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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

#161
post #19

Well it’s in telephoto and 1/121 exposure so the photographer was probably wobbling around like mad when it was taken and the overlay and computational image stuff got confused. I’m fine with this. I use a mini tripod with my 13 pro on telephoto. Back in the old days this would just look like ass instead.

I would rate any camera that does this as 1/100. It cannot possibly be a worse camera. How anyone that have an interest in photography can see swapping a head with a leaf as just fine is beyond me. It's no better than using Snapchat like filters and calling it raw. It's is utterly broken and should be removed ASAP from all iPhones.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ML-powered" enhanced zoom can't be trusted. The moment you need ML magic to magnify you are basically telling the ML "guess what is there based on what we can see and the training database you where trained on". Also due to the nature of such algorithm they do not have any form of common sense or "realistic general purpose" world view, and tend to be black box so it's hard to check if they learned something "stupid"…

OK sure but the distribution of natural images is highly redundant ie pixels are not independent and there is structure to exploit. It's not magic obviously but done properly it's a pretty reasonable thing

> OK sure but the distribution of natural images is highly redundant ie pixels are not independent and there is structure to exploit.

Sure, but that depends very strongly on the number of natural images you trained on and the specificity of the situation you present to the algorithm. Maybe one such structure in the training set just happens to be people holding knives given "a specific skin color and a turquoise sleeve on a picture with a color scheme as if it's a cloudy day".

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch. The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable. And the times it messes up are so rare that it becomes a talking point worthy of hundreds of comments.

Indeed. I wish I had a list of everyone parroting the wisdom that "it's all about the size of the lens, a smartphone can never be as good as a DSLR" so as to ignore their future opinions. Camera phones now beat cameras worth thousands of dollars with better software and larger R&D budgets, at least in low light performance and color gamut. Closely related: "It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license…

Yes, this is getting better, but it reminds me of a story from a friend who was doing work on some classified satellite imaging systems (he was in hardware, iirc) and went to an internal seminar/briefing by some experts on how, from the front to the end of the system, to get the best images for the customers.

He said they went through hours of details on how the various enhancement algorithms and systems worked, and at the end, the bottom line was basically 'take a better picture in the first place' - as in get the lens, lighting, and parameters right in the first place, and that'll be the biggest factor in how far the processing HW/SW/people can take the enhancements.

Maybe the new software with huge R&D budgets is now better, but I'd suspect this advice is still not obsolete...

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

#164
I recently got a Pixel and was disappointed to see that the stock camera app has no way to control the focus manually. I guess Google is so impressed with their post-processing they think users won't need any control.

Turns out, their software isn't that great at focusing in many of the photos I take, so I need a different camera app. My only requirements are: 1. Manual focus 2. Wide angle lens support

I thought a replacement would be trivial to find but I've tried a bunch of apps at this point and haven't found a single one that checks both boxes.

Can anyone recommend a basic android camera? Preferably one that doesn't distort the world too much or replace faces with leaves.

I've been using Open Camera which is pretty great, but doesn't support wide angle lens shots as far as I can tell.

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

#165
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/

You need to change API to Camera2 and then you will be able to enable RAW.

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

#166
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, why is this ruled out? Assuming that phones reach a point where this is computationally cheap, what would be so hard about having a sliding window for each frame in the video?

Nothing prevents that, but if there is a lot of movement (which would be the point of using video) then the great results aren’t as easy to get. You can’t take a still of someone dancing in a dark room with an iPhone, you can take a still of someone standing reasonably still in a dark room.

Isn't this a similar problem to the blurry-face vs. leaf-face issue discussed? If yes, then one would hand it off to computation to figure out which parts matter and need doctoring, except scaled up to video.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch. The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable. And the times it messes up are so rare that it becomes a talking point worthy of hundreds of comments.

Indeed. I wish I had a list of everyone parroting the wisdom that "it's all about the size of the lens, a smartphone can never be as good as a DSLR" so as to ignore their future opinions. Camera phones now beat cameras worth thousands of dollars with better software and larger R&D budgets, at least in low light performance and color gamut. Closely related: "It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license…

> It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable.

Well, a phone can reconstruct this license plate, and in fact any license plate in lieu of this one! And invent a new one!

Which is worrisome for justice. Presenting proof, that was uploaded to servers, horodated and geostamped, won’t be enough in a court of law. Anyone can answer: “What if the iPhone recreated and inferred the presence of a knife using the neural engine? This face, is it real? The distance, is it repositionned?”

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory what prevents me from using a huge lens and sensor on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and then using the same advanced software but now running on a desktop computer or a server that is many times more powerful than a smartphone to do advanced post processing?

It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power. DSLR and mirrorless cameras have better optical properties. But they are held back by starting too late and being much worse when it comes to software. These cameras also are limited by their CPUs, which are a decade behind, and by their batteries, which are much smaller but expected…

I had to check that, as these big chunky camera batteries “feel” like they should have a lot of mAH compared to a phone.

And I am wrong. Depending on the phone.

A Nikon battery: 2280 mAh.

An iPhone 13: anywhere from 2406–4352 mAH.

Yeah, that’s a way smaller power budget than a Pro iPhone, especially as you have autofocus and image stabilization systems that have to move around a lot more mass.

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ML-powered" enhanced zoom can't be trusted. The moment you need ML magic to magnify you are basically telling the ML "guess what is there based on what we can see and the training database you where trained on". Also due to the nature of such algorithm they do not have any form of common sense or "realistic general purpose" world view, and tend to be black box so it's hard to check if they learned something "stupid"…

OK sure but the distribution of natural images is highly redundant ie pixels are not independent and there is structure to exploit. It's not magic obviously but done properly it's a pretty reasonable thing

Sure, if it is an option applied after the fact by the user editing the photo. Any camera that does this automatically is utterly broken. Otherwise where is the line? Some sharpening? Adding bigger boobs by default? Make people less black?

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Modern phones take long exposures and try to make sense of it by analyzing it. Basically, a one second really dark video can be summed up into one very blurry but bright enough photo. But if you carefully move each frame to compensate for camera movement when summing it up - you might also get a sharp picture. But then the subject moves, or a leaf moves, and the algorithm has to decide which parts of the photo should…

Does anything like that exist as a computer-attachable cam, e.g. for Linux? Or are we stuck with <2015 cameras unless they come as part of a smartphone?
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