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About Bokeh

bokehtests.com

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Re: About Bokeh

#41

Post by linuxdude314 »

droitbutch wrote: post #25
droitbutch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition conflicts with the author's. 1st paragraph: >as I own this site, I get to define good and bad Bokeh for the purposes here! The other key term is “image.” Bokeh is a property of IMAGES, not a property of LENSES.

not sure why I'm getting downvoted here for simply pointing out the author defines his definition of Bokeh in the 1st paragraph.

It’s because you’re coming off as clueless and tone deaf. Your post is argumentative just to make a point, and clearly demonstrates you don’t know much about the subject.

Who cares if the definition is slightly different? We’re talking about the same emergent phenomena and I think you realize that.

People upvote contributions not trolls.

Welcome to HN!

Re: About Bokeh

#42

Post by tudelo »

pyridines wrote: post #12

As a very nearsighted person, I can see bokeh if I take off my glasses and look at points of light - either nearby small lights, or far-away large lights. Also, when I look at a bright sky through a tree's canopy, the canopy transforms into a breathtaking mosaic of bokeh, which becomes animated if the tree is swaying in the wind. Can people with normal vision experience this?

finally, an advantage for the near-blind

Re: About Bokeh

#43

Post by murgindrag »

Shape is important. I find that some lenses have a different look on-axis versus off-axis, either leading to ugly smearing, or pretty twirly bokeh.

The aesthetic also depends on image. Nice crisp circles of light are sometimes nicer than a Gaussian blur. As someone pointed out, mirror lenses have their uses too.

But there are lenses with just bad bokeh too.

Re: About Bokeh

#44

Post by geerlingguy »

unicornporn wrote: post #36
penagwin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about non-point and shoot cameras, such as DSLRs or Mirrorless Cameras that cost $500+ such as my Sony A6000, I absolutely DO NOT want post-processing done on my camera. Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ looks okay at a glance, but thinks like hair, wires, and twigs are TERRIBLE on closer inspection. Not to say the software couldn't be improved. For example, after taking a 20 second exposure, I have to w…

> Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ looks okay at a glance, but thinks like hair, wires, and twigs are TERRIBLE on closer inspection. Portrait mode on any phone looks crap. I have not yet seen a picture where fake shallow DOF does not fail and look crap.

If you have solid edges (e.g. hair pulled back or bald), and a fairly smooth background already... it looks acceptable.

But it's not a substitute for a really nice lens and sensor combo. Maybe someday.

I just wish the DSLR/mirrorless manufactuers would invest more in making their RAW files more intelligent. I don't want 'portrait mode' but I do want to be able to focus stack in one image (with originals preserved), do true adjustable HDR (combining exposures), etc.

Sony and Nikon have a couple hint at these capabilities, but the software is not easy to use, and don't get me started on moving pictures between camera bodies and wherever they need to be to do things with them (laptop, iPad, phone).

Re: About Bokeh

#45

Post by __jal »

StillBored wrote: post #2

And its all done in software (or ML) with recent phones to get around the lack of a good lenses system. And for most people it seems to work satisfactorily. This has been one of the complaints against camera manufactures recently, that the firmware on the cameras is wildly archaic.

> And for most people it seems to work satisfactorily

Most people apparently don't look at their pictures.

The "enhanced" photos I've gotten from the Iphone for the last few models have just been getting worse. They look OK if you don't look too closely, but then they're just wrong. Blurry details on the same focal plane as crisp ones, crappy details with translucency, hair or anything else that confuses the "foreground/background" detector, they're just bad.

My DLSR will be in service for quite a while longer.

Re: About Bokeh

#46

Post by jonas21 »

If anyone's interested in the technical details of implementing state of the art real-time bokeh in a game engine, Guillaume Abadie's "Life of a Bokeh" slides from SIGGRAPH 2018 are really good:

https://epicgames.ent.box.com/s/s86j70iamxvsuu6j35pilypficzn...

Unfortunately, a video of the talk doesn't seem to be available online.

Re: About Bokeh

#47

Post by tomc1985 »

pyridines wrote: post #12

As a very nearsighted person, I can see bokeh if I take off my glasses and look at points of light - either nearby small lights, or far-away large lights. Also, when I look at a bright sky through a tree's canopy, the canopy transforms into a breathtaking mosaic of bokeh, which becomes animated if the tree is swaying in the wind. Can people with normal vision experience this?

Not sure what it is I'm doing but intentionally blurring my vision creates a sort of visual bokeh

Re: About Bokeh

#48

Post by thamer »

unicornporn wrote: post #36
penagwin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about non-point and shoot cameras, such as DSLRs or Mirrorless Cameras that cost $500+ such as my Sony A6000, I absolutely DO NOT want post-processing done on my camera. Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ looks okay at a glance, but thinks like hair, wires, and twigs are TERRIBLE on closer inspection. Not to say the software couldn't be improved. For example, after taking a 20 second exposure, I have to w…

> Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ looks okay at a glance, but thinks like hair, wires, and twigs are TERRIBLE on closer inspection. Portrait mode on any phone looks crap. I have not yet seen a picture where fake shallow DOF does not fail and look crap.

These improvements to bokeh on the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL show some pretty good results: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/12/improvements-to-portrait-m...

Re: About Bokeh

#49

Post by rolltiide »

mcny wrote: post #24
rolltiide wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love for that processing time to be cut down. yeah its called an iPhone 11 PRO

My understanding is that the processor on the eleven, eleven pro, and eleven pro max are identical? https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_11-9848.php https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_11_pro-9847.php https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_11_pro_max-9846.php

faster than a 7+

Re: About Bokeh

#50

Post by throwanem »

StillBored wrote: post #2

And its all done in software (or ML) with recent phones to get around the lack of a good lenses system. And for most people it seems to work satisfactorily. This has been one of the complaints against camera manufactures recently, that the firmware on the cameras is wildly archaic.

No, it hasn't. This comes up every time someone on HN mentions anything to do with photography - mostly, it seems, from people who don't do a lot of photography or at the very least aren't closely familiar with interchangeable-lens cameras - and it never stops being nonsense.

There are plenty of things that could be improved about DSLR and mirrorless cameras, in the firmware and out of it. The number of those things which are in any way related to, or could be in any way improved by, the idea of jamming a smartphone into an interchangeable-lens camera, is zero.

(In case anyone's inclined to question my own chops: that's fair, considering my line of argument. I don't post much of my work lately, but here's my best shot of 2019, taken from a distance of six inches with a Nikon D500 and a 105mm macro lens: https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg - so you can look at that and judge for yourself whether I'm qualified to speak to the question of how familiarity with interchangeable-lens cameras influences the perceived value of junking up their UI with a lot of smartphone garbage.)

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