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iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

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Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#231
post #177

I sometimes hang out on mountainbike forums. A user posts that despite a new chain and setting up their rear derailleur according to instructions gear-changes are clunky or the chain skips when applying power on the pedals. The usual reply from the forum members is then to send a photo of the cassette since excessive wear there leads to these problems. This used to clearly show that the user needed to replace their w…

They need to offer an option for a "raw" image as they used to be called --which were minimally processed and were not compressed.

Android does

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s also just weird. That’s not my daughter’s skin in the photo, it’s 1000 other people’s skin blended together and textured in.

It’s what you desire your skin to be .

Yeesh. I can't be the only person for whom this sentence makes my skin crawl.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#234
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch As in, "Incredibly-cheap-but-sometimes-there's-rat-poop-in-it" lunch?

no as in, "computational photography has been a staple of every modern smartphone sold globally for the past 4 years, and this is one of the only examples of problems ever happening for anyone" lunch

Problems of changing skin texture or text or body shape or background details abound, but are normally of a form where it's easier to dismiss or gaslight anyone pointing them out.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cameras have never, ever been "accurate". It is not technologically possible to create a photograph that is "accurate". Cameras have always made big tradeoffs to output something that actually looks good to humans.

Sure, but there is a major difference between color correction and, say, replacing a head with a leaf. Historically cameras have merely altered the style of images. These days smartphone cameras are altering the content of images.

Most modern cameras have noise reduction, stabilisation, the ability to combine multiple exposures and track moving targets. They might not push the envelope as much as a cellphone, but they’re only a few years behind.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#236

Before we criticize, before jumping to conclusions -- I just want to point out, it is a great leaf. Are we certain that the camera's decision was wrong? I mean, maybe we should consider the camera's judgement about what the best picture is. I'm not a photographer, if my camera tells me that my friend's head is best represented as a combination of sticks, leaves, and other natural objects, who am I to argue with that?…

I also don't quite understand the leap to controversy, which seems to rest on the assumption that this person does not have a pile of leaves for a head.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be good for myself, or if I’m honest even my wife, but my daughter looks perfect to me and I only want to see her in reality.

No imaging system reproduces reality. You're always getting a compromised result.

Yes but the knowledge of how it was created affects how I see it. If it’s just denoising etc it feels different than if I know it’s painted in some other data.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference between color correction or exposure compensation and adding non existing objects by ML algorithm.

Modern phones take long exposures and try to make sense of it by analyzing it. Basically, a one second really dark video can be summed up into one very blurry but bright enough photo. But if you carefully move each frame to compensate for camera movement when summing it up - you might also get a sharp picture. But then the subject moves, or a leaf moves, and the algorithm has to decide which parts of the photo should…

Wouldn't they even move different parts of the scene differently for summing up? And the summing is for denoising, not for rising levels out of darkness, so it would be perfectly fine to sum only the parts where there is plenty of confidence about the movement, leaving others noisy (or, if more noisy than one would like to admit, de-noise spatially instead of temporally in those places, which brings us back to blurry. Add an "unsharp mask" step to compensate and you get that watercolors look we all know).

Back to moving different parts differently: this seems very similar to the motion prediction parts of video encoding. I wonder if and how much the stacking algorithms make direct use of elements of the video encoding implementations those cameras also have?

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#239

I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.

Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There must have been some filter on by default because our faces looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that -- it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us. I sim…

Are you sure it was a filter or just a lower-quality front facing camera that didn't capture details in low light like blemishes and smile lines? In an effort to reduce noise, sometimes a camera over-smoothes the image - not as a way to make your imperfections disappear, but to make the noise from the high ISO shot disappear.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory what prevents me from using a huge lens and sensor on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and then using the same advanced software but now running on a desktop computer or a server that is many times more powerful than a smartphone to do advanced post processing?

It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power. DSLR and mirrorless cameras have better optical properties. But they are held back by starting too late and being much worse when it comes to software. These cameras also are limited by their CPUs, which are a decade behind, and by their batteries, which are much smaller but expected…

> recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks

I mean, sure, but the A15 bionic is much more power constrained and effectively has less 'GPUs' and cores than the M1, likely because the SoC is also constrained by its size within the phone housing.

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