In my family we like to take 'pano-rankenstein' photos, where you do a pano across a person's face as they are rapidly changing expressions in dramatic ways. The results are pretty hilarious, as the phone tries to stitch your face together into one cohesive image.
A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
151–160 of 414 posts
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#152Purists 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 just want to be able to turn it off when I want to
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#153Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play devils advocate here: the best camera is the one you have with you, and computational photography does mean you can just push a button without thinking and get a clear picture that captures a memory. It’s obviously an argument to say that Apple shouldn’t get to choose how your memories are recorded, but I know I’ve captured a lot more moments I would’ve otherwise missed because of just how automatic phone cam…
> computational photography does mean you can just push a button without thinking and get a clear picture that captures a memory. I'd argue that the women trying to take a photo of herself in her wedding dress did not get a clear picture that captures a memory. She got a very confusing picture that captured something which never happened. There are lots of great automatic camera features which are super helpful, but…
> don’t falsify events […] Cameras that outright lie […] AI generated monstrosity of what apple thinks
Oh the irony of framing things (pun intended) so hyperbolically. Somehow it never seems to dawn on people that like to throw around the word ‘lie’ that they’re doing exactly what they’re complaining about, except intentionally, which seems way worse. Nobody sat down to say bwahahah let’s make the iphone create fake photos, the intent obviously is to use automated methods to capture the highest quality image while trying to be relatively faithful to the scene, which might mean capturing moving subjects at very slightly different times, in order to avoid photo-wrecking smudges. When you blatantly ignore the stated intent and project your own negative assumptions of other people’s motivations, that becomes consciously falsifying the situation.
Photographs are not and never have been anything but an unrepresentative slice of a likeness of a moment in time, framed by the photographer to leave almost everything out, distorted by a lens, recolored during the process, and displayed in a completely different medium that adds more distortion and recoloring. There is no truth to a photograph in the first place, automatic or not, it’s an image, not reality. Photos have often implied the wrong thing, ever since the medium was invented. The greatest photos are especially prone to being unrealistic depictions. Having an auto stitch of a few people a few milliseconds apart is no different in its truthiness from a rolling shutter or a pano that takes time to sweep, no different from an auto shutter that waits for less camera shake, no different from a time-lapse, no different from any automatic feature, and no different from manual features too. Adjusting my f-stop and focus is really just as much distorting reality as auto-stitching is.
Anyway, she did get a clear memory that was quite faithful to within a second, it just has a slightly funny surprise.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> For decades people have had the ability to get great photos using cell phones Not in these light conditions. Simple as that. What iPhones are doing nowadays gives you the ability to take some photos you couldn’t have in the past. Try shooting a few photos with an iPhone and the app Halide. It can give you a single RAW of a single exposure. Try it in some mildly inconvenient light conditions, like in a forest. Where…
> Not in these light conditions.
Again, decades of people photographing themselves in wedding dresses while in dress shops (which tend to be pretty well lit) would disagree with you. Also, the things that help most with lighting (like auto-exposure) aren't the problem here. That's not why her arms ended up in three different positions at once.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#156The 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…
"interpretation of that moment" from a camera it is not a photograph, it's a fake image kidnapping the word "photograph".
A photograph is always an interpretation. A photograph from, say, a modern $2000 big boy camera:
Does not capture the color of every pixel, and merely infers it from the surrounding ones. Is usually viewed on a sRGB screen with shitty contrast and a dynamic range significantly smaller than the one of the camera, which is significantly smaller than the one of human eyes, which is still significantly smaller than what we encounter in the real world. Does not capture a particular moment in time, but a variable length period that’s also shifted between the top part of the image and the bottom part (a couple of ms for mechanical shutter, tens or hundreds of ms for electronic). Has no idea about the white balance of the scene. Has no idea about the absolute brightness of the scene. Usually has significant perspective distortion. Usually has most of the scene out-of focus and thus misrepresents reality (buildings aren’t built and people aren’t born out of focus).
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
So use a non-mobile device with this feature. Nobody is forcing you to use the camera. You know what the camera does, but then continue to use it, and then complain about it doing exactly what you knew it would do. Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result has a name
I think the issue is that people don't know what the camera does. The woman who tried to take a picture of herself in her wedding dress had no idea she'd end up looking like three different people. I expect that as more and more people come to learn that their iphone photos are all fakes we will see more people reaching for cameras instead of cell phones for the important things when they can.
I think like most things on HN, people are confusing the people here are a much smaller percentage of the population and the majority of the world does not think like HN. Most people don't care one little bit about what the camera does. They only care that it shows them a picture that looks like what they saw. Does it hold up to further scrutiny? Maybe not, but these are also not the people that will be scrutinizing it. Unless they take a picture of their cat and it ends up with the head of a dog, the "your moms" of the world are not going to care.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For decades people have had the ability to get great photos using cell phones Not in these light conditions. Simple as that. What iPhones are doing nowadays gives you the ability to take some photos you couldn’t have in the past. Try shooting a few photos with an iPhone and the app Halide. It can give you a single RAW of a single exposure. Try it in some mildly inconvenient light conditions, like in a forest. Where…
> Not in these light conditions. Again, decades of people photographing themselves in wedding dresses while in dress shops (which tend to be pretty well lit) would disagree with you. Also, the things that help most with lighting (like auto-exposure) aren't the problem here. That's not why her arms ended up in three different positions at once.
> Apple's horrible tech featured in the article had nothing to do with the lighting.
Of course it did.
iPhones take an “exposure” (scare quotes quite intentional) of a certain length. A conventional camera taking an exposure literally integrates the light hitting each sensor pixel (or region of film) during the exposure. iPhone do not — instead (for long enough exposures), iPhones take many pictures, aka a video, and apply fancy algorithms to squash that video back to a still image.
But all the data comes from the video, with length equal to the “exposure”. Apple is not doing Samsung-style “it looks like an arm/moon, so paint one in”. So this image had the subject moving her arms such that all the arm positions in the final image happened during the “exposure”.
Which means the “exposure” was moderately long, which means the light was dim. In bright light, iPhones take a short exposure just like any other camera, and the effect in question won’t happen.
(Okay, I’m extrapolating from observed behavior and from reading descriptions from Google of similar tech and from reading descriptions of astrophotography techniques. But I’m fairly confident that I’m right.)
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#159Slight off-topic but I still can't believe Apple engineers are not able to fix stupid green dot flare when shooting with direct sunlight in the frame... Super easy to fix computationally but for some reason still there for years...
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#160Earlier 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…
No lens is going to produce a straight arm out of one that was bent at the elbow, or vice versa, while not disturbing anything else. It is not "photography".
Depends on the refractive index of the lens [1].
[1] https://gebseng.com/media_archeology/reading_materials/Bob_S...