A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

Post by _kb » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:14 AM UTC

afavour wrote: post #32

Aurornis wrote: post #12

Purists will always hate the idea of computational photography, but I love how well my iPhone captures handheld nighttime, low-light, and motion images. I’ve captured some photos at night that I never would have thought possible from a physically small sensor due to the laws of physics. Is it 100% pixel perfect to what was happening at the time? No, but I also don’t care. I’ve used HDR exposure stacking in the past.…

I have no objection with what we have today either but it does feel slippery slope-y, especially in the AI era. Before we know it our cameras won’t just be picking the best frame for each person, it’ll be picking the best eye, tweaking their symmetry, making the skin tone as aesthetically pleasing as possible, etc etc etc. It was always this way to an extent but now that we’ve given up the pretence of photos being “r…

Post by helf » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:16 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #33

Aurornis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s denoising. Those mosaic like patterns are more pleasing to the eye than a noisy photograph. The laws of physics put a limit on how well a tiny phone lens and sensor can capture light. We’re not at the limit yet even though hardware is quite good. Still, you wouldn’t like if your phone spat out raw, noisy images everywhere without any processing (beyond what’s necessary to translate it to the right pixel grid a…

Is there any way to get the noisy version? Or is that all forced by the hardware.

Post by helf » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:16 AM UTC

Ambroos wrote: post #43

kortilla wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way to get the noisy version? Or is that all forced by the hardware.

Shooting in RAW gets you the real sensor data without any computational magic.

Post by autoexec » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:19 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #26

leephillips wrote: post #2

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.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:22 AM UTC

_kb wrote: post #42

afavour wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no objection with what we have today either but it does feel slippery slope-y, especially in the AI era. Before we know it our cameras won’t just be picking the best frame for each person, it’ll be picking the best eye, tweaking their symmetry, making the skin tone as aesthetically pleasing as possible, etc etc etc. It was always this way to an extent but now that we’ve given up the pretence of photos being “r…

That already happens, in realtime. FaceTime uses eye gaze correction, Cisco is all in on AI codecs for image and audio compression, and other vendors are on similar tracks too. When you talk to a client, a colleague or a loved one we’re on the verge of you conversing with a model that mostly represents their image and voice (you hope). The affordances of that abstraction layer will only continue to deepen from here t…