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Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

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Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#81

Post by perardi »

blahblah4332 wrote: post #54
matthewowen wrote: post #11

This article is awful. It's about smartphone cameras not being able to capture, but the three photos included are all ones that at least somewhat worked. Seems like it would be better to include one that failed?

As someone with a professional photography background, this article was actually super upsetting. The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result. The thesis of the article "I don't understand white…

I know I should defend the common user…but c’mon, if you’re going to write an article like this, maybe spend like 5 minutes figuring out why the camera is “struggling”.

Broadly, the camera is doing the right thing here. Nobody developed these auto white balance algorithms to factor in the sky turning orange. The camera/imaging pipeline is seeing this crazy orange cast, assuming it’s deep incandescent light, and then trying to compensate, which is generally what you want it to do.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#82

Post by sudosysgen »

blahblah4332 wrote: post #76
sudosysgen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top level comment was making a more general claim than just color balance. There are a lot of weird artifacts in phone pictures introduced by image processing overfitting.

I didn't really agree with the top level comment either. This isn't an artifact of sensor size or A/D conversion or any of that. You can encounter the exact same issue with a $40,000 medium format camera if you don't understand photography. What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait ga…

In a competent camera, you actually wouldn't. You would take a picture in RAW format, and change the White Balance afterwards. Whereas in a tiny phone, the RAW images are of exceedingly low quality.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#83

Post by perardi »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #15
30minAdayHN wrote: post #10

> This was a moment for my Canon to prove that, despite its bulk, it can't always be replaced by a smartphone. Such a naive statement. Once those phones' white balance is corrected, they should be able to capture the orange tinge. Even in a DSLR, if the white balance is set to auto, it would not capture the orange tinge. Cloudy might be a good starting point.

How would I do this on iOS, if I had just my phone and no CaptureOne on a laptop or the like? Are there apps that let me use a gray card to set the white balance of raw photos?

Or, as briefly mentioned in the article, use Halide, which outputs RAW files, which you can then edit in your app of choice. (Nice thing about iOS: it outputs Adobe DNG files, which is a standardized format, and broadly readable by a bunch of applications.)

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#85

Post by blahblah4332 »

perardi wrote: post #81
blahblah4332 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a professional photography background, this article was actually super upsetting. The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result. The thesis of the article "I don't understand white…

I know I should defend the common user…but c’mon, if you’re going to write an article like this, maybe spend like 5 minutes figuring out why the camera is “struggling”. Broadly, the camera is doing the right thing here. Nobody developed these auto white balance algorithms to factor in the sky turning orange. The camera/imaging pipeline is seeing this crazy orange cast, assuming it’s deep incandescent light, and then…

Exactly! You could measure the collective eye-rolling of all the electronics engineers who work in the photo industry on seismographs around the world. (hopefully overstating the reach of this garbage article)

Edit: Not to mention that the auto WB algorithm out dates smartphones by more than a decade.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#86

Post by blahblah4332 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #82
blahblah4332 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really agree with the top level comment either. This isn't an artifact of sensor size or A/D conversion or any of that. You can encounter the exact same issue with a $40,000 medium format camera if you don't understand photography. What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait ga…

In a competent camera, you actually wouldn't. You would take a picture in RAW format, and change the White Balance afterwards. Whereas in a tiny phone, the RAW images are of exceedingly low quality.

That's not generally how it works. Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process.

This is probably especially true for people like photojournalist, who shoot thousands of photos in a session and don't want to spend hours processing them afterward.

What about shooting in mixed light, where you have different color light sources inside and outside of a room? Do you think photographers are just saying "meh, this looks fine purple, I'll fix it in post"... or are they trying to capture the scene as close to accurate as possible (perhaps biasing exposure to compensate for limits in highlight or shadow detail capture)

Edit: Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#87

Post by Someone »

blahblah4332 wrote: post #85
perardi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I should defend the common user…but c’mon, if you’re going to write an article like this, maybe spend like 5 minutes figuring out why the camera is “struggling”. Broadly, the camera is doing the right thing here. Nobody developed these auto white balance algorithms to factor in the sky turning orange. The camera/imaging pipeline is seeing this crazy orange cast, assuming it’s deep incandescent light, and then…

Exactly! You could measure the collective eye-rolling of all the electronics engineers who work in the photo industry on seismographs around the world. (hopefully overstating the reach of this garbage article) Edit: Not to mention that the auto WB algorithm out dates smartphones by more than a decade.

Also, before smartphones or even digital cameras, people sent camera rolls to laboratories, and got prints back.

If, in winter sport season, you sent your photos from the Sahara to be developed, chances were you got what looked like snow landscapes back. Conversely, sending winter sport photos in july/august might give you ‘beach with skiers’ photos back (I think that was because of operator error, not automation)

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#88

Post by perardi »

Someone wrote: post #87
blahblah4332 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! You could measure the collective eye-rolling of all the electronics engineers who work in the photo industry on seismographs around the world. (hopefully overstating the reach of this garbage article) Edit: Not to mention that the auto WB algorithm out dates smartphones by more than a decade.

Also, before smartphones or even digital cameras, people sent camera rolls to laboratories, and got prints back. If, in winter sport season, you sent your photos from the Sahara to be developed, chances were you got what looked like snow landscapes back. Conversely, sending winter sport photos in july/august might give you ‘beach with skiers’ photos back (I think that was because of operator error, not automation)

Most of my experience with film was long ago, and mainly through those execrable disposable cameras my family used when I was a kid. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_camera) I doubt there is a single indoor photo of me as a child with the proper white balance.

(Which is for the best. I was an extremely homely child. It's for the good of all we shot with slow, blurry film.)

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#89

Post by blahblah4332 »

perardi wrote: post #88
Someone wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, before smartphones or even digital cameras, people sent camera rolls to laboratories, and got prints back. If, in winter sport season, you sent your photos from the Sahara to be developed, chances were you got what looked like snow landscapes back. Conversely, sending winter sport photos in july/august might give you ‘beach with skiers’ photos back (I think that was because of operator error, not automation)

Most of my experience with film was long ago, and mainly through those execrable disposable cameras my family used when I was a kid. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_camera ) I doubt there is a single indoor photo of me as a child with the proper white balance. (Which is for the best. I was an extremely homely child. It's for the good of all we shot with slow, blurry film.)

The fact that you had to add a wikipedia link for disposable cameras makes me feel old

Re: Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky

#90

Post by perardi »

blahblah4332 wrote: post #89
perardi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my experience with film was long ago, and mainly through those execrable disposable cameras my family used when I was a kid. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_camera ) I doubt there is a single indoor photo of me as a child with the proper white balance. (Which is for the best. I was an extremely homely child. It's for the good of all we shot with slow, blurry film.)

The fact that you had to add a wikipedia link for disposable cameras makes me feel old

A bit of disambiguation to make clear I wasn’t talking about Polaroids.
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