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A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

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171–180 of 414 posts

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

#171

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…

But regular people expect it. And then they take a picture of the moon and they are disappointed.

It's easy to take a picture of the moon. It's always lit the same because it's in space.

ISO 100, f/11, manual focus at infinity, shutter speed 1/100.

Phones aren't good at this, partly because autofocus isn't designed for moons, partly because you want a really long lens and they don't have one.

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

#172
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…

Phones over-beautifying faces by default already happened with the iPhone XS, and it wasn't received well. See #beautygate: https://www.imore.com/beautygate

"Over-beautifying" never happened. Noise reduction/smoothing happens in camera processing even if you don't try to do it, because it's trying to preserve signal and that's not signal. If you want that noise, you have to actually put in processing that adds it back.

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

#173
post #91
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…

Samsung phones (and I guess iphones too) already do this lmao. https://www.insider.com/samsung-phones-default-beauty-mode-c... My favorite one is the phones that put a fake picture of a moon in pictures where the moon is detected! https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...

> My favorite one is the phones that put a fake picture of a moon in pictures where the moon is detected!

This is just about as wrong as saying Stable Diffusion contains a stock photo of the moon it spits out when you prompt it with "the moon".

They work the same way. Samsung's camera has a moon mode, so it gets the prior (a much, much lower quality camera raw than you think it's getting), it processes it with a bias (this noise is a Gaussian distribution centered on the moon), and you get a result (an image that looks like the moon).

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

#174
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

maybe? you can also turn your iphone off, but it still broadcast btle and cell signals. who knows what any feature toggle does anymore, let alone on/off. lol do-not-track is tracked.

Cell signals use way too much battery to be sending them with the phone turned off.

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

#175
post #169

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That's not "basic denoising" and photos from my 8 look nothing like that; the "watercolor" or "oil painting" look started around the iPhone 12. Basic denoising is stuff like chroma or hue smoothing. This is very aggressive patterning. That's a daylight photo that the phone turned into an oil painting. https://www.google.com/search?q=pixel+photo+oil+painting+loo...

It’s just what happens when you really aggressively do noise reduction on small sensor data. The noise pattern of any sensor that small will blotch in patterns that when combined with aggressive noise reduction, it will look this way. It’s less apparent on bigger sensors but you’ll see the same if you really crank the noise reduction

Yes, it's denoising and sharpening due to extreme digital zoom that only uses a small portion of an already tiny sensor.

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

#176

Slight 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...

Pretty cool how the green dot became a green crescent during the last solar eclipse.

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

#177

Earlier 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…

Without the iPhone’s computational camera, she wouldn’t have this photo at all because she wouldn’t have a camera in her pocket that could get a good picture in this situation.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's only that. The processing in a phone is expensive. If you'd build a high end camera with a Snapdragon 8 gen 3 it would raise the price a lot. In a phone that's not an issue because you need the chip there anyway for other tasks. So there's just much more compute power available, not to mention a connection to the cloud with even more potential compute.

Also, many more people buy phones than standalone cameras, so they can afford a lot more software R&D.

Well yes but a lot of that can be reused across devices I would guess.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge difference between someone intentionally altering an image according to their wishes and someone not even aware of changes that have been done. Before, forensic experts could decide if an image had been altered in photoshop, but I guess the only sane conclusion now is that anything taken with an iphone is fake and untrustworthy.

As opposed to Samsungs which will take any vaguely circular bright white object and turn it into the moon? https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

Yeah, that's trash too. At this point I think it's fair to say you just can't trust a picture taken from a cell phone.

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

#180

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. If you're fine with Apple deciding what the subject of pictures should be and how they should look that's fine, but I expect a lot of people wont be.

Can't this be disabled?

And can't some other product with a similar technology offer knobs for configuring exactly how it behaves?

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