191–200 of 418 posts
You may know that intermittent rashes are always invisible in the presence of medical credentials. Years ago I became suspicious of my Samsung Android device when I couldn't produce a reliable likeness of an allergy induced rash. No matter how I lit things, the photos were always "nicer" than what my eyes recorded live. The incentives here are clear enough - people will prefer a phone whose camera gives them an impre…
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There's an obvious difference between debayering and white balance vs using Photoshop's generative fill
Pretending that "these two things are the same, actually" when in fact no, you can seperately name and describe them quite clearly, is a favorite pastime of vacuous content on the internet. Artists, who use these tools with clear vision and intent to achieve specific goals, strangely never have this problem.
For example, I took a picture of my dog at the dog park the other day. I didn’t notice when framing the picture but on review at home, right smack in the middle of the lower 3rd of the photo and conveniently positioned to have your eyes led there by my dog’s pose and snout direction, was a giant, old, crusty turd. Once you noticed it, it was very hard to not see it anymore. So I broke out the photo editing tools and used some auto retouching tool to remove the turd. And lucky for me since the ground was mulch, the tool did a fantastic job of blending it out, and if I didn’t tell you it had been retouched, you wouldn’t know.
Is that a fake image? The subject of the photo was my dog. The purpose of the photo was to capture my dog doing something entertaining. When I was watching the scene with my own human eyes I didn’t see the turd. Nor was capturing the turd in the photo intended or essential to capturing what I wanted to capture. But I did use some generative tool (algorithmic or AI I couldn’t say) to convincingly replace the turd with more mulch. So does doing that make the image fake? I would argue no. If you ask me what the photo is, I say it’s a photo of my dog. The edit does not change my dog, nor change the surrounding to make the dog appear somewhere else or to make the dog appear to be doing something they weren’t doing were you there to witness it yourself. I do not intend the photo to be used as a demonstration of how clean that particular dog park is or was on that day, or even to be a photo representing that dog park at all. My dog happened to be in that locale when they did something I wanted a picture of. So to me that picture is no more fake than any other picture in my library. But a pure “differentiate on the tools” analysis says it is a fake image, content that wasn’t captured by the sensor is now in the image and content that was captured no longer is. Fake image then right?
I think the OP has it right, the intent of your use of the tool (and its effect) matters more than what specific tool you used.
An unprocessed photo does not “look”. It is RGGB pixel values that far exceed any display media in dynamic range. Fitting it into the tiny dynamic range of screens by thrusting throwing away data strategically (inventing perceptual the neutral grey point, etc.) is what actually makes sense of them, and what is the creative task.
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Funnily enough that's not the only mistake he made in that article. His final image is noticeably different from the camera's output image because he rescaled the values in the first step. That's why the dark areas look so crushed, eg around the firewood carrier on the lower left or around the cat, and similarly with highlights, e.g. the specular highlights on the ornaments. After that, the next most important proble…
I didn’t read the article as implying that the final image the author arrived at was “unprocessed”. The point seemed to be that the first image was “unprocessed” but that the “unprocessed” image isn’t useful as a “photo”. You only get a proper “picture” Of something after you do quite a bit of processing.
>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.
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…
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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.
As a mostly amateur photographer, it doesn't bother me if people ask that question. While I understand the point that the camera itself may be making some 'editing' type decision on the data first, a) in theory each camera maker has attempted to calibrate the output to some standard, b) public would expect two photos taken at same time with same model camera should look identical. That differs greatly from what often…
>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.
Did you steal that tree from Charlie Brown?
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My point wasn't "I can't find this information", my point was "this is poorly written".
I wanted to say I that I think it's overrated in terms of its position on HN, but rather than criticize side issues of it, which often point to something being a weak article in general, I probably should have just said exactly what I don't like about it as a whole. So I'll do that. I think the headline is problematic because it suggests the raw photos aren't very good and thus need processing, however the raw data i…
That’s not how I read either the headline or the article at all. I read it as “this is a ‘raw photo’ fresh off your camera sensor, and this is everything your camera does behind the scenes to make that into something that we as humans recognize as a photo of something.” No judgements or implications that the raw photo is somehow wrong and something manufacturers should eliminate or “game”
So cute (I am running a DNS adblock only, on the work browser)