage glass because it brings something enjoyable to the experience. But the photographers that shoot in JPEG typically do it in places where a missed shot isn't that big of a deal.

FWIW, every photojouranlist I've known shoots RAW+JPEG all the time or whenever the light gets fucky for this exact reason. And as someone who shoots multiple hundreds to a thousand images relatively often in a single day, it doesn't really add much issues to my workflow - I'm not going to be doing much anything with all but a few dozen images, and I'm going to be editing all of them even if it takes me two hours or so to make sure I'm getting the most out of my pictures. So if someday I forget to set my white balance, it doesn't make that huge of an issue to my workflow, main problem is that I'm not going to get as good af an impression of what they'll end up looking like when I press the shutter.

That said, in this particular situation, you'd be changing the WB in post.

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

#93

Post by closeparen »

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 was surprised to see photojournalists using Photoshop. Isn't that unethical? But it's the same thing: you correct the image to match what your eyes see.

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

#94

Post by photojosh »

SECProto wrote: post #73
phicoh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

There certainly are iOS apps that allow full manual control and raw capture. I'm a happy user of Halide when I need the extra control. [0]

What I haven't seen yet in this conversation is that back in the film days you changed your white balance setting by changing... your film.

[0] https://halide.cam

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

#95

Post by m463 »

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…

What I found interesting as a kid is... The front door of the house was half opened and I leaned against it so that my nose was against the edge.

So one of my eyes faced the inside of the house, the other eye faced the outside of the house. I waited a little bit and then pulled away from the door. One eye had adjusted to the brightness - and color - of the inside and the other hd done the same for outside.

Our eyes have white balance plus physical and chemical exposure. pretty cool.

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

#96

Post by Leherenn »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #75
blahblah4332 wrote: post #54

Earlier 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!)

Could you please explain for those not in the know?

I realise that why I see is just one "interpretation" of the reality, but it seems sensible that one possible ideal for cameras would be to perfectly match my perception of the world. Is it just impossible because the difference in perception is just so big between individuals that what would be perfect for me would be way off for someone else?

You can also create (at least theoretically, no idea how they compare currently) cameras that are better than human eyes at things like resolution, contrasts and so on, and that seems like another possible ideal; but which one is more relevant seems very context dependant.

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

#97

Post by shard »

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…

Converting the full spectrum lights in nature into color filtered photons captured on a sensor with an artificial color profile, it's own resolution and pixel arrangement, its own lens specifics that is the camera, then converted to another limited color palette with another artificial color profile and it's own resolution and pixel arrangement that is the display, in order to simulate the colors of nature as detected by yet another set of filtered detectors with it's own color profile, resolution, neuron arrangement, and lens specifics that is the human eye, there is already no such thing as objective truth, every step involves heavy interpretation. Therefore there really is no such thing as honest processing either.

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

#98

Post by shard »

closeparen wrote: post #93
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 was surprised to see photojournalists using Photoshop. Isn't that unethical? But it's the same thing: you correct the image to match what your eyes see.

Of course journalists use Photoshop. Before digital cameras, journalists also pushed or pulled the film processing, dodged and burned parts of the image, exposed different parts of the photo paper by different amounts, used different processing chemicals for developing the photo paper. It's not about correcting the image to match what your eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a photograph can never represent what the eyes see, and photographers have to interpret the image to get their message across.

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

#99

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Leherenn wrote: post #96
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

Could you please explain for those not in the know? I realise that why I see is just one "interpretation" of the reality, but it seems sensible that one possible ideal for cameras would be to perfectly match my perception of the world. Is it just impossible because the difference in perception is just so big between individuals that what would be perfect for me would be way off for someone else? You can also create (…

The challenge here is that your perception of the world itself performs contextual color correction. If you've ever seen those optical illusions where you see two different colors but they're actually the same (https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/another-brain-frying-optical-i... is my favorite recent example), that's a demonstration of the effect. So a camera that's trying to match your perception of the world can't just identify the "true" color; it has to identify what color it should print on your screen to generate the same perception as if the contents of the picture were outside your window.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad ideal, though. Smartphone cameras do a very good job at automatically performing all the right corrections in most circumstances. It's just nontrivial, and thus unsurprising that the normal algorithms fail in weird edge cases like "the entire sky is deep red".

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

#100

Post by gwbas1c »

sudosysgen wrote: post #36
m00x wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a much lower dynamic range, less colour depth and let in less light. If you want the best of both worlds you can get a mirrorless which is less bulky, but still have a big sensor.

And also lower sharpness, even big camera lenses (for phones) are limited to around 8MP of resolution due to diffraction, which is why cellphone cameras tend not to have much of a benefit beyond 8-12MP. Whereas a very sharp lens for a DSLR might have a maximum sharpness of 90+MP.

It's why I take snapshots of people with my camera, and buy posters of scenery.
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