If the 'camera' is guessing as to intent, it's no longer a camera, sorry.
A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
221–230 of 414 posts
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#222Earlier 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 photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. Don't fall into this trap. A lens and computational photography are not alike . One is a static filter, doing simple(ish) transformation of incoming light. The other is arbitrary computation operating in semantic space , halfway between photography and generati…
Yes. Also, it seems inevitable that at some points photos that you can't publish on Facebook won't be possible to make. Is a nipple present in the scene? Then too bad, you can't press the shutter.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#223Purists 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…
The first thing they teach you at any photography course worth its money is that framing the picture itself is a distortion of reality. It's you deciding what's worth being recorded and what should be discarded.
There's no "objective photography", no matter how hard we try distinguishing between old and new tech.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#224Of course, this is one in a million chance but it highlights very nicely IMO a much bigger issue: what is reality? Some would say only the classical optical camera would capture faithfully our reality. But does it? The reality of the sunlight is a broad spectrum of radio emissions: UV, infrared and more. Does the optical camera capture these? No. Thus, which reality does it capture? Our perceived reality? Other would…
Probably something closest to what your eye sees is ideal for most photos. But dumb optical cameras have all kinds of artefacts that eyes don’t. When I slightly bump the camera, the whole image comes out blurry, my eyes don’t do that.
Things like lens flares don’t exist either.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#225If the 'camera' is guessing as to intent, it's no longer a camera, sorry.
It isn’t guessing. It’s just stacked multiple shots. Everything in the photo is real, just at slightly different moments.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#226Of course, this is one in a million chance but it highlights very nicely IMO a much bigger issue: what is reality? Some would say only the classical optical camera would capture faithfully our reality. But does it? The reality of the sunlight is a broad spectrum of radio emissions: UV, infrared and more. Does the optical camera capture these? No. Thus, which reality does it capture? Our perceived reality? Other would…
> There is simply no single one reality, only our perceived realities.
This does not follow at all from your earlier paragraph.
The reality we're talking about here, which regular photography reflects while computational one doesn't, is the correlation of recorded data with the state of the world. The pixels of a regular photo are highly correlated with reality - they may have been subject to some analog and digital transformation, and of course quantization, but there's a straightforward and reversible (with some loss of fidelity) function mapping pixels to the photographed event. Computational photography, in contrast, decorrelates pixels from reality, and discards source measurements, leaving you with a recording of something that never happened, but is sort of similar to the thing that did.
I elaborated on this elsewhere in the thread, so let me instead point at another way of noticing the difference. Photogrammetry is the science and technology of recovering the information about reality from photos, and it works because pixels of regular photos are highly correlated with reality. Apply the same techniques to images made via computational photography, and the degree of uncertainty and fidelity loss will reflect the degree to which the computational photos are AI interpretations/bullshit.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Don't fall into this trap. A lens and computational photography are not alike . One is a static filter, doing simple(ish) transformation of incoming light. The other is arbitrary computation operating in semantic space , halfway between photography and generati…
Yes. Also, it seems inevitable that at some points photos that you can't publish on Facebook won't be possible to make . Is a nipple present in the scene? Then too bad, you can't press the shutter.
Or you can, but the nipple will magically become covered by a leaf falling down, or a lens flare, or subject's hand, or any other kind of context-appropriate generative modification to the photo.
Auto-censoring camera, if you like.
(Also don't try to point such camera at your own kids, if you value your freedom and them having their parent home.)
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#228Next time somebody here will be bashing other manufacturers like say Samsung for clarifying 50x zoom moon shots (like most of HN did when this was a topic for a day or two few months ago), remember kids that this is what all manufacturers do. Or half-reversing photo of kitten in the grass as somebody mentioned.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Photographs are not and never have been anything but an unrepresentative slice of a likeness of a moment in time,
This is a complete absurdity
Photos are used daily to find suspects of crimes
to convict people to prison
to establish the level of devastation in a war
To find launch site for rocket attacks
To make scientific measurements of distance,size, etc. in architecture and war
By scientists to determine position of things in the sky, meteors, etc.
You are like a guy that collects knifes and swords and has no idea what they are actually for
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#230This happens more and more, I guess it's an unholy mix of "better compression as long as you don't actually look at the image" and "ai improvement"..
A few weeks ago, I took a really lovely picture of my son, composition, facial expression, focus, light, it was _PERFECT_ except..
The algorithms in my phone had decided that it'd be better to scrape off his fucking skin and replace it with the texture of the wall behind him!
Of course it must be my fault for buying such a cheap phone, it only a Galaxy 22 Ultra, I'm sure the 23 Ultra is better... But it was not out when I changed phones..
Wtf^wtf..
So I go turn on RAW so I can at least salvage picture in the future, except RAW only works in the "pro" camera mode which is inconvenient to use and sometimes it silently falls back to non-pro..
In the end I gave up and installed a third party camera application, I guess I just have to trust Mark, at least he hasn't actively messed up my photos. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforg...