What an unprocessed photo looks like
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What an unprocessed photo looks like
1–10 of 418 posts
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#2Very interesting, pity the author chose such a poor example for the explanation (low, artificial and multicoloured light), making it really hard to understand what the "ground truth" and expected result should be.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#3Very cool and detailed
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#4>if the linear data is displayed directly, it will appear much darker then it should be.
This seems more a limitation of monitors. If you had very large bit depth, couldn't you just display images in linear light without gamma correction.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#5I 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 issues with things like admissibility of evidence.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#6I 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…
One thing I've learned while dabbling in photography is that there are no "fake" images, because there are no "real" images. Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do, making a thousand choices along the way, as this post beautifully demonstrates.
A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits, with local edits being things like retouching specific parts of the image to make desired changes, and one could argue that local edits are "more fake" than global edits, but it still depends on a thousand factors, most importantly intent.
"Fake" images are images with intent to deceive. By that definition, even an image that came straight out of the camera can be "fake" if it's showing something other than what it's purported to (e.g. a real photo of police violence but with a label saying it's in a different country is a fake photo).
What most people think when they say "fake", though, is a photo that has had filters applied, which makes zero sense. As the post shows, all photos have filters applied. We should get over that specific editing process, it's no more fake than anything else.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#7I 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 the luminance (brightness/detail) data. In many advanced demosaicing algorithms, the pipeline actually reconstructs the green channel first to get a high-resolution luminance map, and then interpolates the red/blue signals—which act more like "color difference" layers—on top of it. We can get away with this because the human visual system is much more forgiving of low-resolution color data than it is of low-resolution brightness data. It’s the same psycho-visual principle that justifies 4:2:0 chroma subsampling in video compression.
Also, for anyone interested in how deep the rabbit hole goes, looking at the source code for dcraw (or libraw) is a rite of passage. It’s impressive how many edge cases exist just to interpret the "raw" voltages from different sensor manufacturers.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#8I 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…
One thing I've learned while dabbling in photography is that there are no "fake" images, because there are no "real" images. Everything is an interpretation of the data that the camera has to do, making a thousand choices along the way, as this post beautifully demonstrates. A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits, with local edits being things like retouching specific parts of the image to make d…
> A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits,
Even that isn't all that clear-cut. Is noise removal a local edit? It only touches some pixels, but obviously, that's a silly take.
Is automated dust removal still global? The same idea, just a bit more selective. If we let it slide, what about automated skin blemish removal? Depth map + relighting, de-hazing, or fake bokeh? I think that modern image processing techniques really blur the distinction here because many edits that would previously need to be done selectively by hand are now a "global" filter that's a single keypress away.
Intent is the defining factor, as you note, but intent is... often hazy. If you dial down the exposure to make the photo more dramatic / more sinister, you're manipulating emotions too. Yet, that kind of editing is perfectly OK in photojournalism. Adding or removing elements for dramatic effect? Not so much.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#9This is actually really useful. A lot of people demand an "unprocessed" photo but don't understand what they're actually asking for.
Re: What an unprocessed photo looks like
#10Very interesting, pity the author chose such a poor example for the explanation (low, artificial and multicoloured light), making it really hard to understand what the "ground truth" and expected result should be.
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.