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A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

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

#261

Post by TeMPOraL »

foldr wrote: post #255
kazinator wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There’s no AI transformation altering her body posture. It’s just that the phone is blending multiple exposures during which she was posing in different ways. The phone doesn’t realize that the images of the women in the mirror correspond to the woman in the center, so it hasn’t felt it necessary to use the same keyframe as the reference for the different parts of the photo. People are jumping to crazy explanations f…

> Ironically, the solution to this problem is more AI, not less. The phone needs to understand mirrors in order to make smarter HDR blending decisions.

No, the solution is for the phone to stop blending multiple distinct exposures into one photo, because that's the crux of the problem - that's the "AI transformation" right there, decorrelating the photo from reality.

> HN has a strangely luddite tendency when it comes to photography.

It's not about luddite tendencies (leaving aside the fact that Luddites were not against technology per se - they were people fucked over by capitalist business owners, by means of being automated away from their careers). It's about recognizing that photos aren't just, or even predominantly, art. Photos are measurements, recorded observations of reality. Computational photography is screwing with that.

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

#262

Post by Dah00n »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #131
autoexec wrote: post #51

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...

Yes, except it is called "Moon Mode" isn't it? The iPhone default mode isn't called "unReality Mode", so they aren't saying they are faking it. I don't know if Samsung state it is faked, but Apple definitely does not.

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

#263

Post by lloeki »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #251
jcynix wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with the gist of your comment, I cannot leave this detail uncommented >Or, put another way: you can undo effects of a lens, or the way photo was developed classically, because each pixel is still correlated with reality, You cannot undo each and every effect. Polarizing filters (filters, as are lens coatings, are part of a classical lens in my opinion), gradual filters, etc effectively disturb this corr…

> You cannot undo each and every effect. Fair enough. > Polarizing filters Yeah, I see it. This one is as pure signal removal as it comes in analog world. And they can, indeed, drop significant information - not just reflections, but also e.g. by blacking out computer screens - but they don't introduce fake information either, and lost information could in principle be recovered -- because in reality, everything is c…

The most extreme case being Samsung outright painting the moon in when it thinks a piece of picture is semantically likely to be the moon.

Whether the detail data is encoded as PNG or as AI weights is immaterial, it is adding data that is not there, by a long shot.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...

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

#264

Post by Dah00n »

dylan604 wrote: post #157
autoexec wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>They only care that it shows them a picture that looks like what they saw

Here it most definitely does not look like what they saw.

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

#265

Post by Dah00n »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #258
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #235

So many comments, not a single one pointing out that someone will go to prison over this 'photo', when it shows something that never actually happened.

We've been able to create images and video of things that didn't happen for decades.

This is not the same thing and you know it.

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

#266

Post by TeMPOraL »

belugacat wrote: post #249
sinuhe69 wrote: post #220

Of 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…

The classical optical camera does not capture anything. It is a light sealed box, with a pinhole for a lens. As an optical system, it interacts with electromagnetic waves that go through it, that's the only 'reality' you can really care about. What captures an image is an imaging surface; traditionally a chemical emulsion on a piece of film, now a complex array of digital sensors. This imaging surface is of human des…

> But don't forget that it is a sampling of reality; by definition always partial, and biased (biased to the 400~700 nm range, for starters).

This does not matter in any way. What matters is that, what comes out on the other end of filtering and bias, is highly correlated with what came in, and carries information about the imaged phenomenon.

This is what both analog films and digital sensors were designed for. The captured information is then preserved through most forms of post-processing, also by design. Computational photography, in contrast, is destroying that information, for the sake of creating something that "looks better".

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

#267

Post by _glass »

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.…

I think the future will have digital mirrors with filters, so we don't have to mess with reality anymore, and our own imperfections. The raw image/reflection of oneself will be a societal taboo.

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

#268

Post by foldr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #261
foldr wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no AI transformation altering her body posture. It’s just that the phone is blending multiple exposures during which she was posing in different ways. The phone doesn’t realize that the images of the women in the mirror correspond to the woman in the center, so it hasn’t felt it necessary to use the same keyframe as the reference for the different parts of the photo. People are jumping to crazy explanations f…

> Ironically, the solution to this problem is more AI, not less. The phone needs to understand mirrors in order to make smarter HDR blending decisions. No, the solution is for the phone to stop blending multiple distinct exposures into one photo, because that's the crux of the problem - that's the "AI transformation" right there, decorrelating the photo from reality. > HN has a strangely luddite tendency when it come…

No general-purpose camera, analogue or digital, functions particularly well as a measurement tool. They are simply not designed for that purpose.

Blending multiple exposures is not an "AI transformation". The first iPhone to do HDR was the iPhone 4, introduced in 2010.

If you dislike HDR for some reason, no-one is forcing you to use it. There are lots of iPhone apps that will let you shoot a single exposure. That's never going to be the default in a consumer point-and-shoot camera, though, because it will give worse results for 99% of people 99% of the time.

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

#269

Post by astrange »

saiya-jin wrote: post #241
astrange wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Sure it did, no wrinkles, no moles unless huge, skin tone like after 2 weeks vacation in Carribean. What previously had to be done in photoshop to make people look younger is now done automatically, for every photo, and you can't turn it off. They call it 'instagram look' for quite some time, Apple is the worst among all phone manufacturers (in form of furthest from actual ugly reality, but a lot of people got used t…

I promise there is nothing in the camera trying to make you look even a little better than normal. Especially not removing moles; people use their phones to send pictures to their doctors, so that would kill your customers with melanoma.

If you want pores you need a higher resolution sensor, but even most of those have physical low pass (blur) filters because most people don't like moiré artifacts. Could try an A7R or Fuji X-series.

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

#270

Post by londons_explore »

luuurker wrote: post #113

A modern Google Pixel starts saving frames as soon you open the camera app. When we finally take the picture, it uses some of the older frames to have what's essentially HDR stacking without the delay. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar thing happened here. Different frames, processing picks the best exposure for each part of the picture and you get this effect.

It's also why having the camera open and previewing destroys the battery. Some people I know keep the camera open for hours - especially when exploring a new place and wanting to take a photo of a cool thing at a moments notice, and then moan their battery dies at lunchtime.
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