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What an unprocessed photo looks like

maurycyz.com

11–20 of 418 posts

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#11
post #6

I think everyone agrees that dynamic range compression and de-Bayering (for sensors which are colour-filtered) are necessary for digital photography, but at the other end of the spectrum is "use AI to recognise objects and hallucinate what they 'should' look like" --- and despite how everyone would probably say that isn't a real photo anymore, it seems manufacturers are pushing strongly in that direction, raising iss…

One thing I've learned while dabbling in photography is that there are no "fake" images, because there are no "real" images. Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do, making a thousand choices along the way, as this post beautifully demonstrates. A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits, with local edits being things like retouching specific parts of the image to make d…

> "Fake" images are images with intent to deceive

The ones that make the annual rounds up here in New England are those foliage photos with saturation jacked. “Look at how amazing it was!” They’re easy to spot since doing that usually wildly blows out the blues in the photo unless you know enough to selectively pull those back.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#12
post #4

>if the linear data is displayed directly, it will appear much darker then it should be. This seems more a limitation of monitors. If you had very large bit depth, couldn't you just display images in linear light without gamma correction.

Correction is useful for a bunch of different reasons, not all of them related to monitors. Even ISP pipelines without displays involved will still usually do it to allocate more bits to the highlights/shadows than the relatively distinguishable middle bits. Old CRTs did it because the electron gun had a non-linear response and the gamma curve actually linearized the output. Film processing and logarithmic CMOS sensors do it because the sensing medium has a nonlinear sensitivity to the light level.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#14
post #6

I think everyone agrees that dynamic range compression and de-Bayering (for sensors which are colour-filtered) are necessary for digital photography, but at the other end of the spectrum is "use AI to recognise objects and hallucinate what they 'should' look like" --- and despite how everyone would probably say that isn't a real photo anymore, it seems manufacturers are pushing strongly in that direction, raising iss…

One thing I've learned while dabbling in photography is that there are no "fake" images, because there are no "real" images. Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do, making a thousand choices along the way, as this post beautifully demonstrates. A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits, with local edits being things like retouching specific parts of the image to make d…

There's an obvious difference between debayering and white balance vs using Photoshop's generative fill

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#16
post #6

I think everyone agrees that dynamic range compression and de-Bayering (for sensors which are colour-filtered) are necessary for digital photography, but at the other end of the spectrum is "use AI to recognise objects and hallucinate what they 'should' look like" --- and despite how everyone would probably say that isn't a real photo anymore, it seems manufacturers are pushing strongly in that direction, raising iss…

One thing I've learned while dabbling in photography is that there are no "fake" images, because there are no "real" images. Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do, making a thousand choices along the way, as this post beautifully demonstrates. A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits, with local edits being things like retouching specific parts of the image to make d…

I understand what you and the article are saying, but what GP is getting at, and what I agree with, is that there is a difference between a photo that attempts to reproduce what the "average" human sees, and digital processing that augments the image in ways that no human could possibly visualize. Sometimes we create "fake" images to improve clarity, detail, etc., but that's still less "fake" than smoothing skin to remove blemishes, or removing background objects. One is clearly a closer approximation of how we perceive reality than the other.

So there are levels of image processing, and it would be wrong to dump them all in the same category.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#17
post #6

I think everyone agrees that dynamic range compression and de-Bayering (for sensors which are colour-filtered) are necessary for digital photography, but at the other end of the spectrum is "use AI to recognise objects and hallucinate what they 'should' look like" --- and despite how everyone would probably say that isn't a real photo anymore, it seems manufacturers are pushing strongly in that direction, raising iss…

One thing I've learned while dabbling in photography is that there are no "fake" images, because there are no "real" images. Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do, making a thousand choices along the way, as this post beautifully demonstrates. A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits, with local edits being things like retouching specific parts of the image to make d…

Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do

What about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#18
post #13

I am confused by the color filter step. Is the output produced by the sensor RGB or a single value per pixel?

It's a single value per pixel, but each pixel has a different color filter in front of it, so it's effectively that each pixel is one of R, G, or B

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#20
post #13

I am confused by the color filter step. Is the output produced by the sensor RGB or a single value per pixel?

It's a single value per pixel, but each pixel has a different color filter in front of it, so it's effectively that each pixel is one of R, G, or B

So, for a 3x3 image, the input data would be 9 values like:

   R G B
   B R G
   G B R

?
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