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iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

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Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#71

I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.

On Android you can enable a "raw" mode that will capture a dng file with much less processing. You can then adjust that raw file and render it to a jpeg according to your taste. The dng will still have things like stabilization and multi-frame merging, but without those the image will almost always look horrible as others have explained.

How can we enable raw mode? I'll looked into the settings of Camera but I found only a way to disable the scent optimizer.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#73
post #35

how do we exclude the possibility that we are just seeing a leaf on its way falling (or blowing) between the subject that the photographer? Logically an event like that would be followed by the iphone not detecting a face, and therefore not applying its usual face-related black-box features? Supposing this is the case and is 'bad', what exactly do we expect 'better behaviour' would mean in this situation?

The leaf that takes the place of the face is still attached to its branch. It's not falling down, it's hanging from the tree. And the person's head is missing in the areas you'd expect to still see it if it was a falling leaf.

The was taken under zoom on a smartphone known to apply all kinds of "make thinks look nice AI magic".

Both of following scenarios is possible:

- Due to a combination of various post-processing steps including image stabilization the leaf replaced the head.

- The leaf is on a branch which is above the head and was pushed down by the wind hiding the face, due to the unusual angel of the branch that is non-obvious. And the artifacts around the "face" come form the image sharpening/stabilization magic not knowing what to do with that pixels.

- The leaf might also be falling and it's connection to the branch can be an optical illusion, that kind of leafs sometimes have a "mini branch part" attached to them when they fall.

I would say both is likely, and given that it was supposedly done under high zoom I wouldn't be sure if the human doing the photo can/does see it correctly, because our brain also does "magic" to make the things we see look "better" (like our brain actually fills in details from memory/eperience in some situations).

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#74

Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration. If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face detection then it’s probably not something you can (or would want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a t…

There is a big difference between color correction or exposure compensation and adding non existing objects by ML algorithm.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#76
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.

Taste. It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers. Random examples: - In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their…

Or they just have different tastes then you do, which is a far cry from having 'no taste'. People consistently prefer and rate headphones with more bass as more appealing, for example. That's why consumer brands are bass-heavy. It matches the taste of the market. If you need a flat audio profile where the mids and highs and bass are all at the same level you have to pick up a pair of studio monitors.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#77

I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.

As recently as last night, I was considering selling my DSLR and lenses since the quality of my phone camera is just so good, but this has changed my mind. There is something nice about it taking a shot verbatim and letting me decide how to postprocess the RAW.

Plus I'd only get a few hundred bucks for it, and the tactile pleasure of a big, heavy ka-chink when the shutter button is pressed is worth more than that for me :)

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#78

I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.

On Android you can enable a "raw" mode that will capture a dng file with much less processing. You can then adjust that raw file and render it to a jpeg according to your taste. The dng will still have things like stabilization and multi-frame merging, but without those the image will almost always look horrible as others have explained.

Newer iPhones can also shoot in raw.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#79
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It simply means that we no longer have measuring instruments who are used to draw accurate representation of the scene but seed samplers who are used to generate a representation of the scene, not necessarily accurately but artistically. Accuracy used to be the metric but someone figured out that most people are not after accuracy. IMHO it's not fundamentally evil, it's just that it's not the thing we are used to. Wo…

Cameras have never, ever been "accurate". It is not technologically possible to create a photograph that is "accurate". Cameras have always made big tradeoffs to output something that actually looks good to humans.

Sure, but there is a major difference between color correction and, say, replacing a head with a leaf.

Historically cameras have merely altered the style of images. These days smartphone cameras are altering the content of images.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#80

I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.

Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There must have been some filter on by default because our faces looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that -- it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us. I sim…

This brings new meaning to the old quote, "history is written by victors." Today, the victors are Apple, Google, etc., and they are writing their own version of history as its recorded...
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