Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 467 posts

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

#351

Post by trompetenaccoun »

TedShiller wrote: post #276
Gigachad wrote: post #63

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.

No free lunch is right. iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen. Instagram kids don't know this, but that's ok, because we don't need them to, and neither do they.

Increasingly these photo"graphs" have nothing to do with reality either. I may be part of a weird minority but when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong. Some Chinese manufacturers have taken this to a ridiculous extreme, they make normal friendly faces look outright scary.

Pictures shouldn't be edited by default, the user should be given the option if they want to. And lets not even get started on the fact that we have all these face recognition algos and such in a device constantly connected to the internet, with people taking pictures of themselves and everyone around them. What could go wrong...

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

#352

Post by xdennis »

dagmx wrote: post #341
post_break wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This came up big time with the Rittenhouse trial when the judge didn't want to use the pinch to zoom method on video of the event. A lot of people laughed because he talked about AI but he was on the right path, it does inject pixels to scale the image.

No. He wasn't on the right path because he was talking about the wrong thing. It astounds me how people are so quickly conflating multiple different scenarios. Playback and capture are very different things. Would you be accepting people complaining about log4j vulnerabilities with regards to a C++ code base for example? No, because you'd know the nuanced difference that's inherent in a code base. Image processing is…

It's not clear what you're disputing.

Criminal trials are generally biased towards the defense. If it's unclear if the evidence is doctored or not it shouldn't be introduced to potentially mislead the jury.

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

#353

Post by dathinab »

andbberger wrote: post #243
MauranKilom wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 slee…

I said if done properly. My point is that in principle using a natural image prior to 'enhance' an image is not a totally crazy thing.

It isn't (EDIT: isn't crazy) .

But there is no good way to reliably know if it's done well for this specific image.

So it can't be trusted.

Which doesn't mean it's worthless.

It's kinda like someone saying "I think I maybe have seen when passing by but I didn't pay attention."

It's not trustable as the human mind if fickle but it can be a good starting point.

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

#354

Post by dagmx »

xdennis wrote: post #352
dagmx wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. He wasn't on the right path because he was talking about the wrong thing. It astounds me how people are so quickly conflating multiple different scenarios. Playback and capture are very different things. Would you be accepting people complaining about log4j vulnerabilities with regards to a C++ code base for example? No, because you'd know the nuanced difference that's inherent in a code base. Image processing is…

It's not clear what you're disputing. Criminal trials are generally biased towards the defense. If it's unclear if the evidence is doctored or not it shouldn't be introduced to potentially mislead the jury.

I'm disputing people using this case of the iPhone CAPTURE process screwing up as vindication for the judges distrust of the PLAYBACK process.

A) video scaling is a well documented and well understood field. The judge's mistrust was wrong to begin with, and if he distrusted the scaling algorithm, then there's no reason to trust any capture process either. It's reductionist if they're not going to try and understand what's going on.

B) if the judge mistrusted it, there should be a standard platform for playback that can be trusted by them otherwise it's an easy out for dismissing any evidence

C) again, people are conflating capture and playback. They're different, and issues in one don't translate directly to the other.

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

#355

Post by iamacyborg »

roywiggins wrote: post #116
iamacyborg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading a lot of fantastic essays on the “reality” of photos when I studied photography at A Level. I’ll have to see if I can dig stuff up, but I recall there being a lot of controversy surrounding posing of bodies in early war photography.

Probably the most famous one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Soldier

That one definitely but I was thinking of Alexander Gardner’s Home of a rebel sharpshooter.

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

#356

Post by nullifidian »

wrboyce wrote: post #137
alkonaut wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How raw is “raw”? If you take a long exposure in a dark room with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than it should. Would a “raw” version of that photo be a traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a short video sequence? (that would actually make the most sense) I ha…

It wouldn’t make any difference in this instance, all the computational stuff still happens. I just took a long exposure on my 12 Pro and purposely moved the camera around a bit and my phone produced a sharp RAW image.

That's the definition of a non-RAW image.

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

#357

Post by stinos »

Gigachad wrote: post #264
spoonjim wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s also just weird. That’s not my daughter’s skin in the photo, it’s 1000 other people’s skin blended together and textured in.

It never has been accurate. Even on dumb traditional cameras, colors are more of an interpretation than a reality.

They surely are. But not all interpretations are alike. I was recenty looking at (scans of) analog pictures I took years ago using an entry level analog camera and apart from white balance being off, the general skin tone + texture and shadows at least looks very realistic and not like some cardboard version of skin.

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

#358

Post by arnaudsm »

725686 wrote: post #180

Reminded me of the infamous Xerox copier bug that changed numbers in copies! https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

The fact that a bug this severe and overengineered took so look to be noticed is both hilarious and extremely scary about how we trust modern software.

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

#359

Post by liversage »

alkonaut wrote: post #114
caslon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can set Apple's devices to shoot RAW, and it's usually pretty great, without the painting-like qualities of its default image processing.

How raw is “raw”? If you take a long exposure in a dark room with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than it should. Would a “raw” version of that photo be a traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a short video sequence? (that would actually make the most sense) I ha…

I don't have an iPhone but I've always been shooting RAW on my phones and then processed the photos in LightRoom. As soon as I use one of the "lenses" on my phone (like "night shot" or "panorama" or even "wide angle"/"tele") I only get a JPG. The RAW file is only created when I shoot using the basic camera. This is the case for my current OnePlus but also previous phones (Google, Nokia).

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

#360

Post by calciphus »

stinos wrote: post #357
Gigachad wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never has been accurate. Even on dumb traditional cameras, colors are more of an interpretation than a reality.

They surely are. But not all interpretations are alike. I was recenty looking at (scans of) analog pictures I took years ago using an entry level analog camera and apart from white balance being off, the general skin tone + texture and shadows at least looks very realistic and not like some cardboard version of skin.

I agree - it is getting harder and harder to fully turn off skin smoothing on cellphones and webcam software. You can turn it down, but rarely off.
Post reply on HN