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The limits of "computational photography"

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Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#111

Post by stephencanon »

jlarocco wrote: post #33
jack1243star wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know, iPhone and Android aren't doing anything that isn't already done by digital cameras. It's the opposite, most digital cameras aren't doing enough compared to smartphones, which have minimum control and look very good at 2M pixels. A proper camera with default settings looks bland in the hands of an amateur (too little saturation) and handles dynamic range poorly (without bracketing or post-processi…

I don't buy it. Which cameras have worse "Auto" settings than a phone? I have two Fujifilms, a Panasonic, and a Nikon, and they all take better photos on "Auto" than my iPhone or any of my friends' Androids. And who buys a camera in this day and age but doesn't want to play with the settings? Point and shoot users stick with their phones now.

Our Fuji’s defaults are pretty good, but iPhone’s exposure and white balance on auto is light-years ahead of our Nikon gear.

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#113

Post by [deleted] »

neilpanchal wrote: post #3

> Ultimately, we are still beholden to the pigeonhole principle, and we cannot create information out of thin air. *Looks up pigeonhole principle*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle > If 5 pigeons occupy 4 holes, then there must be some hole with at least 2 pigeons. This is so obvious. > This seemingly obvious statement, a type of counting argument, can be used to demonstrate possibly unexpected resu…

[deleted]

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#114

Post by astrange »

buildbot wrote: post #48
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #16

I would like to see computational photography applied to raw images from DSLRs and MILCs with APS-C and larger sensors. Perhaps Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fujifilm could have built-in options in their cameras for ‘social media mode’, with a modicum of noise reduction (honestly unnecessary at ISOs lower than about 1600 for modern cameras), but drastically improved HDR and white balance. Many of these cameras are able to…

There is no reason to do this. If you want to apply the algorithms and Iphone uses, simply take a burst and post process later for HDR or whatever. I remember being in middle school and messing around with Hugin and my Minolta bridge camera… People value quick shots/edits and don’t care about quality or editing things later don’t mind an iPhone doing all this behind the scene - but it is irreversible. The sort of err…

There is no consumer software that can do what the iPhone does with its sensors.

iPhone HDR produces an HDR image file. Consumer HDR apps do the opposite - they take an HDR raw and tone map an sRGB JPEG out of it.

The only portable format that really supports HDR images is EXR, so if you're not generating that you're not getting it.

(I don't think there's anything that can do deep fusion either, though obviously you need it a lot less.)

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#115

Post by Retric »

steveBK123 wrote: post #98
psychphysic wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly sometimes I just want to apply whatever ai magic elixir my phone does to the raw image from my DSLR. Messing around in lightroom etc is just not worth it for hundreds of shots I take per day sometimes.

The trick is to not take 100s of shots per day, and failing that, filtered out 70-95% of what you shoot, before editing.

I find the best photo before editing is often different than the best photo after editing. Granted that’s probably a skill issue on my part.

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#116

Post by astrange »

SSLy wrote: post #67
buildbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to do this. If you want to apply the algorithms and Iphone uses, simply take a burst and post process later for HDR or whatever. I remember being in middle school and messing around with Hugin and my Minolta bridge camera… People value quick shots/edits and don’t care about quality or editing things later don’t mind an iPhone doing all this behind the scene - but it is irreversible. The sort of err…

>camera manufacturers simply don’t have the same compute available. what forbids them from buying the competitive SoCs from Qualcomm? Pride?

The much larger sensors on a dedicated camera take longer to read out / have physical shutters / are very power hungry, so doing bursts is just a worse tradeoff on a dedicated camera than on a phone.

Also, the camera market is much smaller than the phone market. Also, most camera companies are Japanese and Japanese companies are generally speaking not as good at software as they could be. (Though this is getting less true.)

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#117

Post by macshome »

A photographer friend had a good way of framing this once for me...

"Phones take amazing snapshots, but dedicated cameras can make better photographs."

The new smartphone cameras are capable of pretty amazing things and they can extend taking good pictures to a whole new audience. If you need the control though that large sensors and specific lenses can bring then you will need a dedicated camera.

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#118

Post by leokennis »

jlarocco wrote: post #33
jack1243star wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know, iPhone and Android aren't doing anything that isn't already done by digital cameras. It's the opposite, most digital cameras aren't doing enough compared to smartphones, which have minimum control and look very good at 2M pixels. A proper camera with default settings looks bland in the hands of an amateur (too little saturation) and handles dynamic range poorly (without bracketing or post-processi…

I don't buy it. Which cameras have worse "Auto" settings than a phone? I have two Fujifilms, a Panasonic, and a Nikon, and they all take better photos on "Auto" than my iPhone or any of my friends' Androids. And who buys a camera in this day and age but doesn't want to play with the settings? Point and shoot users stick with their phones now.

> Which cameras have worse "Auto" settings than a phone? I have two Fujifilms, a Panasonic, and a Nikon, and they all take better photos on "Auto" than my iPhone or any of my friends' Androids.

Better or worse is of course entirely subjective. Maybe your real cameras take more neutral pictures, but people these days might expect less neutral pictures: more saturated, more HDR, more contrast.

The goal of photography is often not to look "real" or "neutral". For example, Ansel Adams took beautiful photos...but very stylized.

> And who buys a camera in this day and age but doesn't want to play with the settings? Point and shoot users stick with their phones now.

This point I tend to agree with. Imagine a device that combines the camera/photos interface of a smartphone (full screen viewfinder, touch controls, camera apps, on-device editing etc.) with the hardware of a camera (larger body allowing for bigger sensors, more lenses etc.). Basically the specs of a DSLR with an interface for the masses. Who would carry this with them? It sounds a bit like the novelty "dumb phones" that exist nowadays: very interesting, but a way too small market.

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#119

Post by astrange »

kuschku wrote: post #105
mikewarot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago I did some experiments with SuperResolution[1] which is a technique of aligning images to sub-pixel resolution and stacking them to increase the amount of information with the square root of the number of exposures. I was using Hugin to align the images from my Nikon DSLR. I found that you can get to at least double the resolution in both dimensions fairly quickly, but you'll never get to "enhance" like in T…

Modern cameras use the optical image stabilization for pixel shift photography, where you can get up to 9× the normal sensor resolution (by moving the sensor slightly).

Of course, for this to work nothing else about the camera or the scene can move, or else you need a lot of smarts to realign the image and ignore the parts of the image that aren't registering anymore. This is typically pretty difficult for an outdoor photo.

Re: The limits of "computational photography"

#120

Post by joking »

SSLy wrote: post #67
buildbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to do this. If you want to apply the algorithms and Iphone uses, simply take a burst and post process later for HDR or whatever. I remember being in middle school and messing around with Hugin and my Minolta bridge camera… People value quick shots/edits and don’t care about quality or editing things later don’t mind an iPhone doing all this behind the scene - but it is irreversible. The sort of err…

>camera manufacturers simply don’t have the same compute available. what forbids them from buying the competitive SoCs from Qualcomm? Pride?

They don't really even have to do that, they could use the iPhone soc, but the pairing between the phone and the cameras it's not optimal.
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