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What an unprocessed photo looks like

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Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#381

Post by fragmede »

Edman274 wrote: post #360
eloisius wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole post read like and in-depth response to people that claim things like “I don’t do any processing to my photos” or feel some kind of purist shame about doing so. It’s a weird chip some amateur photographers have on their shoulders, but even pros “process” their photos and have done so all the way back until the beginning of photography.

Is it fair to recognize that there is a category difference between the processing that happens by default on every cell phone camera today, and the time and labor intensive processing performed by professionals in the time of film? What's happening today is like if you took your film to a developer and then the negatives came back with someone having airbrushed out the wrinkles and evened out skin tones. I think tha…

Kent state massacre pole picture is a point of controversy in this area, but may be more relevant then ever.

https://petapixel.com/2012/08/29/the-kent-state-massacre-pho...

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#382

Post by tehjoker »

tpmoney wrote: post #192
sho_hn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that was the point the OP was making. Not that you couldn’t differentiate between white balance correction and generative fill, but rather that the intent of the change matters for determining if an image is “fake”. 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 conve…

Well you changed the photo from an accurate representation of the scene into what you felt like it should be. The photo is no longer "real" but a story. Stories tell us things that are true too, but not in a physical evidence kind of way.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#383

Post by qubitcoder »

15155 wrote: post #305
kuschku wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small neural networks I believe are the current state of the art (e.g. train to reverse a 16x16 color filter pattern for the given camera). What is currently in use by modern digital cameras is all trade secret stuff. Considering you usually shoot RAW, and debayer and process in post, the camera hasn't done any of that. It's only smartphones that might be doing internal AI Debayering, but they're already hallucinat…

Yes, people usually shoot RAW (anyone spending this much on a camera knows better) - but these cameras default to JPEG and often have dual-capture (RAW+JPEG) modes.

To be clear, they default to JPEG for the image preview on the monitor (LCD screen). Whenever viewing an image on a professional camera, you’re always seeing the resulting JPEG image.

The underlying data is always captured as a RAW file, and only discarded if you’ve configured the camera to only store the JPEG image (discarding the original RAW file after processing).

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#384

Post by tehjoker »

jiggawatts wrote: post #372
trashb wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A DSLR and mobile phone camera optimize for different things and can't really be compared. Mobile phone camera's are severely handicapped by the optics & sensor size. Therefore to create a acceptable picture (to share on social media) they need to do a lot of processing. DSLR and professional camera's feature much greater hardware. Here the optics and sensor size/type are important it optimize the actual light being…

> A DSLR and mobile phone camera optimize for different things and can't really be compared. You sound exactly like the sales guy trying to explain why that Indigo workstation is “different” even though it was performing the exact same vector and matrix algebra as my gaming GPU. The. Exact. Same. Thing. Everything else you’ve said is irrelevant to computational photography. If anything, it helps matters because there…

most likely one reason is that to do that, you'd have to pair the price of a fancy smartphone to a nice camera, so adding ~$1000 for a feature professionals often prefer to do offline since they can get good focus and color using optics and professional lights

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#385

Post by qwertywert_ »

dheera wrote: post #39
barishnamazov wrote: post #7

I 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…

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.

That's completely unreasonable. Sure the camera processes them heavily. but when you open it up and start editing in photoshop you are changing this area over that one, or highlighting one color over another etc.. or just boosting the brightness way higher than what it looked like that day. It's a perfectly normal question to ask.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#386

Post by 15155 »

qubitcoder wrote: post #383
15155 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people usually shoot RAW (anyone spending this much on a camera knows better) - but these cameras default to JPEG and often have dual-capture (RAW+JPEG) modes.

To be clear, they default to JPEG for the image preview on the monitor (LCD screen). Whenever viewing an image on a professional camera, you’re always seeing the resulting JPEG image. The underlying data is always captured as a RAW file, and only discarded if you’ve configured the camera to only store the JPEG image (discarding the original RAW file after processing).

> Whenever viewing an image on a professional camera

Viewing any preview image on any camera implies a debayered version: who says is it JPEG-encoded - why would it need to be? Every time I browse my SD card full of persisted RAWs, is the camera unnecessarily converting to JPEG just to convert it back to bitmap display data?

> The underlying data is always captured as a RAW file, and only discarded if you’ve configured the camera to only store the JPEG image (discarding the original RAW file after processing).

Retaining only JPEG is the default configuration on all current-generation Sony and Canon mirrorless cameras: you have to go out of your way to persist RAW.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#387

Post by __turbobrew__ »

Waterluvian wrote: post #45

I studied remote sensing in undergrad and it really helped me grok sensors and signal processing. My favourite mental model revelation to come from it was that what I see isn’t the “ground truth.” It’s a view of a subset of the data. My eyes, my cat’s eyes, my cameras all collect and render different subsets of the data, providing different views of the subject matter. It gets even wilder when perceiving space and ti…

> I imagine a sort of absolute reality that is the universe. And we’re all just sensor systems observing tiny bits of it in different and often overlapping ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_idealism

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#388

Post by eloisius »

Edman274 wrote: post #360
eloisius wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole post read like and in-depth response to people that claim things like “I don’t do any processing to my photos” or feel some kind of purist shame about doing so. It’s a weird chip some amateur photographers have on their shoulders, but even pros “process” their photos and have done so all the way back until the beginning of photography.

Is it fair to recognize that there is a category difference between the processing that happens by default on every cell phone camera today, and the time and labor intensive processing performed by professionals in the time of film? What's happening today is like if you took your film to a developer and then the negatives came back with someone having airbrushed out the wrinkles and evened out skin tones. I think tha…

It’s fair to recognize. Personally I do not like the aesthetic decisions that Apple makes, so if I’m taking pictures on my phone I use camera apps that’s give me more control (Halide, Leica Lux). I also have reservations about cloning away power lines or using AI in-painting. But to your example, if you got your film scanned or printed, in all likelihood someone did go in and change some stuff. Color correction and touching the contrast etc is routine at development labs. There is no tenable purist stance because there is no “traditional” amount of processing.

Some things are just so far outside the bounds of normal, and yet are still world-class photography. Just look at someone like Antoine d’Agata who shot an entire book using an iPhone accessory FLIR camera.

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#389

Post by bmitc »

cycomanic wrote: post #239
bmitc wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Green is the highest energy light emitted by our sun, from any part of the entire light spectrum, which is why green appears in the middle of the visible spectrum. The visible spectrum basically exists because we "grew up" with a sun that blasts that frequency range more than any other part of the light spectrum.

That comment does not make sense. Do you mean the sun emits it's peak intensity at green (I don't believe that is true either, but at least it would make a physically sensical statement). To clarify why the statement does not make sense, the energy of light is directly proportional to its frequency so saying that green is the highest energy light the sun emits is saying the sun does not emit any light at frequency hi…

> Do you mean the sun emits it's peak intensity at green (I don't believe that is true either, but at least it would make a physically sensical statement).

Yes, that's what I meant, as I was sloppy with my language, and it's definitely true.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/physics-and-astronomy/s...

Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like

#390

Post by qubitcoder »

Abh1Works wrote: post #310

Why is the native picture (fig 1) in grayscale? or more generally why is black and white the default of signal processing? Is it just because black and white are two opposites that can be easily discerned?

They’re known as DNs, or digital numbers. Thom Hogan’s eBooks do a phenomenal job of explaining the intricacies of camera sensors, their architecture, processing to JPEGs, and pretty much every aspect of capturing good photos.

The books, while geared toward Nikon cameras, are generally applicable. And packed with high-quality illustrations and an almost obsessive uber-nerd level of detail. He’s very much an engineer and photographer. When he says “complete guide”, he means it.

The section on image sensors, read-outs, and ISO/dual gain/S&R, etc. is particularly interesting—-and should be baseline knowledge for anyone who’s seriously interested in photography.

[0] https://zsystemuser.com/z-system-books/complete-guide-to-the...

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