71–80 of 171 posts
Is it just me who found the article immensely frustrating for lacking same-region-crop side by side comparisons?
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I think this point is worth pushing on a bit harder, which is to say that the "additional details" in the picture are guesses by the software, not actual additional details. The data present in the picture is fixed, the software uses that data to build educated guesses on what was actually there. If the photo doesn't contain enough data to actually determine what a given piece of text in the image says, the software…
In some use cases, like OCR, the accuracy of these guesses can be established in a scientific way. And it tends to be very good.
Is it just me who found the article immensely frustrating for lacking same-region-crop side by side comparisons?
This seems highly relevant as to what is actually going on: http://www.johncostella.com/magic/
"As noted above, in 2021 I analytically derived the Fourier transform of the Magic Kernel in closed form, and found, incredulously, that it is simply the cube of the sinc function. This implies that the Magic Kernel is just the rectangular window function convolved with itself twice—which, in retrospect, is completely obvious. This observation, together with a precise definition of the requirement of the Sharp kernel, allowed me to obtain an analytical expression for the exact Sharp kernel, and hence also for the exact Magic Kernel Sharp kernel, which I recognized is just the third in a sequence of fundamental resizing kernels. These findings allowed me to explicitly show why Magic Kernel Sharp is superior to any of the Lanczos kernels. It also allowed me to derive further members of this fundamental sequence of kernels, in particular the sixth member, which has the same computational efficiency as Lanczos-3, but has far superior properties."
Is it just me who found the article immensely frustrating for lacking same-region-crop side by side comparisons?
I don't even understand why someone would use a headline like "Jaw hit the floor" without even bothering to share the two images. It's not like Adobe Photoshop doesn't have the ability to export images...
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Yeah, a monthly payment forever is ridiculous...
I think what bothers me the most is that its not just a monthly subscription. When you sign up, you are entering a one year contract with them. Sure, you can cancel at any time...just pay the remaining amount due and you can walk away.
Truth is that anything other than the full suite (and maybe the photographer plan) doesn't make sense financially. And then they killed the month by month subscription as you said.
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If you consider photos taken by cell phones, it's hard to really say what "as the camera takes them" means - a lot of ML-driven retouching happens "automagically" with most modern cell phones already and I'd expect more in the future.
It goes even further than that. Image sensors don't capture images. They record electricity that can be interpreted as an image. This might seem like a quibble, but once you dive a little deeper into it, you realise that there's enormous latitude and subjectivity in the way you do that interpretation. What's even crazier is that this didn't come with digital photography. Analogue film photography has the same problem…
The nice thing about this was that you could hand the E-6 off to a magazine and end up with a photograph printed in the magazine that was very close to the original film. Any color shifts or changes in contrast you could see just with your eyes. You could drop the film in a scanner and visually confirm that the scan looks identical to the original. (You cannot do this with C-41.)
This was not used for forensic photography, though. The point of using E-6 was for the photographer to make artistic decisions and capture them on film, so they can get back to taking photos. My understanding is that crime scene photography was largely C-41, once it was relatively cheap.
Topaz Gigapixel is quite good though despite the negative comments in the article. I'd rather give my money to Topaz for this one feature than keep paying Adobe subscription fees indefinitely
When I use ML these days is it all hardcore data crunching by remote servers or is some of it running on my phone/laptop?