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.
When will that happen? I’ve sent phots to my dog’s vet (I go to a doctor for humans myself) but this hasn’t been a problem. If you could let me know when this will happen I’ll make sure I don’t rely on it.
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.…
Apple's obsession with hiding the magic trick is hurting them badly here. Just like Live pictures show you a video from before and after your pressed the shutter, every single picture should include an unprocessed, probably way too dark picture without any computational photography. That way regular users could truly grasp at what their phone is doing.
I didn’t misunderstand what happened, and I know how the iPhone camera works. I was only noting a couple common cases where computational photography is really nice. I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”. I know those types of anomalies can happen, but they’re clearly design flaws, i.e. Apple doesn’t actually want their camera to make fantasy images. I don’t…
> I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”. That you know of. There could be many lies in those photos, both subtle and blunt, which you didn't notice at the moment because you weren't primed to look for them, and which you won't notice now, because you no longer remember the details of the scenes/situations being photographed, days or months ago. Are you sure I…
If we’re going to be this pedantic about it: iPhone’s camera will not add or remove things that weren’t captured in its temporal window. It won’t change the semantic meaning of an image. It won’t make a sad face person look happy, make daytime look like nighttime, or change dogs into cats. It can make mistakes like from the OP, but the point is that Apple also sees this as a mistake, so I would expect the error rate to improve over time. This is a different approach from other computational photography apps, like Google’s, where it looks like they are more willing to push the boundaries into fantasy images. Apple’s approach seems to be more grounded, like they simply want to get great pro DSLR level images automatically.
> 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…
> Or, put another way: you can undo effects of a lens
No, you most definitely cannot. The roots of computational photography are in things like deblurring, which in general do not have a nice solution in any practical case (like non-zero noise). Same deal with removing film grain in low light conditions.
> 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 n…
Cellphones have been capable of HDR for a very very long time and yet none of those older phones were capable of producing a picture like the one in the article. The problem here was not HDR. The problem was using AI to create a composite image by selectively erasing the subject of the photo from parts of the image, detecting that same person found in other photos, then cutting the subject out of those other images and pasting them into the deleted parts of the original picture before filling in the gaps to make it look like it was all one picture.
This was absolutely an "AI transformation" as the original article correctly pointed out:
> “It’s made like an AI decision and it stitched those two photos together,”
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!
The Apple algorithm visibly and significantly changes color, contrast, and likely curves, for every image, including in RAW format. Without my consent and with no option to opt out.
The Apple camera app is accessible quickly without unlocking the phone and I use that feature most of the time when I travel.
So I end up with thousands of crappyfied images. Infuriating.
So use a non-mobile device with this feature. Nobody is forcing you to use the camera. You know what the camera does, but then continue to use it, and then complain about it doing exactly what you knew it would do. Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result has a name
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.
Are you serious?
Lemme try: I expect that as more and more people come to learn that their iphone's auto mode is better than their DSLR's auto mode, we will see more people reaching for cell phones instead of cameras for the important things when they can.
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 n…
Cellphones have been capable of HDR for a very very long time and yet none of those older phones were capable of producing a picture like the one in the article. The problem here was not HDR. The problem was using AI to create a composite image by selectively erasing the subject of the photo from parts of the image, detecting that same person found in other photos, then cutting the subject out of those other images a…
>Cellphones have been capable of HDR for a very very long time and yet none of those older phones were capable of producing a picture like the one in the article.
I don't think this is true? You can easily get an image like this just by choosing a different keyframe for different areas of the photo when combining the stack of exposures. No AI needed. Nor is there any 'selective erasing'.
You talk about 'detecting the same person found in other photos', which suggests that you're not aware that HDR involves blending a stack of exposures (where the woman may have been in various different poses) that are part of the same 'photo' from the user's point of view (i.e. one press of the shutter button). There is no reason at all to think that the phone is actually scanning through the existing photo library to find other images of the same person. I doubt that would even be computationally feasible, given how quickly the iPhone renders the final image after the photo is taken.
The human eye does color temperature correction automatically, and so do digital cameras, basically since they are available. So yes that is okay obviously.
Cellphones have been capable of HDR for a very very long time and yet none of those older phones were capable of producing a picture like the one in the article. The problem here was not HDR. The problem was using AI to create a composite image by selectively erasing the subject of the photo from parts of the image, detecting that same person found in other photos, then cutting the subject out of those other images a…
>Cellphones have been capable of HDR for a very very long time and yet none of those older phones were capable of producing a picture like the one in the article. I don't think this is true? You can easily get an image like this just by choosing a different keyframe for different areas of the photo when combining the stack of exposures. No AI needed. Nor is there any 'selective erasing'. You talk about 'detecting the…
HDR in older phones would have only merged/blended the images resulting in ghosting (the reflections would have shown the woman as having more than two arms) or blurring because they weren't using AI to select and cut out parts of the original image to swap in parts from other images.
The "other photos" weren't older pictures pulled from her photo library, but were the photos taken in quick succession using different exposures. Those are still "other images of the same person" even if they are only temporarily stored in memory, but using them for exposure adjustment isn't a problem. Any old HDR capable phone would have done that. The problem is AI detecting people and deleting them to paste in "better" versions from those other photos. HDR is additive, not destructive.