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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

#271

Post by kaba0 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #195
autoexec wrote: post #55

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…

> 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…

> because each pixel is still correlated with reality, just modulo a simple, reversible transformation

It’s absolutely not reversible. Information gets lost all the time with physical systems as well.

Also, probably something like the creation of the image of the black hole is closer to computational photography than “AI”, and it seems a bit like yours is a populist argument against it.

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

#272

Post by astrange »

Dah00n wrote: post #257
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.

Yes, it actually did. And as it says in the link: > ".... if they can detect and preserve fabric, rope, cloud, and other textures, why not skin texture as well?" The phone changed the image on skin and not on random other things that wasn't a face. That is a filter, not normal image processing, when it happens only on X but not on Y. The only way to not get this filter on the phone is using RAW.

> And as it says in the link

That is the opinion of an uninformed tech writer, and even besides that, he's not claiming it did happen but just that it could possibly happen.

In this case you do have someone who knows how it works, that someone being me.

> The phone changed the image on skin and not on random other things that wasn't a face.

There are some reasons you'd want to process faces differently, namely that viewers look at them the most, and that if you get the color wrong people either look sickly or get annoyed that you've whitewashed them. Also, when tone mapping you likely want to treat the foreground and background differently, and people are usually foreground elements.

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

#273

Post by londons_explore »

Frummy wrote: post #203

I was in a butterfly house, and closeup photos removed the legs of the butterflies to keep only the wings lol. e: image link https://ibb.co/nwbw5xY

That will be the denoising. Legs are thin and can easily be interpreted as noise - especially when using digital zoom and dim light so there are very few pixels and each pixel is very noisy.

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

#274

Post by londons_explore »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #205
edent wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

Social media algorithms have changed. Viral things used to be semi-random (eg. the 6:01pm on sunday bug, which heavily promoted things initially published at 6:01pm on a sunday because thats when some weekly stats aggregation function ran, and the age of the video in seconds was used as a divisor, so you got huge popularity boosts for the first week if you could post in the right second).

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

#275

Post by kaba0 »

lukeschlather wrote: post #196
nucleardog wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case in the article is obviously one that any idiot could have taken without these tools. But "in difficult scenarios", as the GP comment put it, your mistake is assuming people have been taking those photos all along no problem. They have not. People have been filling their photo albums and memory cards up with underexposed blurry photos that look more like abstract art than reality. That's where this sort of te…

In circumstances where it really matters having a prettied up image might be worse than having no image at all. If you rely on the image being correct to make some consequential decision, you could convict someone of a crime, or if you were trying to diagnose some issue with some machine you might cause damage. While if the camera gave an honest but uninterpretable picture you would be forced to try again.

That’s a pretty hand-wavy argument. You can just frame a picture however you want to give a very different image of a situation, que that overused media-satire picture of a foot vs a knife being shown.

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

#276

Post by scott_w »

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 claim was that any camera without this feature is "entirely unusable" and the photos couldn't be saved even with "hours of manual edits".

You missed the "in certain situations" part, which completely changes the meaning of your "quotes."

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

#277

Post by thfuran »

sharkweek wrote: post #71
ALittleLight wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have that backwards. The vast majority of people will prefer Apple's computational enhancements. A small number of photography enthusiasts will prefer manual control (and a smaller number will benefit from it).

Yeah I 100% agree - When I pull my phone out to take a picture of the kids/my dog/something randomly interesting, all I want is to point my camera at whatever I want to capture and have it turn out. Don’t care how it happens I don’t want to think about settings.

And you simply don't care if two different people are shown in the photo in poses that didn't happen at the same time? That doesn't seem to me like capturing whatever it was you wanted to capture.

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

#278

Post by kaba0 »

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 fact is that for decades countless of beautiful photos have been captured with cell phone cameras

Which phones are you thinking of? Because you definitely have a very rose tinted view if you are thinking literally of cell phones, over smartphones, and even in the latter case, only the past couple of years have had acceptable quality where it might pass some rudimentary view as a proper photograph. Everything else was just noise.

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

#279

Post by kaba0 »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #189
frogblast wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. In these difficult scenarios, the alternative photo I'd get using such a small camera without this kind processing would be entirely unusable. I couldn't rescue those photos with hours of manual edits. That may be "in control", but it isn't useful.

Is an argument about corner cases where computational improvement does make sense an argument in good faith when used as an excuse to take away control in all cases?

How is that different from a noise removal algorithm? Is it also taking away control from you!

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

#280

Post by kaba0 »

kazinator wrote: post #147
autoexec wrote: post #55

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…

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".

That’s basic photo-stacking.
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