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What an unprocessed photo looks like

maurycyz.com

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Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Kindle ads were available in my region in 2015 because I don't remember seeing these back then, but you're a lucky one to fix this classic mistake :-) I remember trying out some of the home-made methods while I was implementing a creative work section for a school assignment. It’s surprising how "flat" the basic average looks until you actually respect the coefficients (usually some flavor of 0.21R + 0.…

If you really want that old school NTSC look: 0.3R + 0.59G + 0.11B This is the coefficients I use regularly.

Interesting that the "NTSC" look you describe is essentially rounded versions of the coefficients quoted in the comment mentioning ppm2pgm. I don't know the lineage of the values you used of course, but I found it interesting nonetheless. I imagine we'll never know, but it would be cool to be able to trace the path that lead to their formula, as well as the path to you arriving at yours

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#112
> There’s nothing that happens when you adjust the contrast or white balance in editing software that the camera hasn’t done under the hood. The edited image isn’t “faker” then the original: they are different renditions of the same data.

Almost, but not quite? The camera works with more data than what's present in the JPG your image editing software sees.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#113

But does applying the same transfer function to each pixel (of a given colour anyway) count as "processing"? What bothers me as an old-school photographer is this. When you really pushed it with film (e.g. overprocess 400ISO B&W film to 1600 ISO and even then maybe underexpose at the enlargement step) you got nasty grain. But that was uniform "noise" all over the picture. Nowadays, noise reduction is impressive, but…

Just wait a few years, all of this is still getting better.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#114
post #56
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.

If we're talking about a sunset, then we're talking about your monitor shooting out blinding, eye-hurting brightness light wherever the sun is in the image. That wouldn't be very pleasant.

That's a matter of tone mapping which is separate from gamma encoding? Even today, linearized pixel value 255 will be displayed at your defined SDR brightness no matter what. Changing your encoding gamma won't help that because for correct output the transform necessarily needs to be be undone during display.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#115
post #104
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also why I absolute hate, hate, hate it when people ask me whether I "edited" a photo or whether a photo is "original", as if trying to explain away nice-looking images as if they are fake. The JPEGs cameras produce are heavily processed, and they are emphatically NOT "original". Taking manual control of that process to produce an alternative JPEG with different curves, mappings, calibrations, is not a crime.

it's not a crime but applying post processing in an overly generous way that goes a lot further than replicating what a human sees does take away from what makes pictures interesting imho vs other mediums, that it's a genuine representation of something that actually happened. if you take that away, a picture is not very interesting, it's hyperrealistic so not super creative a lot of the time (compared to eg painting…

Do you also want the IR light to be in there? That would make it more of 'genuine representation'.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#116
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…

Eh, I'm a photographer and I don't fully agree. Of course almost all photos these days are edited in some form. Intent is important, yes. But there are still some kinds of edits that immediately classify a photo as "fake" for me.

For example if you add snow to a shot with masking or generative AI. It's fake because the real life experience was not actually snowing. You can't just hallucinate a major part of the image - that counts as fake to me. A major departure from the reality of the scene. Many other types of edits don't have this property because they are mostly based on the reality of what occurred.

I think for me this comes from an intrinsic valuing of the act/craft of photography, in the physical sense. Once an image is too digitally manipulated then it's less photography and more digital art.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#117
post #112

> There’s nothing that happens when you adjust the contrast or white balance in editing software that the camera hasn’t done under the hood. The edited image isn’t “faker” then the original: they are different renditions of the same data. Almost, but not quite? The camera works with more data than what's present in the JPG your image editing software sees.

You can always edit the RAW files from the camera, which essentially means working with the same data the camera chip had to generate the JPEGs.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#118
post #113

But does applying the same transfer function to each pixel (of a given colour anyway) count as "processing"? What bothers me as an old-school photographer is this. When you really pushed it with film (e.g. overprocess 400ISO B&W film to 1600 ISO and even then maybe underexpose at the enlargement step) you got nasty grain. But that was uniform "noise" all over the picture. Nowadays, noise reduction is impressive, but…

Just wait a few years, all of this is still getting better.

"Better"...

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#119
post #35

The article keeps using the acronym "ADC" without defining it.

Right-click, "Search Google for 'ADC'", takes much less time than making this useless comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog-to-digital_converter

My point wasn't "I can't find this information", my point was "this is poorly written".

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want that old school NTSC look: 0.3R + 0.59G + 0.11B This is the coefficients I use regularly.

Interesting that the "NTSC" look you describe is essentially rounded versions of the coefficients quoted in the comment mentioning ppm2pgm. I don't know the lineage of the values you used of course, but I found it interesting nonetheless. I imagine we'll never know, but it would be cool to be able to trace the path that lead to their formula, as well as the path to you arriving at yours

I’m sure it has its roots in amiga or TV broadcasting. ppm2pgm is old school too so we all tended to use the same defaults.

Like q3_sqrt

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