> On it’s own, this would make the LED Christmas lights into an overstaturated mess,
So, realistic then?
What an unprocessed photo looks like
271–280 of 418 posts
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#272I 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…
For me personally, it's fine to do things like local tone mapping, but object segmentation is where I draw the line. As in, a camera shouldn't know what a sky or a tree or a person is. It shouldn't care about any of that. It shouldn't process different parts of the image differently depending on what it "thinks" is there. Also, denoising should be configurable, because I would always prefer noise over this stupid "painted" look.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#273Earlier 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.
I don't think it's the same, for me personally I don't like heavily processed images. But not in the sense that they need processing to look decent or to convey the perception of what it was like in real life, more in the sense that the edits change the reality in a significant way so it affects the mood and the experience. For example, you take a photo on a drab cloudy day, but then edit the white balance to make it…
This is nothing new. For example, Ansel Adams’s famous Moonrise, Hernandez photo required extensive darkroom manipulations to achieve the intended effect:
https://www.winecountry.camera/blog/2021/11/1/moonrise-80-ye...
Most great photos have mediocre and uninteresting subjects. It’s all in the decisions the photographer makes about how to render the final image.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#274Earlier 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.
I don't think it's the same, for me personally I don't like heavily processed images. But not in the sense that they need processing to look decent or to convey the perception of what it was like in real life, more in the sense that the edits change the reality in a significant way so it affects the mood and the experience. For example, you take a photo on a drab cloudy day, but then edit the white balance to make it…
The “raw” and unedited photo can be just as or even more unrealistic than the edited one though.
Photographs can drop a lot of the perspective, feeling and colour you experience when you’re there. When you take a picture of a slope on a mountain for example (on a ski piste for example), it always looks much less impressive and steep on a phone camera. Same with colours. You can be watching an amazing scene in the mountains, but when you take a photo with most cameras, the colours are more dull, and it just looks flatter. If a filter enhances it and makes it feel as vibrant as the real life view, I’d argue you are making it more realistic.
The main message I get from OP’s post is precisely that there is no “real unfiltered / unedited image”, you’re always imperfectly capturing something your eyes see, but with a different balance of colours, different detector sensitivity to a real eye etc… and some degree of postprocessing is always required make it match what you see in real life.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#275Now how do I apply this to get the most realistic looking shaders in 3d?
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#276Does anyone remember a blog post on how repeated sharpening and blurring results in reaction diffusion Turing patterns. That blog also had an article on sub pixel shift. Trying frantically to remember and looking for it in my bookmarks but failing miserably. If anyone remembers what blog I am talking about please leave a link.
Maybe these? https://patorjk.com/blog/2025/11/02/what-happens-if-you-blur... https://patorjk.com/blog/2025/03/10/making-a-follow-up-to-su... https://relativisticobserver.blogspot.com/2012/02/keeping-it...
Hey thanks a bunch. These were not the ones though. The blog was more mathy and had a signal processing analysis and fixed point analysis of the repeated blue and sharpen phenomena.
I had upvoted it on HN either as a post or a comment that had the link. Wish there was an easy way to search through ones own upvoted comments and posts.
Thanks again though for trying to help.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bit about the green over-representation in camera color filters is partially correct. Human color sensitivity varies a lot from individual to individual (and not just amongst individuals with color blindness), but general statistics indicate we are most sensitive to red light. The main reason is that green does indeed overwhelmingly contribute to perceptual luminance (over 70% in sRGB once gamma corrected: https:…
Is it related to the fact that monkeys/humans evolved around dense green forests ?
Well, plants and eyes long predate apes.
Water is most transparent in the middle of the "visible" spectrum (green). It absorbs red and scatters blue. The atmosphere has a lot of water as does, of course, the ocean which was the birth place of plants and eyeballs.
It would be natural for both plants and eyes to evolve to exploit the fact that there is a green notch in the water transparency curve.
Edit: after scrolling, I find more discussion on this below.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#278I love posts that peel back the abstraction layer of "images." It really highlights that modern photography is just signal processing with better marketing. A fun tangent on the "green cast" mentioned in the post: the reason the Bayer pattern is RGGB (50% green) isn't just about color balance, but spatial resolution. The human eye is most sensitive to green light, so that channel effectively carries the majority of t…
> The human eye is most sensitive to green light, This argument is very confusing: if is most sensitive, less intensity/area should be necessary, not more.
Yeah, was thinking the same. If we're more sensitive, why do we need double sensors? Just have 1:1:1, and we would anyways see more of the green? Won't it be too much if we do 1:2:1, when we're already more perceptible to green?
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#279Ok I just never imagined that photons hitting camera lenses would not produce a “raw” image that made sense to my eyes - I am stunned and this is a fantastic addition to the canon of things one should know about the modern world.
(I also just realised that the world become more complex than I could understand when some guy mixed two ochres together and finger painted a Woolly Mammoth.)
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand your complaint. The "expected result" is either of the last two images (depending on your preference), and one of the main points of the post is to challenge the notion of "ground truth" in the first place.
Not a complaint, but both the final images have poor contrast, lighting, saturation and colour balance, making them a disappointing target for an explanation of how these elements are produced from raw sensor data. But anyway, I enjoyed the article.
That’s because it requires much more sophisticated processing to produce pleasing results. The article is showing you the absolute basic steps in the processing pipeline and also that you don’t really want an image that is ‘unprocessed’ to that extent (because it looks gross).