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A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

appleinsider.com

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

#71

Post by sharkweek »

ALittleLight wrote: post #61
autoexec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it 100% pixel perfect to what was happening at the time? No, but I also don’t care. No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. You don't have to be a purist to want the ability to decide what gets captured or to have control over how it looks though. Those kinds of choices are part of what make photo…

I think you have that backwards. The vast majority of people will prefer Apple's computational enhancements. A small number of photography enthusiasts will prefer manual control (and a smaller number will benefit from it).

Yeah I 100% agree - When I pull my phone out to take a picture of the kids/my dog/something randomly interesting, all I want is to point my camera at whatever I want to capture and have it turn out.

Don’t care how it happens I don’t want to think about settings.

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

#72

Post by crotho »

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.…

There's a big difference between looking at reality through a bad filter and looking at a completely different constructed reality.

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

#73

Post by bryanlarsen »

threeseed wrote: post #53
khazhoux wrote: post #24

I’m gonna call bullshit here. The difference in arm pose couldn’t be covered in any reasonable burst period.

Surprised you were downvoted because this doesn't sound right at all. The poses would be at least a few seconds apart which rules out anything in Apple's computational photography pipeline e.g. focus and dynamic range stacking. At least based on what they have communicated to date. We know Google demonstrated an AI model that was capable of selecting human parts from multiple photos but that was a showcase feature no…

It takes 250 ms for something to fall 1 foot under the weight of gravity, which is also approximately how long it takes to go from arms crossed to arms at side.

Which is well under the 2 seconds computational photography clip.

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

#74

Post by orbital-decay »

autoexec wrote: post #55
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.…

> Is it 100% pixel perfect to what was happening at the time? No, but I also don’t care. No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. You don't have to be a purist to want the ability to decide what gets captured or to have control over how it looks though. Those kinds of choices are part of what make photo…

>In the end, this tech just takes control from you.

1. "This tech" is too broad of a qualifier, as GP is talking about computational photography in general, which is many things at once. Most of those things work great; some others are unpredictable. There are plenty of custom camera apps besides Apple's default camera which will always try to stay as predictable as possible.

2. There is such a thing as too much control. Proper automation is good, especially if you aren't doing a carefully set up session. The computational autofocus in high-end cameras is amazing nowadays. You can nail it every time now without thinking, with rare exceptions.

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

#75

Post by dkarras »

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.…

when you think about it, with rolling shutter, no row (or column?) of pixels are from the same moment in a given picture unless you are shooting with a global shutter camera - which is rare for consumer type devices.

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

#76

Post by autoexec »

frogblast wrote: post #68
autoexec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it 100% pixel perfect to what was happening at the time? No, but I also don’t care. No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. You don't have to be a purist to want the ability to decide what gets captured or to have control over how it looks though. Those kinds of choices are part of what make photo…

> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. In these difficult scenarios, the alternative photo I'd get using such a small camera without this kind processing would be entirely unusable. I couldn't rescue those photos with hours of manual edits. That may be "in control", but it isn't useful.

For decades people have had the ability to get great photos using cell phones that included useful features like automatically adjusting focus, or exposure, or flash all without their phones inventing total misrepresentations of what the camera was pointed at.

I mean, at a certain point taking a less than perfect photo is more important than getting a fake image that looks good. If I see a pretty flower and want to take a picture of it, the result might look a lot better if my phone just searched for online images of similar flowers, selected one, and saved that image to my icloud, but I wouldn't want that.

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

#77

Post by katbyte »

ALittleLight wrote: post #61
autoexec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it 100% pixel perfect to what was happening at the time? No, but I also don’t care. No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. You don't have to be a purist to want the ability to decide what gets captured or to have control over how it looks though. Those kinds of choices are part of what make photo…

I think you have that backwards. The vast majority of people will prefer Apple's computational enhancements. A small number of photography enthusiasts will prefer manual control (and a smaller number will benefit from it).

and for those who don't there are a bunch of photo apps that allow far more control & iphones can shoot raw now

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

#78

Post by datadrivenangel »

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.

Incorrect. It gets you less editorial magic, but all cameras make decisions about how they create RAW images.

Even cameras that don't make any intentional decisions end up making decisions because of the physics of the sensor as an electrical device and how you read each sensor element.

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

#79

Post by hnburnsy »

threeseed wrote: post #66
w-ll wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are conflating two different aspects. Live Photo is a feature where it captures a couple of seconds of video before/after the photo is taken. From the article that feature was not enabled. The computational pipeline is where you press the shutter and it blends a few frames together in order to do focus stacking, HDR etc. Based on what I have tried with my iPhone it is doing this in < 100ms which is not enough tim…

Couldn't it be using frames from before the shutter was pressed? Could the processing take longer when people\animals are in the frame?
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