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A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

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351–360 of 414 posts

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

#351
post #318

This reminds me of printers, scanners and photocopies that have a "compressing" step, and replace numbers with other numbers just for fun. Like you have one job, make the numbers correct, and you fail to do that.

Yeah. The difference is that people get really angry when they hear scanners are doing this, while in the current case (look at the other comments) most people treat it like a perfectly acceptable curiosity.

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

#352
post #336

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…

The tech doesn’t “just” take control from me. It also exponentially increases the chances that the photo I wanted to take will be the photo that is saved on my device and shared with my friends. It’s just picture of my dog. It’s not that serious.

> It’s just picture of my dog. It’s not that serious.

Until you want to send it to your vet, but you can't, because your phone keeps beautifying out the exact medical problem you're trying to image.

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

#353

Changing the positions of limbs is computational, but it's not photography. Photography refers to the capturing of the reflected light to create an image, which then corresponds to how the scene actually was. Bringing out detail in shadows being called "computational photography": that I could swallow.

Are colour filters allowed?

The human eye does color temperature correction automatically, and so do digital cameras, basically since they are available. So yes that is okay obviously.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Denoising is often great, but sometimes it really destroys details. It is basically impossible to capture a snowy day (or heavy rain) with a digital camera. The denoiser will remove 90% of the snowflakes. Analog cameras, by contrast, remove nothing.

Interestingly, some phones now use a model of the camera sensor to detect how much noise there 'should' be (based on temperature, age of sensor, test results of the specific sensor from the factory, exposure time and light levels). They then only remove that much noise, hopefully leaving snow.

Every other phone just has an algorithm to estimate how much noise is in an image by sampling a few patches - and that will remove snow.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is a nipple present in the scene? Then too bad, you can't press the shutter. reply Oh yes you can, and the black helicopters will be dispatched, your social score obliterated and credit ratings becomes skulls and bones. EU Chat Control will morph to EU Camera Control. Think of the children!

Nipple restriction is an American thing, not so much an EU thing

Yes but American puritanism is being imposed onto the rest of the world. It's not like there's a nipple-friendly version of Facebook for all non-US countries.

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

#356
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.

[flagged]

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

#357
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 liter…

> Taking multiple measurements is literally the most basic way to get better signal to noise ratio.

Yes. That is not a problem.

Stacking those and blending them in correctly isn't a problem either - information is propagated in well-defined, and usually not surprising ways. If you're doing it, you know what you'll get.

Selectively merging photos by filling different areas from different frames, and using ML to paper over the stitches, is where you start losing your signal badly. And doing that to unsuspecting people is just screwing with their perception of reality.

Yes, AI generated stuff like fake Moon is even worse, but my understanding of the story in question is that the iPhone did a transformation that's about halfway between the HDR/astrophotography stuff and inpainting the Moon. And my issue isn't with the algorithms per se - hey, I'd love to have a "stitch something nice out of these few shots" button, or "share to img2img Stable Diffusion" button. My issue is when this level of AI transformation happens silently, in the background, in spaces and contexts where people still expect to be dealing with photographs, and won't notice until it's too late. And secondarily, with this becoming the default, as the default with wide-enough appeal tends to eventually become the only thing available.

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

#358
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devils advocate here: the best camera is the one you have with you, and computational photography does mean you can just push a button without thinking and get a clear picture that captures a memory. It’s obviously an argument to say that Apple shouldn’t get to choose how your memories are recorded, but I know I’ve captured a lot more moments I would’ve otherwise missed because of just how automatic phone cam…

Here iPhone is using collage instead of showing particular photo. Then there was Samsung taking sharp picture of moon that was just completely generated. > the best camera is the one you have with you > I’ve captured a lot more moments I would’ve otherwise missed Soon these moments will be 'captured' so perfectly with simulation that there wouldn't be reason taking them. Generate them when you want to recall them, no…

> Generate them when you want to recall them, not when the moment is happening.

At this point, photography becomes a shittier version of what our brains do, so why bother? Or maybe let's do that, but then let's also do the kind of photography that accurately represents photons hitting the imaging plate.

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

#359
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It can, but does it? Defaults matter. I wouldn't want to discover that my camera was screwing with me only after I sent the photos of an accident to my insurer, a day after it happened.

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

#360

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.…

> Purists will always hate the idea of computational photography A non-purist will hate it too, as soon as the technology re-imagines the positions of his hands such that they are around someone's throat.

Or moves the hill a little to the left, and the forest a little to the front, and the tanks a little to the side, and next thing you know, artillery is raining down on a nearby village.
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