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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

#281

Post by kaba0 »

autoexec wrote: post #55
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.…

> 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…

Getting a roughly correct image vs a blurry mess doesn’t take control away from you and it is just bullshitting on a non-issue.

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

#282

Post by kaba0 »

bambax wrote: post #222
TeMPOraL wrote: post #195

Earlier 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.

[flagged]

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

#283

Post by rereasonable »

_glass wrote: post #267
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.

[dead]

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

#284

Post by kaba0 »

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, 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.

Thanks, but I will take a proper picture over a blurry noisy mess.

And please learn a bit about the whole field of measurement theory before you comment bullshit. Taking multiple measurements is literally the most basic way to get better signal to noise ratio. A blurry photo is just as much an alteration of reality, there is no real-world correspondence to my blurred face. Apple just does it more intelligently, but in rare cases messes up. It’s measurement. AI-generated stuff like a fake moon is not done by apple, and is a bad thing I also disapprove of. Smart statistics inside cameras are not at all like that.

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

#285

Post by alt227 »

esskay wrote: post #232
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…

> 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. The majority dont care, as the majority are not photographers, nor is it meant to be a product for photographers. Average joe just wants a good photo of that moment, which it does exceptionally well. The tech 'taking control from you' is its exact purpose, as again, n…

The bride in the original article doesnt seem to be a photographer, yet she seems to care quite a bit that the photo is not an acurate representation of reality at that moment.

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

#286

Post by alt227 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #126
rafram wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s due to basic denoising, not anything more advanced. I have photos from my iPhone 6s circa 2016 that look similar when you zoom in.

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...

If you go into photoshop and mess around with filters for 5 mins, you will soon see that if you over aggressively apply any filter to a photo it soon starts looking like a cartoon or painting due to the way that image processing groups blocks of colour together for manipulation.

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

#287

Post by kaba0 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #229
dahart wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 positi…

And some of those use cases require special cameras in the first place. Photography is basically just a measurement of light at different positions - there are endless priorities to make. You don’t need stacking multiple photos for scientific measurement of distance, as you would be having proper illumination in the first place.

A smartphone camera works in a vastly different environment, and has to adapt to any kind of illumination, scene etc.

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

#288

Post by kaba0 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #180
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…

> 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?

It can make a RAW file as well, so just the usual clickbait article/comments.

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

#289

Post by fsloth »

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…

Yeah, computational photography is actually closer to Terry Pratchet’s Discworld version of a camera - a box with an imp who paints the picture.

Artistic interpretation of a scene is often very nice.

But we would really need to be able to discern cameras that give you the pixels from the ccd from the irreversible kind.

In the worst case scenario it’s back to photographic film if you want to be sure no-one is molesting the data :D

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

#290

Post by kaba0 »

thfuran wrote: post #277
sharkweek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It won’t happen in direct sunlight, and yeah, I will definitely take it over not having that picture in a presentable state.

How is that different than creating a panorama photo?

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