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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

#201

Post by oktoberpaard »

autoexec wrote: post #118
bawolff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying that you're just bad at photography? That is a bit harsh. The vast majority of all people are worse at photography than apple's algorithm.

The claim was that any camera without this feature is "entirely unusable" and the photos couldn't be saved even with "hours of manual edits". The fact is that for decades countless of beautiful photos have been captured with cell phone cameras without this feature and most of them needed no manual edits at all. Many of those perfectly fine pictures were taken by people who would not consider themselves to be photogra…

The two of you might have a different threshold of what you consider to be usable photos, and that’s fine. However, there is no way around physics. Under indoor lighting, a single exposure of a cellphone camera will either be a blurry mess, a noisy mess, or both. Cellphones used to get around that by adding flashlights and adding strong noise suppression, and it was up to the photographer to make sure that the subject didn’t move too much. Modern smartphones let you take pretty decent photos without flash en without any special considerations, by combining many exposures automatically. I think I t’s quite amazing. The hardware itself has also improved a lot, and you can also take a better single exposure photo than ever, but it won’t be anywhere near the same quality straight out of the camera.

And, yes, I have been taking a lot of pictures with my Sony Ericsson K750i almost two decades ago and I did like them enough to print them back then, but even the photos taken under perfect lighting conditions don’t stand a chance to the quality of the average indoor photo nowadays. The indoor photos were all taken with the xenon flash and were very noisy regardless.

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

#202

Post by karlshea »

_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…

This is nothing new. Very old examples are the xerox machines that accidentally changed numbers on scanned documents, and speech coding for low bit rate digital audio over radio, phone, and then VoIP.

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

#204

Post by alentred »

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.…

As a layman in photography, I agree with you.

But it is easy to understand the artists. It is said that in art everyone needs to master the technique first, the tool of the trade, but true works of art are the expressions that are created with these various techniques. At this point, a tool - computational photography in this case - may get in a way. So, it is not about purism. Quite the contrary, it is about being able to use the tools and bend the reality the way an artist wants.

Having said that, I would think anyone would normally use *all* the tools available at their disposal, and the truth is that iPhone camera among else is a great one anyway.

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

#205

Post by TeMPOraL »

edent wrote: post #197
TeMPOraL wrote: post #184

Tangent, but: > A U.K. comedian and actor named Tessa Coates Why is it always some kind of celebrity that "discovers" stuff like this? Was it luck (yet again), or are those extreme failure modes of computational photography already somewhat known, just too nerdy to report on until they can be attached to a public person?

Because the typical Instagram account is only followed by a handful of people. So anything unusual is unlikely to get any traction.

Might be my age showing, but I swear it wasn't like this just a few years ago - this kind of story would genuinely go viral from the first rando posting it on social media ("wtf is my camera broken?") or the second rando that adapted it into a goofy scene/video ("look I'm a vampire now").

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

#206

Post by TeMPOraL »

yorwba wrote: post #192
atomlib wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not link directly to Instagram instead then? https://www.instagram.com/p/CzPGNmJIebC/

For one, the Instagram post says "Full story in my highlights (THE MIRROR)" but I can't figure out how to actually view those highlights. (Without creating an account at least.)

Can't, those are login-walled.

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

#207

Post by wkat4242 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #194
wkat4242 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Naw, astrange is correct. At peak in 2010, 121 standalone cameras were shipped worldwide. By 2021, that number was down to ~8 million. By comparison, 83 million smartphones are shipped each quarter (~1.4 billion for the year). Those kinds of economies of scale means there's more R&D revenue to sustain a larger amount of HW & SW innovation. Even though smartphone shipments should come down over the next few years as t…

Good points.

> Honestly, I'm surprised those device manufacturers haven't shifted their DSLR stack to just be a dumb CMOS sensor, lens, a basic processor for I/O, and a thunderbolt controller that you slot the phone into. Probably heat is one factor, the amount of batteries you'd need would go up, the BOM cost for that package could be largely the same, & maybe the external I/O isn't quite yet fast/open enough for something like that.

This is not really an option. There were actually clip-on cameras back in the day when cameras were new on phones. But there were several problems:

- Software support tended to lag with updates

- Phones change form factor very regularly and phones in general are replaced much more often than camera hardware, leaving you a highly expensive paperweight

- I don't think any phones have thunderbolt yet, just some tablets

- Dealing with issues is a nightmare because you don't control the hardware end to end

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

#208

Post by TeMPOraL »

willseth wrote: post #122
autoexec wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The camera in this case wasn't taking many shots and selecting one. It wasn't just combining exposures either. It did a bunch of shitty cut/paste operations to produce an altered composite image which showed something that never happened. Some automatic features are wonderful. People have been able to take pictures of fast moving toddlers and pets for ages because of them. The camera "features" that secretly alter im…

I didn’t misunderstand what happened, and I know how the iPhone camera works. I was only noting a couple common cases where computational photography is really nice. I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”. I know those types of anomalies can happen, but they’re clearly design flaws, i.e. Apple doesn’t actually want their camera to make fantasy images. I don’t…

> I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”.

That you know of.

There could be many lies in those photos, both subtle and blunt, which you didn't notice at the moment because you weren't primed to look for them, and which you won't notice now, because you no longer remember the details of the scenes/situations being photographed, days or months ago.

Are you sure I'm wrong? Are you sure that there are no hard lies in your photos? Would you be able to tell?

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

#209

Post by kazinator »

eproxus wrote: post #190
kazinator wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

No lens is going to reproduce a perfectly straight line without lens compensation either. Lenses are bending light to distill a moment in space time into a 2D representation which by definition will always be imperfect. What counts as “photography” really? GP> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. In the end, any tech is always going to take control away from you one way or another. That’s the whole poin…

Though it may be that no lens will reproduce a perfectly straight line, the transformation which warps the line is a relatively simple and invertible mapping which preserves local as well as global features.

It might not be a conformal mapping but, say, if the image of a grid is projected through the lens, the projected image will have the same number of divisions and crossings, in the same relation to each other.

We cannot say this about an AI-powered transformation which changes a body posture.

> What counts as “photography” really?

Focusing light via a lens into an exposure plate, from which an image is sampled.

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

#210

Post by Kye »

jahnu wrote: post #191
atomlib wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not link directly to Instagram instead then? https://www.instagram.com/p/CzPGNmJIebC/

Off topic, but does anyone know why when I click on the above link in Firefox the back history is gone as if it was opened in a fresh tab? IG doing sketchy stuff to discourage navigating back to where I came from? Or perhaps the Firefox Facebook container protecting me?

It opens Facebook and Instagram in a Facebook container by default. The container has no history.
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