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A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

appleinsider.com

21–30 of 414 posts

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#21
post #3

I had a related experience with my Pixel 7 a few months ago. In this picture of a deer: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qChwaw9C29WVdAmr6 If you zoom in, you'll note that .. everything at a detail level looks like an oil painting, especially the deer's face and the wall behind it. Very weird effect, and that's certainly not what the wall or deer actually look like. No filters applied. Computational photography is really aw…

This is how all my bird and squirrel photos look. It really disappoints me

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolling shutter could in principle explain this, but it’s probably too fast to capture these three poses which must be temporally rather far apart.

Not probably too fast - definitely too fast. Rolling shutter occurs over a single read-out of the sensor, so she'd have to have held all the three poses during the 1/100th of a second or so exposure for it to be possibly related to rolling shutter.

Completely valid nitpick.

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#25

The article says that “The final composite image should be the best, most realistic interpretation of that moment.” But that doesn’t make any sense. If the there were three real people, rather than one person and two reflections, the algorithm would have created an image of a moment that never existed, stitching together different images taken at different times. The only difference is that we might not notice and mi…

Imagine such an image being used as evidence is a court case. E.g. showing someone pointing a gun at another person when that actually never happened.

As far as the phone knows, there were three people in the photo, and it captured the 'best' picture of each one and composited them.

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#26

The article says that “The final composite image should be the best, most realistic interpretation of that moment.” But that doesn’t make any sense. If the there were three real people, rather than one person and two reflections, the algorithm would have created an image of a moment that never existed, stitching together different images taken at different times. The only difference is that we might not notice and mi…

How is what it is attempting to do any different from when someone takes multiple pictures of a group shot, and then uses the different shots to ensure no blinks and "best" expression from each subject?

There's a reason professional photogs use the mulitiple snaps mode for non-sports. It used to be a lot of work in post, but a lot of apps have made that easier to now it's a built in feature of our phones.

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#27
post #22

So the mirror with the hands clasped?… is just completely made up? Because she’s clearly not doing that irl.

2 mirrors, 3 differnt arm poses. "Photos" are not really any more, the seem to be few second clips, and yea the processing merged 3 differnt poses.

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#28

The article says that “The final composite image should be the best, most realistic interpretation of that moment.” But that doesn’t make any sense. If the there were three real people, rather than one person and two reflections, the algorithm would have created an image of a moment that never existed, stitching together different images taken at different times. The only difference is that we might not notice and mi…

Imagine such an image being used as evidence is a court case. E.g. showing someone pointing a gun at another person when that actually never happened.

images like this would easily be torn apart by experts brought in to testify against it. then again, for something this obvious, it probably wouldn't need an expert.

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#29
I heard mention on a podcast recently [0] that if you hold down the button in the iPhone camera app it will capture a set of photos and then mark the one that it thinks is the 'best' (based on, for example, the photo where everyone has their eyes open). Not the same as what happened here of course. (I keep forgetting to try this, not least because I always try to get the people out of my photos!)

[0] This one, I think: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/the-talk-show-with-joh...

Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

#30
post #22

So the mirror with the hands clasped?… is just completely made up? Because she’s clearly not doing that irl.

not made up as in generated. it was sampled from different instances of time. This is the article's explanation

> Coates was moving when the photo was taken, so when the shutter was pressed, many differing images were captured in that instant.

> Apple's algorithm stitches the photos together, choosing the best versions for saturation, contrast, detail, and lack of blur.

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