[HN Gopher] iPhone camera app replaces person's head with a leaf...
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       iPhone camera app replaces person's head with a leaf in photo
        
       Author : davidbarker
       Score  : 705 points
       Date   : 2021-12-30 18:00 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | mark-r wrote:
       | The leaf over the face is much larger than the leaves in the
       | background. That leads me to believe it was an actual leaf in the
       | foreground hanging in an inconvenient place.
        
       | matsemann wrote:
       | I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it
       | most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a
       | big selling point on a phone.
       | 
       | But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter
       | applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have
       | vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really
       | did.
        
         | mgraczyk wrote:
         | On Android you can enable a "raw" mode that will capture a dng
         | file with much less processing. You can then adjust that raw
         | file and render it to a jpeg according to your taste.
         | 
         | The dng will still have things like stabilization and multi-
         | frame merging, but without those the image will almost always
         | look horrible as others have explained.
        
           | ehsankia wrote:
           | RAW is not quite what they want (I think). It's HDR+ that
           | they need to disable. The latter takes multiple frames at
           | different exposures and smartly merged them into a single
           | photo, then applies extra color corrections on top. Taking
           | RAW skips the last step, but you still get a merging of
           | multiple frames. Disabling HDR+ will, I believe, take a
           | single frame. Of course on a small phone sensor, the quality
           | will be quite bad.
        
             | mgraczyk wrote:
             | Yeah I work on HDR+. Depends on the phone though, only
             | certain phones run full HDR+, but they all do some sort of
             | multi frame processing.
             | 
             | If you were able to disable HDR+ and get a single captured
             | frame, it would look horrible. You'd have to merge multiple
             | frames yourself to get something decent. You can Google
             | around for ways to do that but it will only work on a few
             | phones.
        
               | kuschku wrote:
               | The way HDR+ merges stuff (which looks awesome, but
               | something is just _off_ , especially in darker
               | environments) is actually why I bought a Sony a6300. Used
               | it was cheaper with a good lens than a Google Pixel would
               | have been (my Pixel 1 stopped getting updates after all)
               | and the photos it takes are incredible.
        
           | pmontra wrote:
           | How can we enable raw mode? I'll looked into the settings of
           | Camera but I found only a way to disable the scent optimizer.
        
             | justsomehnguy wrote:
             | https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/
             | 
             | You need to change API to Camera2 and then you will be able
             | to enable RAW.
        
             | roywiggins wrote:
             | The Samsung photo app offers to store RAW files (when
             | shooting in Pro mode) as a setting. YMMV on others.
        
             | bigyikes wrote:
             | I use a (paid) app called Halide, but there are others out
             | there too. I'm personally not aware of a way to do it with
             | the native Camera app, but it would be cool if it exists.
        
           | justusthane wrote:
           | Newer iPhones can also shoot in raw.
        
         | pcurve wrote:
         | Half the time it's the camera, the other half, it's the display
         | setting. Samsung phone has different modes for their AMOLED
         | screens.
        
         | Jackson__ wrote:
         | And furthermore, how it manages to make it all look like a
         | painting when zoomed in. No matter if Android or iPhone, old or
         | new, they all seem to have this really annoying effect.
        
         | akomtu wrote:
         | Big tech has this uni-modal aporoach to users: they find what
         | maximizes a metric, and works for 75% of the users, but roll it
         | out to 100%. Dealing with the remaining 25% would have low ROI.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Not only tech. Try finding shoes or pants when your size is
           | 1.5 times sigma away from the mean.
        
             | iamacyborg wrote:
             | As a 5'5 dude buying clothes from American brands is often
             | hilarious. I bought an xs nike trail running tshirt and
             | it's a good 5 inches too long in the body.
        
               | Skunkleton wrote:
               | I'm a 6'6" dude and I feel your pain. Every time I get
               | company swag, the best they can offer me is a super wide
               | belly shirt :(
        
             | GuB-42 wrote:
             | Small people can use child size, which is usually much
             | cheaper for the same thing.
             | 
             | Large people are out of luck.
             | 
             | But your point still holds, it is just that if you include
             | children, small sizes don't follow a normal distribution,
             | large sizes do.
        
           | hetspookjee wrote:
           | I never understood this one size fits all approach of a lot
           | of companies. Controlled opposition would often result in
           | higher market penetration and more net happiness
        
             | dylan604 wrote:
             | Mr Smarty Pants has the solution for all cameras to be 100%
             | accurate 100% of the time pleasing 100% of the users. How
             | humble of you to chat with us here on HN. /s
             | 
             | You sound like you have not dealt with humans at the scale
             | of the number of smart phone users. I've never dealt with
             | the numbers of something like an iPhone, but over the
             | course of my career have had multiple SKUs totaling over 1
             | million units. No matter what, there are always "people on
             | the internet" that are dissatisfied enough to go online to
             | voice their opinions. That's the only 100% is that there
             | will always be someone unhappy for whatever reason(s).
        
         | severine wrote:
         | I don't know if digital camera emulation is a thing, but this
         | thread is making me thirsty for a way to emulate my old 2MP
         | Olympus.
        
           | cfn wrote:
           | I have some software that has "digital film" emulations (DXO
           | FP), I suppose that is what they mean, emulating old cameras.
        
         | davidcollantes wrote:
         | Altering photographic images has always existed. 35 years ago I
         | developed my own films, and took artistic liberty on each photo
         | I printed on photographic paper. I also used a sepia process,
         | and my sister would colour the photos afterwards (we didn't
         | have colour film, but black and white).
        
         | tomasyany wrote:
         | Very much agree. I took RAW pictures with my Nikon on a
         | christmas party, and even took the time to properly develop and
         | adjust them.
         | 
         | Still, people complained on how "old and bad" their faces
         | looked (in pretty normal pics, nothing fancy). I attribute this
         | to the fact that everybody is now used to phones completely
         | editing faces and smoothing skin and adding saturation, etc.,
         | which makes us more "instagramable" although less human.
        
           | ryandvm wrote:
           | Just wait until the phones are automatically giving people
           | cartoon character eyes...
        
             | kingcharles wrote:
             | You mean the cartoon filter that has been around since
             | forever?
             | 
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRNiyjVpEM
        
             | johnisgood wrote:
             | They already have been giving them a dog tongue and
             | whatnot.
        
             | mark-r wrote:
             | I worked on Paint Shop Pro a long time ago, when they first
             | added red eye correction. It did it not by manipulating the
             | image, but by painting an artificial eye over the original.
             | The dialog was hellishly complex since you had to specify
             | not only how the new eye should look but how to make it
             | match the original. But it delivered impressive results.
             | Last I saw, it was scheduled to be replaced with something
             | simpler and more traditional in the next version.
        
               | teawrecks wrote:
               | Wow! That seems like a WAY harder task.
        
             | nitrogen wrote:
             | It's already happening. I saw an extreme eye enlarging
             | filter accidentally applied to a video by Matt Risinger
             | (YouTube videos about construction and homebuilding).
        
             | jjeaff wrote:
             | I think the iPhone is doing this with the portrait mode. It
             | may just be the smoothing or a bit of lens fish eye
             | creating the illusion, but I swear that all the portrait
             | photos of me and my family have slightly larger eyes than
             | reality.
        
             | Zak wrote:
             | This is a feature of Snapchat, to give one example.
             | 
             | https://www.google.com/search?q=snapchat+cartoon+eyes&tbm=i
             | s...
        
         | annexrichmond wrote:
         | Yeah I find that the front facing camera on the iPhone is
         | notoriously bad. The pictures it takes don't look like me
         | because it alters the skin tone and does aggressive smoothing.
         | I hate it.
        
         | shp0ngle wrote:
         | It's market unfortunately.
         | 
         | People want it, and they want their faces to look better than
         | in reality, to post on Instagrams.
         | 
         | The phone that has better pictures got better sales.
        
         | barrkel wrote:
         | I'm finding it increasingly hard to take photographs of unusual
         | light in the sky, because the phone camera keeps trying to
         | normalize it to something it's seen before (i.e. something
         | which matches its tuning and machine learning models), whether
         | it's auto white balance or other computational trickery.
        
           | formerly_proven wrote:
           | Sony used to have that problem with their real cameras a few
           | years ago. Earned them the nickname Stareater iirc.
        
             | mark-r wrote:
             | The stareater feature was just noise reduction taken too
             | far. A star looks just like a noisy pixel.
        
         | Derbasti wrote:
         | A while ago I was trying to compare a few of my cameras. It was
         | a cloudy day in early fall. All three cameras and my eyes
         | agreed that the sky was dull-grey and the leaves on the trees
         | drab-brown.
         | 
         | To the iPhone, however, the sky was more blue than grey, and
         | the leaves had an autumn-orange hue instead of brown. It wasn't
         | a complete fake, and if I had only had the iPhone picture I
         | wouldn't have noticed. But it was just a little bit better-
         | than-real, and in direct comparison obviously incorrect.
         | 
         | This, more than anything, discounted the iPhone camera for my
         | uses.
        
           | gwillen wrote:
           | This kind of white-balance fuckery became very apparent last
           | year, when the skies in the bay area turned orange and red
           | from smoke. On many phone cameras, the photos were
           | automatically color "corrected" to be completely wrong, with
           | no option to avoid this.
        
             | sethammons wrote:
             | I have yet to capture the oranges, pinks, and violets of
             | our amazing sunsets on a phone camera. It is always more
             | mundane and the vibrance gone.
        
         | naz wrote:
         | This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it?
         | Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and
         | sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats
         | headphones.
        
           | bcrosby95 wrote:
           | It's common in pretty much anything targeted towards the
           | masses.
           | 
           | It's probably best to think about it in terms of food. Your
           | average person has an "unrefined" palate. Be it for food,
           | drink, art, etc.
           | 
           | I think everyone has one of these in some areas of life. You
           | can't be a connoisseur in every field - it takes too much
           | energy.
        
           | laumars wrote:
           | I've never owned Bose nor Beats specifically but more
           | generally I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than
           | a gimmick for dumb consumers.
           | 
           | With room sized speakers it's not a problem because you'll
           | have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some
           | subs too. Thus it's easy to have a rich low end without
           | sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with
           | headphones that's _much_ harder to pull off. So you either
           | have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having
           | headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still
           | still producing a rich and deep low end is very much
           | desirable.
        
             | Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
             | > _I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a
             | gimmick for dumb consumers_
             | 
             | It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality.
             | Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of
             | bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to
             | intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing
             | something different than the musicians and mixing engineer
             | intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for
             | my mood/taste.
             | 
             | Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is
             | equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading
             | of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You
             | _can_ do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do
             | it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening.
             | However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?)
             | reason is a bit unusual.
        
               | laumars wrote:
               | > However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the
               | frequency response so I'm hearing something different
               | than the musicians and mixing engineer intended.
               | 
               | I've done a lot of research on this as a recording artist
               | myself and what you're saying here is a misunderstood
               | meme.
               | 
               | Eg Half the records released before 80s have been
               | remastered to sound different to what the musicians
               | originally recorded.
               | 
               | Plus any medium adds colour, vinyl adds warmth to the
               | playback, digital formats (unless you're using lossless,
               | which most people don't) add artifecting, etc. Songs are
               | often written for their preferred medium.
               | 
               | So there isn't really an exact "as intended" but rather a
               | broader "Goldilocks zone" (for want a better term). This
               | is especially true if you listen to a broad variety of
               | genres.
               | 
               | You'll also find that most songs record in the last 20
               | years will be compressed to hell and back so they sound
               | good regardless of how shitty the sound systems are in
               | peoples homes and cars. This isn't an artistic decision,
               | it's what producers and sound engineers do to make
               | records sound good for the lowest common denominator.
               | It's also part of the reason why live music sound better
               | (if the gig or club has a half decent sound engineer
               | anyway).
               | 
               | > Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is
               | equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading
               | of your monitor to not accurately represent colours.
               | 
               | Some content is actually deficient in some spectrums due
               | to the limitations of the media or technologies of the
               | era. Those limitations were intended to be compensated by
               | speakers that added that colour. There's a reason why
               | studio monitors with zero frequency curve are less common
               | to for rock fans than acoustic speakers (for example).
               | 
               | Lastly it's also worth noting that not everyone's ears
               | hear spectrums equally. Our ears don't have a zero
               | frequency curve and that curve will differ from person to
               | person. Which is why some of the best headphones out
               | there are ones that profile your hearing and then perform
               | post processing on the music based on your hearing
               | profile.
        
               | kuschku wrote:
               | And that's why you buy the CD release of Peter Gabriel
               | albums and listen to those instead ;)
        
               | laumars wrote:
               | Already discussed that point: those have been remastered
               | for CD and thus sound different to the original recorded
               | versions.
               | 
               | If you're a purist like the GP then you wouldn't listen
               | to the CD versions. Of course, in practice most people
               | are not that much of a purist. Which is why the whole
               | meme of "as the artists intended" is largely hypocritical
               | posturing.
        
             | ShroudedNight wrote:
             | If I hadn't been gifted a pair of beats earbuds, I could
             | see myself believing similarly. The ones I was given were
             | very nicely built, with tactile components that felt of
             | significant quality, as though they were assembled with
             | great care. They were also the muddiest, mushiest, and most
             | unpleasant listening experience I've had in the last couple
             | of decades outside of bad laptop / phone speakers or
             | scenarios that used explicitly damaged components. When I
             | first got them I thought that I had received a bad pair,
             | only to find online that the sound profile was intentional.
             | 
             | They were awful.
        
               | laumars wrote:
               | Obviously shit earphones are going to sound shit. That's
               | true whether they're bass heavy or not. So its a
               | sentiment that is not contradictory to my point.
               | 
               | My point is having earphones and headphones that can
               | offer a deep and rich low end _without_ sacrificing
               | sharpness a not novelty feature. And there are earphones
               | and headphones out there that can do that. I know this
               | because I've owned plenty over the years. :)
        
           | Zircom wrote:
           | I hate motion interpolation with a burning passion and have
           | made it into practically a vendetta and will turn it off
           | anywhere I see it by any means necessary, including
           | downloading a remote application onto my phone and using the
           | IR blaster to turn it off in restaurants and waking up in the
           | middle of the night at friends houses to sneakily switch it
           | off.
        
             | tartoran wrote:
             | For whoever what motion interpolation is also known as is
             | the soap opera effect on movies and I agree, it looks
             | terrible but most people don't get it, it doesn't bother
             | them at all.
        
               | kuschku wrote:
               | For me personally, 24fps is extremely close to being
               | unable to perceive motion, and in many movies I
               | absolutely can't see the content.
               | 
               | Any pan in a movie is something where my mind absolutely
               | is unable to process the motion and I become unable to
               | see anything at all. With motion interpolation on, I can
               | actually tell what's happening in an action scene.
        
               | copperx wrote:
               | According to some neuroscience article that was posted in
               | HN recently, some people might percieve reality in "less
               | FPS." Not only that, but as people age, the speed also
               | goes down. Most people I know cannot discern the
               | difference between heavy motion interpolation and it
               | being off. In the same way, I remember when people
               | weren't able to discern between DVD and BluRay quality in
               | 1080p displays. Even today, many people can't see the
               | difference between a Retina display and a 1080p monitor,
               | which blows my mind.
        
               | vbezhenar wrote:
               | I did blind testing on myself and found out that I
               | couldn't see a difference between 72 and 144 FPS.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | Taste.
           | 
           | It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on
           | average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste
           | for a few products, but not _most_ products. Hence, the mass-
           | market products are aimed at people with no taste, because
           | that captures the largest slice of the consumers.
           | 
           | Random examples:
           | 
           | - In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music
           | as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their music up to
           | 11, to the point that it's horrendously distorted, causes
           | physical pain, and forces everyone to scream at the top of
           | their lungs to be heard.
           | 
           | - Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by
           | typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence,
           | all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those
           | elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs
           | and spices.
           | 
           | - Just look at the typical gaming PC market. RGB LEDs are now
           | almost "essential", despite adding nothing material to the
           | performance or capability of the system other than a garish
           | blinken-light-show. You can't _see_ the gigahertz, but you
           | sure can see the LEDs!
           | 
           | - Cars are perceived to be more sporty if they have a loud
           | exhaust with a deep note to it. So of course, every "sports"
           | car has literal fake exhaust that's "tuned" to make this
           | particular noise.
           | 
           | Etc, etc...
           | 
           | It's all down to bad taste.
        
             | mark-r wrote:
             | It's even worse with Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They're
             | not just going for low and loud, they have a specific
             | profile that they tune their engines for. It will be
             | interesting to see what they do if they ever make an
             | electric.
        
               | jazzyjackson wrote:
               | Harley-Davidson does make electrics, they're very
               | expensive, which I guess is another way to be loud.
        
             | ramesh31 wrote:
             | > Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by
             | typical people as more tasty than foods without them.
             | Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with
             | those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such
             | as herbs and spices.
             | 
             | I love this one. Want to convince someone with an
             | unsophisticated palette that you are the greatest chef in
             | history? Just start loading everything you make with butter
             | and sugar. Salty and sweet === good to most people.
        
               | twofornone wrote:
               | You can buy MSG on amazon and instantly make anything
               | taste great.
        
               | thaumasiotes wrote:
               | You can buy MSG in any store. Why Amazon?
               | 
               | It doesn't have much effect. I make fried rice with and
               | without it and can't really tell the difference.
        
             | anonymouse008 wrote:
             | Hearing this and Steve Jobs' critique of Microsoft, "they
             | have no taste" is stunning.
             | 
             | Taking the iPhone as the mass consumer computer, must mean
             | that as a computing device the iPhone has very little
             | taste...
             | 
             | Which in a sense I can definitely see...
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | iPhones are definitely aimed at the more discerning, up-
               | market customer. Android meanwhile is for the mass-
               | market.
               | 
               | iPhones have four levels of encryption designed to thwart
               | the likes of the FBI trying to get data out of your
               | confiscated phones. Androids have a checkbox tick that
               | basically says "Encryption: Yes".
               | 
               | iPhones have 1000-nit OLED HDR screens that are colour-
               | managed and calibrated out of the box, and have Dolby
               | Vision HDR system-wide.
               | 
               | Etc, etc...
               | 
               | iPhones are for people that actually care about their
               | privacy, aren't blind, and appreciate the "small
               | touches". Androids are for people that don't mind
               | factory-installed crapware, _as long as it 's cheap_.
        
               | jjeaff wrote:
               | You aren't really comparing apples to apples here.
               | Android is an open source operating system used by dozens
               | of different hardware vendors. Crapware is only installed
               | by some vendors. And iphone rarely has the best displays.
               | They usually trade places with a few other Android
               | vendors for best camera. As for security, iphone usually
               | is the best. But it varies with different Android vendors
               | in how well or how poorly they implement security.
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | The iPhone 13 literally has the best display currently
               | available, and more importantly, it's colour managed
               | correctly. It is manufactured by Samsung, and they use
               | the same panel in their own flagship phone, but they
               | don't colour-manage as well or as consistently, making
               | the iPhone the overall winner in my book. Other Android
               | manufacturers have markedly worse displays in every
               | metric.
               | 
               | The fact that you don't appreciate this just reinforces
               | my point: you don't happen to have "taste" in phone
               | screens. That's okay! I have bad taste in cars, wine,
               | sport, and a bunch of other stuff.
        
               | kcb wrote:
               | My android phone has a folding screen that allows it to
               | double as a tablet. Checkmate.
        
               | sudosysgen wrote:
               | Actually, it just doesn't. Firstly Apple doesn't just use
               | Samsung, they also use BOE and LG panels, so they'd have
               | to be calibrated to the lesser of either.
               | 
               | Unless there is massive unit variance, which is even
               | worse.
               | 
               | So much for taste :)
        
               | jazzyjackson wrote:
               | wtf is dolby-vision HDR? Sounds like cheap marketing crap
               | like "Extra Bass Boost"
               | 
               | I rock an iphone because the SE is cheap and the camera
               | is good, if I cared about privacy I wouldn't have a phone
               | with always on microphones and cameras...
               | 
               | NSO group's Pegasus was cross-platform, so as far as I'm
               | concerned the security point is moot, people buy iphones
               | and androids for various reasons, and it's easier to
               | judge someone's "upmarketness" by the stickerprice of
               | their flagship, not the OS it runs...
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | HDR10 is the crap Samsung invented, which just extends
               | 8-bit colour to 10-bit colour (from 256 shades of
               | intensity to 1024). This is _not enough_ to display
               | smooth gradients when going from the blackest blacks to
               | the brightest whites that a high-dynamic range (HDR)
               | screen is capable of. Hence, it causes visible banding,
               | especially in  "blue skies" or similar smooth areas of
               | slowly changing colour.
               | 
               | Samsung worked around this by applying a post-processing
               | filter that smooths out the banding... sometimes. It also
               | almost always smooths away fine detail, ruining the 4K
               | details. (Similarly, their 8K screens appear _less
               | detailed_ than some 4K screens for other but equally
               | silly reasons.)
               | 
               | Dolby Vision uses a more optimal allocation of signal
               | "bits" to the spectrum of colours and intensities visible
               | to the human eye. The ideal is that each colour and each
               | shade would be perfectly evenly distributed, so that
               | "512" would be exactly half as _perceptually_ bright as
               | "1024", etc... The Dolby Vision encoding does this very
               | nearly perfectly, eliminating visible banding without
               | having to hide them by smudging the decoded picture. This
               | optimal colour-volume encoding also means that transforms
               | like scaling or brightness changes don't introduce
               | colour-shifts or relative brightness shifts.
               | 
               | If you've never seen a DV video taken with an iPhone Pro
               | 13 displayed on its OLED, you just don't know what you're
               | missing. Go to an Apple store and play with one for a few
               | minutes.
               | 
               | But seriously, companies like Samsung like to shave 50
               | cents off their flagship products by not paying DV their
               | licensing fees. They figure that cutting corners like
               | this doesn't matter, because most customers have no taste
               | in image quality anyway, and just want BRIGHTER! COLORS!
               | and nothing else.
               | 
               | They're right.
               | 
               | You don't care, and you're happy to save 50c on a $10K
               | television or a $1K mobile phone.
        
               | fomine3 wrote:
               | Don't group $50 device and $2000 device as "Android".
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | You can buy a $2000 Android loaded with crapware.
        
               | AnyTimeTraveler wrote:
               | You can also buy a $50 Android without.
               | 
               | What's your point?
        
             | musicale wrote:
             | > Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by
             | typical people as more tasty than foods without them
             | 
             | Sweet, salty and/or fatty tastes form a pretty solid basis
             | for many delicious snacks/hors d'oeuvres/desserts -
             | highbrow or lowbrow - though I personally like tangy as
             | well as textures like crunchy, creamy, chewy, spongy; and
             | sometimes other tastes like bitter, savory, or piquant as
             | well. These are tastes that humans (and other creatures)
             | have developed and retained over thousands of years.
             | 
             | Omitting sweet/salty/creamy greatly reduces the scope of
             | cuisine.
        
             | RuggedPineapple wrote:
             | Or they just have different tastes then you do, which is a
             | far cry from having 'no taste'. People consistently prefer
             | and rate headphones with more bass as more appealing, for
             | example. That's why consumer brands are bass-heavy. It
             | matches the taste of the market. If you need a flat audio
             | profile where the mids and highs and bass are all at the
             | same level you have to pick up a pair of studio monitors.
        
               | jjeaff wrote:
               | There is nothing wrong when it comes to subjective taste.
               | However I think there is some level of objectivity to
               | many things that can be applied to an extent. For
               | example, if there is so much bass that much of the other
               | frequencies are not audible, then I think it is an
               | objectively bad setup. Or if your food is prepared with
               | so much sugar/salt/fat/seasonings that you can't even
               | taste the main ingredient, then it's objectively not very
               | good (or at the very least, a waste of the main
               | ingredient).
        
               | Ma8ee wrote:
               | > If you need a flat audio profile where the mids and
               | highs and bass are all at the same level you have to pick
               | up a pair of studio monitors.
               | 
               | Which is what many of us do.
        
           | Philip-J-Fry wrote:
           | Gimmicks? Something that a company needs to invent to keep
           | selling new versions of their product.
        
           | Gigachad wrote:
           | For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing.
           | You can even see some of this going on when you open the
           | photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high
           | quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder
           | and the final image.
        
           | formerly_proven wrote:
           | The pendulum seems to be coming back on that one with the
           | "Filmmaker Mode" and all that.
        
         | mc32 wrote:
         | Reality isn't good enough in the time of Instagram.
         | 
         | People want perfect pictures to reflect their mind's eye.
         | 
         | In a way this is the way in for a metaverse. Reality isn't what
         | they seek. They seek an alternate state that is a mix of
         | reality and fantasy.
        
           | ShroudedNight wrote:
           | Hypermediocrity in the flesh. I expect the depressing outcome
           | for most is to discover that despite having traded our flawed
           | execution for that of a computer, most of us can't even
           | conceive of an existence masterful enough to be worthy of
           | accumulating the abnormally high social status we seem wired
           | to crave.
        
         | rimliu wrote:
         | What is "real"? Do you count infrared? Ultraviolet? What if you
         | are color blind? For me photo is how I see it, not some
         | "representation of reality" whatever that reality may be.
        
         | m-p-3 wrote:
         | I'd hate to see a photo altered to the point where it could
         | have a significant outcome in a trial. Imagine if the ML
         | improvement lead to a photo where something shows up that
         | wasn't there or vice-versa.
         | 
         | How can you trust the picture taken if it might not reflect
         | reality?
        
         | thaumasiotes wrote:
         | > how the sky looks clearer than it really did
         | 
         | See also: https://www.axios.com/san-francisco-orange-sky-
         | smartphone-40...
         | 
         | You should be allowed to photograph what reality looks like if
         | you want to.
        
         | SturgeonsLaw wrote:
         | As recently as last night, I was considering selling my DSLR
         | and lenses since the quality of my phone camera is just so
         | good, but this has changed my mind. There is something nice
         | about it taking a shot verbatim and letting me decide how to
         | postprocess the RAW.
         | 
         | Plus I'd only get a few hundred bucks for it, and the tactile
         | pleasure of a big, heavy ka-chink when the shutter button is
         | pressed is worth more than that for me :)
        
         | mrtksn wrote:
         | It simply means that we no longer have measuring instruments
         | who are used to draw accurate representation of the scene but
         | seed samplers who are used to generate a representation of the
         | scene, not necessarily accurately but artistically. Accuracy
         | used to be the metric but someone figured out that most people
         | are not after accuracy.
         | 
         | IMHO it's not fundamentally evil, it's just that it's not the
         | thing we are used to. Wouldn't have caused a confusion if they
         | used some other word instead of photograph.
        
           | user-the-name wrote:
           | Cameras have never, ever been "accurate". It is not
           | technologically possible to create a photograph that is
           | "accurate". Cameras have always made big tradeoffs to output
           | something that actually looks good to humans.
        
             | ixfo wrote:
             | Well, no, it's not _perfectly_ possible to recreate a
             | singular human vision system and capture and reproduce
             | imagery to match that.
             | 
             | But actually, we have lots of excellent, well-researched
             | and proven standards for accuracy in imaging. Cameras
             | generally target those standards, certainly professional
             | ones. Many cameras - quite clearly - can produce very
             | accurate photographs.
             | 
             | The more worrying trend is that of pervasive post-
             | processing, where we depart from reality and entertain
             | aesthetics.
        
               | user-the-name wrote:
               | > Well, no, it's not perfectly possible to recreate a
               | singular human vision system and capture and reproduce
               | imagery to match that
               | 
               | How?
        
             | bigyikes wrote:
             | Sure, but there is a major difference between color
             | correction and, say, replacing a head with a leaf.
             | 
             | Historically cameras have merely altered the style of
             | images. These days smartphone cameras are altering the
             | _content_ of images.
        
               | mr_toad wrote:
               | Most modern cameras have noise reduction, stabilisation,
               | the ability to combine multiple exposures and track
               | moving targets. They might not push the envelope as much
               | as a cellphone, but they're only a few years behind.
        
         | Zak wrote:
         | For most phones, there's the possibility of using a third-party
         | camera app with less automation, and even capturing in a raw
         | format (almost always dng). Open Camera for Android is an open
         | source option.
         | 
         | Of course getting good results with this approach requires the
         | user to have more knowledge of and practice at photography.
         | 
         | https://opencamera.org.uk/index.html
        
         | mynameisash wrote:
         | Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month
         | ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There
         | must have been some filter on by default because our faces
         | looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no
         | smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked
         | immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that --
         | it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us.
         | 
         | I similarly have mixed feelings about what I've seen lately of
         | the deep learning that 'restores' very old images to incredible
         | quality. But that quality is fake. I'm sure there's a tug at
         | the heartstrings to see a crisp image of your deceased father
         | from his high school days, but to me that seems a bit
         | revisionist. I don't know. I guess I'm just uneasy with the
         | idea of us editing our lives so readily.
        
           | lathiat wrote:
           | Lots of phones have a selfie beautification mode now.
           | 
           | Even Apple had appeared to add one in the iPhone XS/iOS12 but
           | was apparently an issue with Smart HDR and was rolled back.
           | But many Android phones advertise it as a feature and it's
           | something many filters etc do.
           | 
           | It's also possible some HDR type functionality causes this on
           | other implementations.
        
           | hazza_n_dazza wrote:
           | my kid brought home a picture of them taken at school by the
           | school. It didn't look like her. the shiny smiley filters
           | were not real happiness. cameras replacing happiness that is
           | there with happiness that isnt there is quite a delusion.
        
           | eclipxe wrote:
           | Are you sure it was a filter or just a lower-quality front
           | facing camera that didn't capture details in low light like
           | blemishes and smile lines? In an effort to reduce noise,
           | sometimes a camera over-smoothes the image - not as a way to
           | make your imperfections disappear, but to make the noise from
           | the high ISO shot disappear.
        
             | jeroenhd wrote:
             | My phone has a button in the camera app labeled "AI" and it
             | does exactly this. Even in low light conditions you can see
             | the differences between denoised and smoothed skin.
             | 
             | It's also clearly optimized for Chinese faces, which makes
             | for some comedic side effects sometimes when it tries to
             | apply what seems to be the beauty standard in China to my
             | very much non-Asian face structure.
             | 
             | Sadly, there's no differentiation between the stupid face
             | filter and the landscape-fixing AI. I like the AI
             | processing for a lot of static scenes where there are no
             | people around, because the small camera sensor simply can't
             | catch the necessary details, but I always forget to turn it
             | on because of the stupid face filter that comes with it.
        
           | travisgriggs wrote:
           | First we have the uncanny effect from trying to imitate real
           | life too much. It will be interesting if the effect shows up
           | on the other side of modifying away from real life imagery as
           | well.
        
           | noizejoy wrote:
           | To be fair, human memory also liberally edits.
           | 
           | And historical representations also undergo changes, like the
           | colour fading on old pictures, paintings and statues. And
           | that's in addition to all of the issues in capturing accurate
           | colours and other details in the first place. Add a bit of
           | optical illusion to at least some imagery and the entire
           | question of historical accuracy becomes very messy very fast.
           | 
           | A prime example is astro-photography, where most of the well
           | known imagery isn't and may never be seen like that by even
           | future evolved human eyes.
           | 
           | Photos are limited representations, just like they've always
           | been.
           | 
           | But it's understandable, that different individuals would
           | prefer differently prioritized representations. And maybe
           | that's the next generation of tools. Give more choice, more
           | facial wrinkles or fewer. More lighting and colour
           | enhancements or less. etc.
        
           | madeofpalk wrote:
           | I'm curious what model phone you have. _In the past_ Samsung,
           | Google Pixel, and Apple phones all had their own approaches
           | to computational photography and would all take photos in
           | their own  "style". Samsung would priories for vibrancy and
           | clear faces, Apple would try for "most correct" but often got
           | quite flat photos, and the Pixel managed to do with a
           | middleground.
        
           | tobyjsullivan wrote:
           | This brings new meaning to the old quote, "history is written
           | by victors." Today, the victors are Apple, Google, etc., and
           | they are writing their own version of history as its
           | recorded...
        
             | hughrr wrote:
             | Nope. Give me a 40 year old East German camera and a roll
             | of Ilford and I'm still perfectly capable of corrupting
             | reality intentionally.
        
             | mc32 wrote:
             | They are the means, but the "victors" are people's vanity.
             | If people didn't want blemish free pictures, they wouldn't
             | be offered --but airbrushing was a thing and old fashioned
             | paintings also tended to skip the blemishes --unlike
             | mirrors. So, today, this continues albeit more perfect and
             | automated for our consumption.
        
               | noizejoy wrote:
               | Bad vision airbrushes even mirrors. :-)
        
       | mitchcohentoo wrote:
       | Mystery solved!
       | https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026
        
       | space_rock wrote:
       | So now we can't trust our photos to be fake? Let's get rid of the
       | ML. Optional post processing only. This is why an iPhone photo
       | won't be able to be used in court
        
       | gfykvfyxgc wrote:
       | Apple would tell you this is actually the photo you wanted to
       | take.
        
       | literallyaduck wrote:
       | Remember the Rittenhouse trial and the big to do about the video
       | being enhanced when zoomed? Digital evidence and photos are
       | suspicious for the purpose of evidence. Not commenting on the
       | results of the trial.
       | 
       | Sidebar not specific to that trial, slow motion, and slowed video
       | shouldn't be shown to jurors because it creates the illusion of
       | having more time to think. Everything in real life happens at one
       | speed, you can't back it up, slow it down, or armchair qb it then
       | decide if an action was appropriate.
        
         | mikewhy wrote:
         | > the Rittenhouse trial and the big to do about the video being
         | enhanced when zoomed
         | 
         | I keep thinking about this, and was already when the case was
         | going on. If linear interpolated zoom isn't allowed, no iPhone
         | photo after a certain time should be.
        
           | mateo1 wrote:
           | Well, it appears that we are rapidly approaching the point in
           | time when these companies are no longer going to be able to
           | deceive consumers like this. After that there will be an off
           | button and perhaps legally mandated metadata, although I'm
           | sure forensics people can already tell when AI trickery has
           | been applied.
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | _If linear interpolated zoom isn 't allowed..._
           | 
           | Think about analog/optical/chemical photography. In the old
           | days did juries look at camera negatives with a loupe? Of
           | course not, they looked at enlargements. What "algorithm"
           | does an optical enlarger use?
        
             | tagoregrtst wrote:
             | Continuously linear implemented with an analog device vs
             | digital "linear" (ie, watch your floats! Take care of
             | quanization error! Have you kept the colors separated
             | according to the Beyer pattern?).
             | 
             | No one has a problem with a mathematically perfect linear
             | transformation, and film enlargers come very close to that
             | ideal (yes they distort, but in a very obvious way and by
             | degrading detail not adding detail that isn't there)
             | 
             | The analog picture is much harder doctor. More gracious
             | artifacts in blow up (grains are random, versus sharp
             | grid). Much more detail is recorded (by virtue of the size
             | of the sensor and therefore the diffraction limit. Sensor
             | resolution is not too useful).
        
               | sudosysgen wrote:
               | Film development is actually VERY, VERY far from linear.
               | 
               | Because of film grain, it's not continuous either, but
               | actually discrete too.
        
               | tagoregrtst wrote:
               | Film development is very non linear in the exposure (call
               | it z dimension), not in the dimension (x and y). That is
               | to say it might exaggerate or diminish a gradient that
               | was already there but not create one from nothing.
               | 
               | The grain is random size and randomly distributed which
               | cancels out a lot of the effects of discritzation (eg you
               | wont get patterns due nyquist sampling error).
        
               | sudosysgen wrote:
               | It's non linear in the X and y dimension because of
               | grain.
               | 
               | Any camera with a good antialiasing filter will also have
               | little to no discretisation error.
        
               | tagoregrtst wrote:
               | Its non linear because enlarger optics are non linear.
               | 
               | The image of a digital or a film photo is a mosaic. This
               | mosaic can be mathematically enlarged into a large
               | mosaic. If you enlarge far enough you'll see the
               | individual tiles. This is a linear operation no matter
               | the shape of the tile.
               | 
               | Digital photos do not, however, just make the tiles
               | larger. They could but its not done.
               | 
               | Even before enlarging, they interpolate between tiles to
               | recover color (each pixel in the sensor is
               | monochromatic).
               | 
               | When a picture is displayed, the screen resolution is not
               | that of the photo, so an algorithm has to fit one grid
               | into another. And this is before going into superesoltion
               | techniques.
               | 
               | But _none_ of this would matter if we had a standard,
               | open source, way to utilize digital photos in court.
               | Until then Mr. lawyer can get himself an expert to
               | testify to the validity of each and every still he wants
               | to show the court.
        
               | dagmx wrote:
               | Film development is actually quite a bit more subjective.
               | There's a much larger variance in film type, and the
               | chemical process.
               | 
               | Perhaps it's harder to doctor, but it's also not
               | necessarily truer either.
               | 
               | With regards to sensor size and detail recorded...well
               | that depends. Are you assuming 35mm sensors? Because
               | people shot 8mm and 16mm too back in the day. That's not
               | far off from smaller sensors today. Are we also
               | accounting for film sensitivity? Because digital sensors
               | have far eclipsed the sensitivity range of most common
               | film types now, so would be more likely to resolve image
               | data.
               | 
               | It's not so cut and dry.
        
               | tagoregrtst wrote:
               | Sensitivity of digital is amazing. You cant really get
               | past ISO 400 on film without large compromises.
               | 
               | But, as for size, photo cameras sporting film smaller
               | than 35 were rare. Yes Kodak had the advantax (?) system
               | and some other weird cameras here and there, but the vast
               | majority of consumer pictures were taken on 35mm.
               | 
               | As to the subjectivity of film, as I mentioned in the
               | other post, most of the subjectivity came from what I
               | called the "z" dimension, i.e exposure. There was little
               | subjectivity about the enlargement itself.
               | 
               | That is to say, the subjectivity was largely limited to
               | the contrast and brightness sliders of today. Anything
               | else is far more difficult to do with film.
               | 
               | There is another advantage for digital, cost. Video was
               | much more rare with film, and the video we're talking
               | about certainly would not exist.
               | 
               | But I think that's the greatest advantage of film - it
               | contains within it an inherent protection of the public's
               | privacy completely absent in our society today
        
               | djrogers wrote:
               | > But, as for size, photo cameras sporting film smaller
               | than 35 were rare.
               | 
               | Strong disagree here. 126 film is what brought color
               | photography to the mass market, and others like the Kodak
               | Disc were wildly popular among point-n-shoot users.
               | 
               | 35mm was standard for pro photogs, but consumers went for
               | convenience.
        
               | djrogers wrote:
               | I should also point out that while 126 popularized color
               | photography, a decade later 110 came along and largely
               | dominated consumer photography until the digital
               | revolution.
        
               | tagoregrtst wrote:
               | 126? 110 (other comment)? By that token betamax was a
               | successful format in 1975 before VHS launched.
               | 
               | 35mm was the top selling film since the 1960s until
               | digital took over.
               | 
               | You went to any drugstore and you found 35mm. Maybe a box
               | or two of APS. Maybe some medium format. But you could
               | find 35mm in every drugstore, gas station, street vendor
               | in a tourist trap without fail.
               | 
               | Professionals used 35mm because it was snaller than MF
               | and for many things good enough. Otherwise it was
               | considered consumer grade.
        
               | dagmx wrote:
               | Specifically, this thread originated with the Kyle
               | Rittenhouse trial which would be video. So for the
               | average person, it would be 8/16mm.
               | 
               | Even for stills, 110/126 was very common.
               | 
               | As for your last point, it only ensured privacy from the
               | poor. Privacy was always invaded by those with means like
               | paparazzi.
               | 
               | There's also the flip side that the prevalence of digital
               | has let people capture pivotal moments they wouldn't have
               | been able to otherwise, including generation defining
               | moments like the murder of George Floyd.
        
               | tagoregrtst wrote:
               | Privacy for the poor, not from. Paparazzi have never been
               | outside my door. They were taking pictures of rich people
               | for gossip mags (ie poor consumers).
               | 
               | Now we spy on poor people, use AI to analyze the photos
               | at scale, while the rich got anti-paparazzi laws put in
               | places like EU and CA.
               | 
               | In this context, the Rittenhouse video would not exist
               | and it would be better if it didn't. The prosecution,
               | arguably, should get disbarred for the shenanigans they
               | pulled (no discovery and dumping it in the last moment,
               | giving a modified version, lying about the provenance).
               | 
               | As to George Floyd, cameras have done much more to erode
               | our civil liberties than they have put bad cops away.
        
         | boublepop wrote:
         | I think it's ok to select jurors based some basic abilities. I
         | don't know if this considered discrimination based on IQ in the
         | US. But if a grown person has the mind of a 5year old or
         | doesn't know how to walk up stairs I think it's fair to say
         | "you shouldn't be in a jury". Likewise if a person doesn't
         | understand the concept of zooming an image or slow motion, then
         | I think it's quite fair to exclude them from jury duty.
        
           | literallyaduck wrote:
           | Understand concepts and removing bias are totally different.
           | 
           | Consider:
           | 
           | https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-slow-
           | mo...
           | 
           | https://law.temple.edu/aer/2021/02/08/selectively-
           | trusting-s...
           | 
           | It is also clear that digital photography from phones is far
           | from an accurate representation of events.
        
       | aimor wrote:
       | I had a problem where letting iPhones automatically touch up
       | portraits taken on a dedicated camera would result in black blobs
       | being inserted over the whites of the subject's eyes. That's just
       | to say that these problems are common and to watch out for it on
       | your own photos. When you know it can happen in subtle ways
       | you'll pay more attention and you'll start to see big errors in
       | images you thought were fine at first glance.
        
       | iandanforth wrote:
       | Three dots instead of four.
        
       | alboy wrote:
       | I take it the processing model was trained on a dataset of
       | Magritte's paintings?
        
       | bitwize wrote:
       | My guess is this is some sort of AI driven compression. The
       | compressor presented the neural network with images of the
       | woman's head and some background leaves and said: "Corporate
       | needs you to tell the difference between these two pictures." The
       | neural network happily replied, "They're the same picture". And
       | so the compressor discarded the woman's head from the data and
       | replaced it with the leaves, which have unerringly been found to
       | be equivalent.
        
       | cdaringe wrote:
       | Man takes photo of leaf, surprised to see leaf in photo
        
       | avrionov wrote:
       | I've been thinking a lot about this recently. The mobile phones
       | photography went in a direction which makes the mobile
       | photography quite questionable. ML algorithms can't be tested
       | completely, there are going to be many corner cases where results
       | like the above will be produced. The algorithms are trying to
       | compensate for the limitations of the small sensors, limited
       | lenses and the hands movement, but we end up getting images that
       | are completely artificial in many cases. Multiple images are
       | combined with data which just made up by the ML models.
       | 
       | Better hardware (sensors) could solve some of this I hope.
        
       | rurp wrote:
       | I recently got a Pixel and was disappointed to see that the stock
       | camera app has no way to control the focus manually. I guess
       | Google is so impressed with their post-processing they think
       | users won't need any control.
       | 
       | Turns out, their software isn't that great at focusing in many of
       | the photos I take, so I need a different camera app. My only
       | requirements are: 1. Manual focus 2. Wide angle lens support
       | 
       | I thought a replacement would be trivial to find but I've tried a
       | bunch of apps at this point and haven't found a single one that
       | checks both boxes.
       | 
       | Can anyone recommend a basic android camera? Preferably one that
       | doesn't distort the world too much or replace faces with leaves.
       | 
       | I've been using Open Camera which is pretty great, but doesn't
       | support wide angle lens shots as far as I can tell.
        
         | lucb1e wrote:
         | > Can anyone recommend a basic android camera? Preferably one
         | that doesn't distort the world too much or replace faces with
         | leaves.
         | 
         | Everyone's been complaining about the Fairphone not doing
         | enough image processing and giving you basically the raw sensor
         | output, making the pictures look bland compared to bigger-brand
         | phones with worse sensors. So there's that option if you want a
         | true-to-sensor picture and they also have a great open source
         | community so you can also know what effects the camera app is
         | applying.
         | 
         | Or install an open source camera on any android and at least
         | that aspect of the picture-taking chain is covered.
         | 
         | If you want a terrible UX experience but reasonable amount of
         | features, there's Open Camera: https://opencamera.org.uk/ |
         | https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/
         | 
         | If you prefer better UX with just basic features (point and
         | shoot, no knobs to turn), Simple Mobile Tools has an app for
         | that: http://simplemobiletools.com/ |
         | https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.camera...
        
         | Zak wrote:
         | Does Open Camera not show the switch multi-camera button on
         | your phone? From https://opencamera.org.uk/help.html
         | 
         |  _Switch multi-camera icon - This icon only shows on devices
         | with more than one front and /or back cameras, and allows you
         | to switch between those cameras. For example, a device might
         | have two back cameras, one standard and one ultra-wide, this
         | icon will switch between the standard and ultra-wide camera. If
         | Settings/On screen GUI/"Multiple cameras icon" is disabled,
         | then this icon will not show; instead the "Switch camera" icon
         | can by used to cycle through all the cameras. Note that some
         | devices do not allow third party applications to access their
         | multiple cameras, in which case Open Camera isn't able to use
         | them._
        
           | user_7832 wrote:
           | Not the person you were replying to but I also have a Pixel 5
           | (still on Android 11). I didn't realize it until the previous
           | comment but I also cannot access the wide angle camera. The
           | button simply doesn't exist. Other 3rd party apps like
           | Lightroom also couldn't find the 2nd camera. But a gcam mod
           | finds it unsurprisingly.
           | 
           | To answer op's grievance though the wide angle is fixed
           | focus, so they could use gcam for the wide angle and open
           | camera for the regular lens.
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | Filmic pro is pretty good and supports manual focus and
         | selecting which camera to use
        
         | TedShiller wrote:
         | > Can anyone recommend a basic android camera?
         | 
         | I can't, unfortunately
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | I wouldn't completely exclude the possibility that a random bit
       | flip caused the ML processing to go haywire.
        
         | 1_player wrote:
         | The probability of a bit flip enabling the leaf-replacer logic
         | instead of causing a weird heisenbug and just crashing the
         | camera app is astronomically low.
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | Just crashing the camera app won't end up on Twitter and HN
           | though.
        
           | DSMan195276 wrote:
           | Yeah but how many iPhone pictures are taken every day?
           | 
           | I'm not saying I'm convinced, but even something with
           | 1/1,000,000,000 odds isn't really out of the question for an
           | action that must happen at least millions of times a day.
        
             | 1_player wrote:
             | Your probability estimate is off by a dozen orders of
             | magnitude. As a back of the napkin estimate, an iPhone with
             | 8GB has 64 billion bits that can be flipped. One bit flip
             | per week per user would already be extremely bad, as it
             | would mean on average one random crash or case of data
             | corruption per week.
             | 
             | If you suppose the bit flip happens in the CPU registers,
             | the number of state changes on a modern CPU is so
             | incredibly huge that a random bit flip doesn't just cause a
             | memory load from a wrong address or a crash is, again, much
             | less probable than 1/1e9 odds, by a lot.
             | 
             | And as explained in my other comment, you'd have to show
             | that this behaviour can be expressed in one bit. Is there a
             | bit anywhere in the iOS hardware and software that by
             | changing from 0 to 1 can run a code path that replaces your
             | face with a leaf? I doubt that.
             | 
             | I stand by Occam's razor. This happens because it's a bug
             | introduced by its programmers rather than a random gamma
             | ray that turned a bit to 1.
        
               | dannyw wrote:
               | also most cpus have ecc on registers.
        
               | 1_player wrote:
               | I didn't know that, but it makes a lot of sense.
        
           | Gigachad wrote:
           | There are billions of iphone users taking photos every day.
           | Astronomically rare things happen regularly.
        
             | 1_player wrote:
             | Yes, bit flips are quite rare already, in the grand scale
             | of things. So a bit flip that causes that specific
             | behaviour is exponentially rarer.
             | 
             | And you have to prove that there actually is one bit that,
             | when changed, causes faces to be replaced by background
             | objects, in this case leaves.
        
       | vorpalhex wrote:
       | Is it possible to opt in to this feature? I would love it if any
       | unauthorized photos of me had me replaced with background
       | scenery.
        
         | NavinF wrote:
         | Sounds like you need to watch the White Christmas episode of
         | Black Mirror.
        
       | davidhariri wrote:
       | This title should be updated. The author has since figured out
       | that it was in fact a leaf obstructing the person's face.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | dt2m wrote:
       | I've noticed some sort of image post-processing on the newer
       | iPhones that removes noise and graininess, and instead adds this
       | fake smoothness to all pictures. Haven't found a way to disable
       | it, save for shooting in RAW, which is impractical due to file
       | size.
       | 
       | Really disappointed that this seems to be a forced setting.
        
         | jcun4128 wrote:
         | I have a cheaper phone that has this, makes your face look
         | weird, it's too smooth
         | 
         | LG Stylo 6 has "AI cam"
        
         | berkut wrote:
         | I've had this (very agressive de-noising I think it is - it's
         | at least almost identical) since I got my iPhone 6S in 2015:
         | basically if you look at 1:1 (i.e. on a computer, as opposed to
         | the small screen of the phone), it almost looks like a
         | watercolour painting, due to how agressive it is.
         | 
         | You can pretty much see it in almost all iPhone camera review
         | sample images (and that of phones from other manufacturers).
         | 
         | Even in photos taken in direct bright sunlight!
         | 
         | I imagine it has an added side 'benefit' (due to the lack of
         | noise/grain) of decreasing the images' sizes after compression.
        
           | dannyw wrote:
           | That's exactly why I switched to a Pixel.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | rubatuga wrote:
         | I sometimes use the NightCap app for photos, and it doesn't
         | have that AI bullshit.
        
       | ezconnect wrote:
       | This is worse than the Huawei moon scandal.
        
       | warning26 wrote:
       | Maybe the person really _is_ leaves, and we 're all just blind to
       | the truth
        
         | ineedasername wrote:
         | Just like the fnords.
        
         | Lamad123 wrote:
         | agree
        
       | pvaldes wrote:
       | <code for turning more people into sleaves of the iphone starts
       | here...>
        
       | resters wrote:
       | It was actually a leaf from a foreground tree, not an image
       | processing artifact:
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026
        
       | dqpb wrote:
        
       | fxtentacle wrote:
       | That looks to me like they are using deep learning with CNN for
       | denoising. NVIDIA OptiX can produce similar artifacts.
       | 
       | However, it appears they forgot to add a loss term to penalize if
       | the source and the denoised result image turn out too different.
       | NVIDIA's denoiser has user-configurable parameters for this
       | trade-off.
        
         | ladberg wrote:
         | I think it would be impossible to train the model in the first
         | place without that loss term.
        
       | osivertsson wrote:
       | I sometimes hang out on mountainbike forums.
       | 
       | A user posts that despite a new chain and setting up their rear
       | derailleur according to instructions gear-changes are clunky or
       | the chain skips when applying power on the pedals.
       | 
       | The usual reply from the forum members is then to send a photo of
       | the cassette since excessive wear there leads to these problems.
       | 
       | This used to clearly show that the user needed to replace their
       | worn cassette too.
       | 
       | Lately these photos of cassettes can look all mangled. Like ML
       | tried to "enhance" mountains or the back of an alligator or some
       | other structure from nature on to the cassette.
       | 
       | This has to be a problem in all sorts of technical trouble-
       | shooting.
        
         | PragmaticPulp wrote:
         | I had a 12-speed cassette nearby so I photographed it several
         | times (iPhone) and I can't see any problems.
         | 
         | Is it possible you're seeing compression artifacts from the
         | forum software? Do you have an example?
        
         | internet2000 wrote:
         | Focusing on the wrong thing? That's not a ML issue.
        
         | mc32 wrote:
         | They need to offer an option for a "raw" image as they used to
         | be called --which were minimally processed and were not
         | compressed.
        
           | CarVac wrote:
           | The problem with phone raws is that either:
           | 
           | 1. They're not raw, they're aligned and merged and denoised
           | and sharpened just like this iPhone photo (they're just
           | linear so you can adjust white balance and recover shadows,
           | working with them the way you could a real raw file)
           | 
           | or
           | 
           | 2. They look like total garbage, noisy as heck and horribly
           | soft, because the sensors are tiny and the lenses are
           | simultaneously limited by diffraction and refractive error.
        
             | kevincox wrote:
             | The raw mode for these wouldn't be a single image. It would
             | be a video with lots of low-quality frames. Then your "raw
             | processing" would be deciding how to align and Marge the
             | frames, which to drop...
             | 
             | I think the idea that raw is a 2d array of pixels is
             | outdated by the way modern cameras, especially smartphone
             | cameras work.
        
             | maxerickson wrote:
             | They just need to offer an option without aggressive
             | processing, they don't need to try to make it competitive
             | with dedicated cameras.
        
           | Razengan wrote:
           | iOS does
        
             | jakear wrote:
             | How do I get this? Sick of seeing oversaturated landscapes.
             | Edit: why is this downvoted? honest question... I'm on iOS
             | and didn't see anything in settings.
        
               | mc32 wrote:
               | Some models of iPhones the "PROs"[1] support something
               | they call "Pro Raw" which isn't actual RAW images: "Apple
               | ProRAW combines the information of a standard RAW format
               | along with iPhone image processing, which gives you more
               | flexibility when editing the exposure, color, and white
               | balance in your photo."
               | 
               | So it's better than JPEG but not as good as RAW.
               | 
               | Anyhow apparently Apple supports quasi raw at the system
               | level but doesn't always get exposed to the user. but 3rd
               | part apps can take advantage of this even for non "PRO"
               | Apple telephones.
               | 
               | [1]https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
        
               | gnicholas wrote:
               | Lots of details here. [1] Basically, things changed when
               | Apple released the iPhone 12. Earlier phones have regular
               | RAW, and later phones have ProRAW, which is processed. It
               | sounds like you can still get access to the regular RAW
               | files on newer phones, but it's not simple.
               | 
               | 1: https://nocamerabag.com/blog/shoot-raw-iphone
        
               | jagger27 wrote:
               | If you're serious about photography on iPhone you should
               | get Halide.
        
           | hu3 wrote:
           | Android does
        
         | wrboyce wrote:
         | I'd be curious to see this, could you link to some examples?
         | Cheers.
        
       | hughrr wrote:
       | Well it's in telephoto and 1/121 exposure so the photographer was
       | probably wobbling around like mad when it was taken and the
       | overlay and computational image stuff got confused.
       | 
       | I'm fine with this. I use a mini tripod with my 13 pro on
       | telephoto. Back in the old days this would just look like ass
       | instead.
        
         | Dah00n wrote:
         | I would rate any camera that does this as 1/100. It cannot
         | possibly be a worse camera. How anyone that have an interest in
         | photography can see swapping a head with a leaf as just fine is
         | beyond me. It's no better than using Snapchat like filters and
         | calling it raw. It's is utterly broken and should be removed
         | ASAP from all iPhones.
        
           | dntrkv wrote:
           | Are you suggesting that if you have a product that performs
           | better than the previous version 99.999999% of the time, but
           | that 0.000001% of the time it performs terribly, in your
           | opinion, the new version is worse?
        
           | hughrr wrote:
           | I've taken about 8000 photos from iPhone 6 to 13pro and
           | sifted through them all manually within a day or so of taking
           | them and haven't seen any anomalous things yet.
           | 
           | The error margin is tiny and the benefits to the output are
           | huge. My brain has more trouble accurately portraying things.
           | This is not much of a problem.
           | 
           | Reality is really transient and inconsistent anyway.
        
         | jlnthws wrote:
         | Yes that's the correct explanation: 1/120 speed for 220mm focal
         | length equivalent is far too slow, at least 1 EV. The
         | stabilization is probably not on par with big pro lenses and
         | SLR so you might offset 1 more EV. Now the way the AI is fixing
         | this seems obviously wrong but it's "best effort". I'm guessing
         | it has taken several pictures and merged them. This can't be
         | right 100% of the time. Maybe they should add a "no smart self-
         | similarity merges" option, I would use it most of the time.
        
       | root_axis wrote:
       | Why does everyone automatically assume this explanation is
       | correct? Based on the photo, it looks to me like a real leaf in
       | the foreground, probably having fallen at the perfect time to
       | create this photo. I would be curious to hear Apple's explanation
       | on this...
        
         | vmception wrote:
         | > Why does everyone automatically assume this explanation is
         | correct?
         | 
         | because they want to. thats how the internet works right now,
         | it mirrors your greatest gripe or nightmare, which is exactly
         | when you should have the most skepticism.
        
           | krapp wrote:
           | Except the leaf isn't so close to the foreground that it
           | completely obscures the person's head, and there is clearly
           | other distortion/artifacting in the image. Something more
           | than that is going on.
           | 
           | Useful skepticism actually takes evidence into account,
           | rather than dismissing claims at a glance, or because "thats
           | how the internet works right now."
        
             | vmception wrote:
             | https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026
        
               | krapp wrote:
               | Yep, fair enough I have to eat those words.
               | 
               | Although to be fair(er), people didn't believe otherwise
               | because, as you insisted, they were buying mindlessly
               | into some internet hype/rage generator "mirroring their
               | latest gripe or nightmare." The original photo did look
               | odd and it generated a lot of interesting discussion.
               | Honestly, it still does to me.
               | 
               | While that reasoning was (kind of) correct (the leaf
               | didn't fall at just the right time, it was attached to a
               | branch,) both you and root_axis above assumed people were
               | being driven by stupidity rather than curiosity, which is
               | still an attitude we could use a lot less of.
        
               | vmception wrote:
               | If it must be said, I do think there is some merit to
               | what you are saying.
               | 
               | Now for my defensive response: stupidity of the
               | respondents isn't my assumption, its their lack of
               | considering other possibilities. user error of OP and the
               | assumption OP went with does verge more closely towards
               | something I would call stupid. but these are your words,
               | I'm saying it was an obvious circumstance to ignore the
               | crowd specifically because of internet crowd trends. And
               | unsurprisingly to me, in hindsight, that turned out to be
               | correct. The internet mirrors the desired predisposition
               | because people troll, a lot.
        
       | emerged wrote:
       | Well to be fair, its incredible how far head to leaf technology
       | has come.
        
       | omk wrote:
       | Few things seem to be at play here.
       | 
       | 1. iPhone uses face tracking to adjust focus on subject's face
       | 
       | 2. Same face detection can end up detecting faces in arbitrary
       | objects. Very common occurring. Here the leaf.
       | 
       | 3. iPhone uses multiple lens to compose a single photo. 1 lens
       | focused on the persons face while another with better focus on
       | the face estimated the face to be within the leaves.
       | 
       | 4. The composite photo now has picture of leaf replacing the
       | person's face.
        
       | 01acheru wrote:
       | Heads turn into leaves, windows turn into Ryan Gosling, the power
       | of image post processing using ML.
        
       | chrstphrknwtn wrote:
       | At some point the images from phones are no longer photographs...
       | but some kind of photo-illustration.
       | 
       | Taking landscape shots with new iPhones creates some very intense
       | over-saturation of skies and some general HDR-like balancing
       | (even with HDR setting turned off).
       | 
       | I understand that phone makers want to give people devices that
       | "make the best photos" but it does sometimes feel like the image
       | processing is going to far, and producing a representation of
       | reality that is weirdly unrealistic.
        
       | Jenda_ wrote:
       | So... when are we going to see made up numbers in photographed
       | documents again?
       | https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
       | 
       | Superimposing other's people face onto a photo from a crime
       | scene?
       | 
       | Or, as part of my work, I photograph electric switchboards for
       | documentation and diagnostic purposes. Hopefully I won't get any
       | hallucinated connections, right?
        
       | syntaxing wrote:
       | Wouldn't looking at the RAW give insight on what's happening here
        
         | chrisseaton wrote:
         | The iPhone Camera app doesn't support RAW except on some
         | specific Pro models, and then you have to turn it on - you
         | can't get RAW retroactively.
        
       | xchaotic wrote:
       | This is how it begins - SKYNET
        
       | rbrbr wrote:
        
       | sathishmanohar wrote:
       | She is a ghost! Duh.
        
       | ineedasername wrote:
       | Maybe iPhones are now making aesthetic decisions? _" No, that
       | person's face... Well, let's just cover it with a leaf."_
       | 
       | It puts the censorship of Renaissance paintings & statues with
       | figleafs over the naughty bits in a new perspective.
        
         | dathinab wrote:
         | Yes they have been doing aesthetic decisions since a while.
         | 
         | What started out with "simple" image stabilizations, noise
         | filtering etc. has long become a pipeline of "apply AI magic
         | onto the image which makes it how people _think_ it should look
         | " (instead of how it actually looks).
         | 
         | Like making the sky much more bluer then it is.
         | 
         | Or edges much sharper then anything such a camera could see (or
         | sometimes especially in combination with digital zoom anything
         | a human with sharp healthy eyes could see).
         | 
         | And in case of image stabilization one thing you tend to turn
         | is to take multiple pictures in a row and interpolate. Like
         | some pictures with leafs "besides" the head and some with them
         | behind the head. And then "magic" the head becomes the leaf.
        
       | yuvalkarmi wrote:
       | Plot twist: this person actually has a leaf for a head
        
       | GoToRO wrote:
       | Impossible to take photo of stars on iphone. Whatever sw they
       | use, it will create random stars in the photo. Like instead of 1
       | star you get ten.
        
       | anonnyj wrote:
       | My wife's phone produced some odd results. We went out shooting
       | Christmas decorations around town at night... The next day when
       | we were looking at them they appeared very much like daytime
       | photos. WTH
        
         | mr_toad wrote:
         | The phone will take a lot of shots at different exposure levels
         | and combine them. It lets you take shots at night without
         | having lights overexposed and the background underexposed.
        
       | bereasonable wrote:
       | He posted an update. It was a leaf on a tree in front of the
       | woman and it obscured her face.
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026
        
       | RicoElectrico wrote:
       | Block matching is a somewhat popular noise removal technique
       | predating neural networks.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block-matching_and_3D_filterin...
        
       | danShumway wrote:
       | Before we criticize, before jumping to conclusions -- I just want
       | to point out, it is a _great_ leaf. Are we certain that the
       | camera 's decision was wrong?
       | 
       | I mean, maybe we should consider the camera's judgement about
       | what the best picture is. I'm not a photographer, if my camera
       | tells me that my friend's head is best represented as a
       | combination of sticks, leaves, and other natural objects, who am
       | I to argue with that? I haven't been to photography college.
       | 
       | This is a darn good picture of a leaf person.
        
         | lkois wrote:
         | I also don't quite understand the leap to controversy, which
         | seems to rest on the assumption that this person does not have
         | a pile of leaves for a head.
        
           | kingcharles wrote:
           | Right. To me the photo was set up for the retweets and likes.
           | They got their leaf-headed friend to stand in front of some
           | leaves and took a photo. Probably didn't even use an iPhone.
           | This might have been some Samsung psy-op to discredit the
           | iPhone neural processor.
        
             | yoav wrote:
             | I think it's absurd to assume this guy has friends or that
             | there are people with leaves for heads. These are clearly a
             | couple of jackets stuffed with leaves. You don't see the
             | hands or the other friend except a sleeve. This is the same
             | ploy I did many years ago trying to convince the internet I
             | had friends.
        
         | Centmo wrote:
         | Clearly, the ML algorithm had been given the goal of optimizing
         | the happiness of the user. It had ascertained that the user was
         | quite active on social media and had tied a significant amount
         | of their self-worth to the number of likes received from posts
         | and photos. It had correctly calculated that the user would
         | extract more enjoyment from the photo by way of likes if their
         | friend's face were replaced with an arrangement of foliage. The
         | user clearly did not like that friend very much anyway due to
         | the lack of engagement with their posts. Truly impressive
         | technology.
        
       | implying wrote:
       | This reminds me of Huawei camera app detecting pictures of the
       | moon and superimposing a clear stock photo into your picture:
       | https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co...
        
         | Traubenfuchs wrote:
         | That's hilarious. The way AI is developing we are turned into
         | children full of magical thinking like ,,I made a great
         | moonshot with my amazing device!" when it's actually 99% AI
         | handholding.
        
           | therealdrag0 wrote:
           | And I'm going to take thousands of pictures and never look at
           | them.
        
             | feupan wrote:
             | Don't worry I can now sync them to music and have _other_
             | humanoids look at them instead while bored out of their
             | minds.
        
       | Cerium wrote:
       | "Cameras" making changes to the image like this make the
       | discussion about the image processing pipeline during the
       | Rittenhouse trial seem a little less bizarre.
        
         | ___q wrote:
         | Turns out the Camera app did NOT replace this person's head
         | with a leaf
         | https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026
         | 
         | So the discussion about the image processing pipeline during
         | the Rittenhouse trial" is just as bizarre as it was before.
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | Any technically savvy person should be able to differentiate
         | different types of upscaling algorithms.
         | 
         | The judge was arguing about enlarging an already recorded
         | video, not about the merits of the original recording. This
         | post is about image processing during the capture process.
         | 
         | Conflating them is disingenuous, unless we're taking very large
         | leaps of logic
        
           | xdennis wrote:
           | I don't think they're that different. In both cases the frame
           | is already taken and the editing takes place milliseconds
           | after or months after.
           | 
           | Apple could make iPhones work like DSLRs and save both the
           | edited image and the RAW sensor capture.
        
             | dagmx wrote:
             | No they're radically different in effect.
             | 
             | One is the playback of data, the other is the capture of
             | real world signals into data. They may use technologies in
             | the same domains, but the implementation varies
             | dramatically, as do the possibilities..
             | 
             | If you have the recorded data, you can send it to any
             | trusted playback device/software to get back a trusted
             | scaling. You can workaround/bypass any distrust in a given
             | players algorithms, and it's very easily discoverable
             | whether something is applying processing or not. There's
             | still the risk of intentionally faked videos, but the
             | discussion is around real time processing introducing
             | artifacts.
             | 
             | With image capture though, there's no such thing as
             | "truth". Even RAW data isn't truth. It's just less
             | processing, but you can't escape it altogether. Even
             | professional full frame cameras will do significant signal
             | processing between the photosites and the recorded RAW
             | image. The same goes for film.
             | 
             | The only thing a court can do is put a strong guidelines
             | for proving the honesty of the content. you can't disallow
             | processed imagery because all images are processed the
             | second they're recorded.
        
           | max48 wrote:
           | >Any technically savvy person should be able to differentiate
           | different types of upscaling algorithms.
           | 
           | Even the company who makes the software couldn't explain what
           | was done to the picture when their "expert" was asked during
           | the trial. There is a wide range of different methods that
           | can be used to get more details out of a blurry pictures,
           | including ML/AI-based algorithms that are indirectly getting
           | extra details from other pictures.
        
             | dagmx wrote:
             | The device in question was an iPad, the company that made
             | the software (Apple) was not involved, the "expert" was a
             | third party explaining the standard enlargement methods.
             | 
             | https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22778801/kyle-
             | rittenhous...
             | 
             | If the judge mistrusted the enlargement method, he should
             | have ordered them to display it on another device or
             | software.
             | 
             | Real-time video upscaling is very standard filtering that's
             | not introducing extra hallucinated details. At most, some
             | TVs use ML to tune their sharpening and color rendition,
             | but it can always be disabled. The iPad has never been
             | shown or proven to use those for video playback, and even
             | if it did, the courts should have a standard video player
             | to present details with standard filtering.
             | 
             | The judges non-technical stance on things, isn't borne out
             | of reality and again, any capture time post processing
             | should be completely independently viewed from playback
             | time processing.
        
         | Philip-J-Fry wrote:
         | It wasn't really bizarre in the grand scheme of things, but it
         | was a bit of a reach in the context it was questioned in.
        
           | bendbro wrote:
           | It was not. Popular coverage cited the court as debating
           | "iphone pinch and zoom," but in reality, discussion mostly
           | focused on the actual forensic application that was used, and
           | the effect the algorithm that application produced on the
           | output photo. The judge displayed a good understanding of how
           | an algorithm takes as input original pixels and produces new
           | pixels from that. https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/
           | 11/12/22778801/ky...
        
         | tandymodel100 wrote:
         | No, not really
        
           | kahrl wrote:
           | Yes, yes really. When real resolution is being substituted
           | with the best guess of a completely closed source image
           | processor, the court should be made aware of it.
        
             | tandymodel100 wrote:
             | This sounds like a weird rationalization for an absurd case
             | of technical ignorance. Like when people defended nuking
             | hurricanes or using UV lights as a Covid therapy.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | Fact is, you have no idea what kind of unsolicited
               | postprocessing the camera in the Rittenhouse trial might
               | or might not have performed, and neither did the court.
               | 
               | It's a huge potential problem, and getting worse by the
               | day.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | iszomer wrote:
               | Agreed as we've been living in the era of deep fakes for
               | a while. I shudder to think how computational photography
               | can advance to such a degree to blur the context to any
               | unsuspecting user, whether accidental or _intentional_.
        
               | dagmx wrote:
               | Except, specifically to the Rittenhouse trial, it was
               | about playback processing NOT capture time processing.
               | 
               | Capture time processing is also verifiable with regards
               | to what stack a particular device uses with the use of
               | metadata, and as such has little in the way of extra
               | problems over other potential doctored evidence which
               | have been possible for years without smart phone devices.
               | 
               | Do we question what color film would portray an image for
               | example? Is a particular lensing affecting the truth of
               | an image? A specific crop? There's no such thing as a
               | perfectly true photo or video.
        
               | ALittleLight wrote:
               | It's perfectly reasonable to ask what image processing is
               | done to get an enhanced image.
        
               | tagoregrtst wrote:
               | Both sides have a right to question evidence.
               | 
               | Defending the suitability of evidence is the duty of re
               | council who introduced it.
               | 
               | The prosecution couldn't explain how the iPhone zooms and
               | it was on them to do so.
               | 
               | Btw, the prosecution later on were caught tampering with
               | evidence.
        
               | Dah00n wrote:
               | If a camera can replace a head with a leaf nothing taken
               | with that camera can be trusted, especially in court,
               | ever. Any changes to photos or videos should be avoided.
               | This is the norm in court cases. You should read a proper
               | article about it instead of the click baity ones.
        
               | tandymodel100 wrote:
               | This aged poorly
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750660
        
               | kahrl wrote:
               | No it didn't. The point still stands that AI enhanced
               | images have a credibility and admissibility problem. This
               | one example turning out to not have been altered in the
               | way we thought it was by the enhancer doesn't invalidate
               | the broader questions brought forth by the discussion.
        
       | webkike wrote:
       | Kinda looks like a water droplet or something
        
       | alkonaut wrote:
       | Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the
       | past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out
       | unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take
       | some joy in this "no free lunch" demonstration.
       | 
       | If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face
       | detection then it's probably _not_ something you can (or would
       | want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a tiny sensor in
       | something other than great light (even a heavy overcast is often
       | not enough) will require a _lot_ of software processing. I'm not
       | sure exactly what happened here but I'm pretty sure everyone
       | asking for "unmodified raw photos" to be produced don't
       | understand what they are asking for. Those "unmodified" photos
       | would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions.
        
         | johnisgood wrote:
         | I am not sure what you are trying to say here. They definitely
         | did not ask for their face to be replaced by leaves either. Is
         | it either unmodified, or leaves? Is not there a middle ground?
        
           | KarlKemp wrote:
           | This is the "smart HDR" option on an iPhone, described as "In
           | difficult lighting, the best parts of multiple exposures are
           | combined into a single image".
           | 
           | So there is the middle ground of disabling this. Or,
           | alternatively, just not caring about such an error once in a
           | million shots.
           | 
           | (as an aside, I'm pretty sure the structure of the leaves is
           | responsible for this error, as it's an area with usually many
           | strong edges in a somewhat repetitive pattern. That invites
           | misalignments.
        
             | johnisgood wrote:
             | Yeah. If I tap "Selfie" on my stock Android 11, I can see
             | my face being smoothed out. I can tell that it is modified.
             | If I have an issue with it, I can disable it. :)
        
           | alkonaut wrote:
           | They asked for their phone to make a best effort to stack
           | many pictures into one, cleverly aligning objects as well as
           | possible.
           | 
           | And the camera failed. The alternatives would have been an
           | extremely dark picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an
           | extremely blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face.
        
             | johnisgood wrote:
             | > The alternatives would have been an extremely dark
             | picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an extremely
             | blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face.
             | 
             | If that truly is the case, then.. woah. It definitely
             | failed.
        
         | andrewflnr wrote:
         | But it would be nice to be able to re-run that software
         | processing later if you can see it has done something silly,
         | right? That at least seems like a valid use for "unmodified"
         | image data.
        
           | Bilal_io wrote:
           | I believe the Google Camera does this. Not sure if it
           | preserves the original photo before any color corrections,
           | but it allows me to go back and added, remove or change any
           | blur.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch. The quality
         | that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable. And the times it
         | messes up are so rare that it becomes a talking point worthy of
         | hundreds of comments.
        
           | jhgb wrote:
           | > No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch
           | 
           | As in, "Incredibly-cheap-but-sometimes-there's-rat-poop-in-
           | it" lunch?
        
             | evanextreme wrote:
             | no as in, "computational photography has been a staple of
             | every modern smartphone sold globally for the past 4 years,
             | and this is one of the only examples of problems ever
             | happening for anyone" lunch
        
               | Schroedingersat wrote:
               | Problems of changing skin texture or text or body shape
               | or background details abound, but are normally of a form
               | where it's easier to dismiss or gaslight anyone pointing
               | them out.
        
               | jhgb wrote:
               | > one of the only examples of problems ever happening for
               | anyone
               | 
               | Assuming you don't have a sampling error here, of course.
        
           | GenerocUsername wrote:
           | You guys are conflating 'adjusting light levels and sharness'
           | with 'replacing whole objects in one area of scene with other
           | objects from the scene'
           | 
           | I think this particular big demonstrates a massive gap in
           | what people think photoprocessing is, and what it has very
           | recently become
        
             | judge2020 wrote:
             | Simply adjusting light levels and sharpness wouldn't
             | produce this good/clear of a photo in the conditions
             | presented - AI/ML image post-processing is a hard
             | requirement for sensors like these.
        
               | spoonjim wrote:
               | But it's also just weird. That's not my daughter's skin
               | in the photo, it's 1000 other people's skin blended
               | together and textured in.
        
               | vlunkr wrote:
               | Ceci n'est pas une pipe
        
               | foota wrote:
               | That's not necessarily true, I don't know the specifics
               | of how it's implemented but it could just be used for
               | select pixels from different frames in the shot?
        
               | Gigachad wrote:
               | It never has been accurate. Even on dumb traditional
               | cameras, colors are more of an interpretation than a
               | reality.
        
               | johnmaguire wrote:
               | I don't know about this - RAW files are recordings of
               | sensor values. Those sensor values are accurate of what
               | light the sensor measured.
               | 
               | Then the sensor values are converted to a JPEG. So it's
               | still an accurate rendition of the light - even though
               | yes, it is a _rendition_ of the light.
               | 
               | But to completely replace some sensor values with some
               | computer-generated values is a different ballgame, IMO.
               | It's more akin to Photoshop editing, as opposed to
               | Lightroom.
        
               | AuryGlenz wrote:
               | I agree with your point, but just to be clear for people:
               | 
               | When you bring that RAW photo into something like
               | Lightroom or Capture One they're automatically applying a
               | base curve to the photo before you do anything.
               | 
               | In Capture One you can set that to "flat" which I believe
               | is fairly unprocessed, and it takes a lot of work to get
               | it to a usable state from there. They also have other
               | options, and they recently changed their default setting
               | and it's pretty incredible how different it is from their
               | old default.
        
               | tsimionescu wrote:
               | The least that modern phone cameras do is to blend
               | multiple RAW files into a single picture, to improve
               | various metrics. That brings the risk of producing
               | results like the one seen here.
        
               | georgyo wrote:
               | This is really splitting hairs, but even our eyes are
               | interpretation of reality.
               | 
               | The camera sensor does not record the wavelengths of
               | lights it is capturing, only RGB values. We can only
               | reproduce the picture in a way that is convincing to our
               | eyes, not what light what original being captured.
        
               | johnmaguire wrote:
               | Yes, but still, as another poster put it, it's the
               | difference of changing the lighting versus changing the
               | texture pack...
        
               | JKCalhoun wrote:
               | There definitely though is some magic-sauce when de-
               | Bayering [1] the RAW data and then playing games with
               | color spaces and color profiles to end up with that final
               | JPEG.
               | 
               | I agree with your point though. I dislike "computational
               | photography".
               | 
               | [1] guess it is called _demosaicing_
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | There is a difference between getting the colors
               | subjectively wrong and replacing the entire texture of
               | the material
        
               | stinos wrote:
               | They surely are. But not all interpretations are alike. I
               | was recenty looking at (scans of) analog pictures I took
               | years ago using an entry level analog camera and apart
               | from white balance being off, the general skin tone +
               | texture and shadows at least looks very realistic and not
               | like some cardboard version of skin.
        
               | calciphus wrote:
               | I agree - it is getting harder and harder to fully turn
               | off skin smoothing on cellphones and webcam software. You
               | can turn it down, but rarely _off_.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | laurent92 wrote:
               | It's _what you desire your skin to be_.
        
               | spoonjim wrote:
               | That might be good for myself, or if I'm honest even my
               | wife, but my daughter looks perfect to me and I only want
               | to see her in reality.
        
               | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
               | No imaging system reproduces reality. You're always
               | getting a compromised result.
        
               | spoonjim wrote:
               | Yes but the knowledge of how it was created affects how I
               | see it. If it's just denoising etc it feels different
               | than if I know it's painted in some other data.
        
               | johnmaguire wrote:
               | Sure, but altering the hue/saturation/lightness of colors
               | is a little different than replacing a bunch of pixels to
               | achieve a "prettier" result.
        
               | wholinator2 wrote:
               | Yeah, even your eyes don't reproduce reality perfectly
               | but at that point it's just semantics. He means he wants
               | to see his daughter the same way through the camera that
               | he sees her through his eyes, in real life, otherwise
               | known to him as "reality".
               | 
               | I don't think it's unreasonable to allow context of the
               | statement to allow us to disregard "reality" as it
               | pertains to quantum wave functions, in favor of something
               | more human. There's a large difference in something
               | that's goal is to capture what the eye sees and something
               | that's goal isn't. It feels like Apple thinks they know
               | what's better for us than we do, which I admit it's
               | perfectly capable of doing in certain scenarios. But,
               | when Apples thoughts do not align or go directly against
               | our wishes it's uncomfortable, it feels like your
               | "reality" is being ripped from your hands in favor of
               | what some giant corporation thinks your reality should
               | be, for any large number of opaque or intentionally
               | obscured reasons.
        
               | kingcharles wrote:
               | The amount of post-processing your brain does to make you
               | believe you see far more than you actually do in far
               | higher resolution than you do, whilst combining two 2D
               | views into a pseudo-3D view, is incredible.
        
               | kadoban wrote:
               | There's straight-up blank spots in our raw vision, we
               | don't see ~any color at the edges, etc., and that's just
               | the _start_ of what our eyes/brains elide out. Really
               | crazy stuff.
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | That doesn't mean I want a camera to do it. With a bigger
               | sensor I can get a nice crisp image, and that should be
               | the target for what a phone makes.
        
               | shawnz wrote:
               | As far as I understand the goal of using ML augmentation
               | in camera phones is to capture what the eye sees. It's to
               | compensate for the limitations of the hardware which on
               | its own is not able to produce a true-to-eye result. You
               | seem to be implying that the goal is to improve the photo
               | to be better than reality but I don't think that's the
               | case.
        
               | kelnos wrote:
               | Right, but it can only _guess_ at what the eye sees when
               | hardware limitations don 't allow it to capture enough
               | information. Maybe most of the time it guesses right, but
               | it's still a guess, and it appears sometimes it guesses
               | wrong. _Really_ wrong.
        
               | shawnz wrote:
               | If it's combining information from multiple shots or
               | multiple camera sensors, isn't that more like sensor
               | fusion than "guessing"? I think calling it guessing is an
               | uncharitable interpretation of what's happening.
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | > You seem to be implying that the goal is to improve the
               | photo to be better than reality but I don't think that's
               | the case.
               | 
               | I think it is, Afterall that's what all the Instagram
               | filters are for, and that's where most photos end up
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | That's not even remotely close to AI/ML processing, and
               | also is something you have been able to accomplish--
               | manually or with presets-- in Lightroom for ages.
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | I mean to illustrate the attitude of a typical user, not
               | technology
        
               | fao_ wrote:
               | Yeesh. I can't be the only person for whom this sentence
               | makes my skin crawl.
        
               | numpad0 wrote:
               | And I can't be the only person who feels modern life is
               | like perpetually flying through Miyazaki Hayao tentacles
               | and making out the best of it.
        
               | fao_ wrote:
               | Do you mean Junji Ito?
        
               | be_nice wrote:
               | Good thing that won't show up in photos!
        
               | creato wrote:
               | The "hard requirement" is just multi-frame noise
               | reduction, which has been around for a lot longer than
               | the AI/ML hype wave, and has always had a risk of
               | producing similar artifacts to this one.
        
               | Retric wrote:
               | Multi-frame noise reduction only gets you so far.
               | Rotating objects for example present huge issues and
               | result in their own artifacts. In the end there isn't a
               | free lunch, any system that improves resulting images is
               | making trade offs.
        
               | jjeaff wrote:
               | Ya, I don't think anyone has been using ml/ai in camera
               | phones up until the last 5 years maybe.
               | 
               | But it does seem like they have quite a few high tech
               | algorithms at play. More than just multi-frame noise
               | reduction.
        
             | aaron695 wrote:
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | dheera wrote:
             | It probably all goes into a black box ML model nowadays, so
             | the model will conflate it if we don't.
        
           | max48 wrote:
           | >The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable
           | 
           | It's more than that, it's completely mind blowing when you
           | compare it to a DSLR.
           | 
           | In "good" lightning condition, your iphone will give you a
           | picture 75% as good as what you could get with a 4k$
           | fullframe DSLR kit that's 10" long and weight a few pounds.
           | 
           | the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the
           | bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that
           | doesn't know much about photography. And if you need to edit
           | your pictures, you don't get those extra stops of exposure up
           | or down because the iphone already needed all the dynamic
           | range of the sensor to create the picture you got.
           | 
           | It would be very interesting to see a colab between apple and
           | a DSLR company to get the best of both world. A large FF
           | senor and lens ecosystem like Canon combined with whatever
           | dark magic Apple is doing on their tiny sensor would have
           | massive potential.
        
             | tsimionescu wrote:
             | > the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the
             | bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that
             | doesn't know much about photography.
             | 
             | I think the opposite is true, from my (amateur) experience.
             | It's much harder to get a good photo in poor light with a
             | dedicated camera if you don't know what you're doing than
             | it is to get a good photo with a smartphone.
             | 
             | In good light, the better sensors shine through, but in
             | poor light (e.g. and overcast day, not talking about some
             | limit of darkness condition) the superior processing and
             | auto-adjustment of a top-end phone will make for much
             | better photos. Again, talking exclusively about amateur
             | photography, not what a master can do.
        
               | saiya-jin wrote:
               | Yes and no - even latest iphone 13 pro / nexus 6 cameras
               | will produce shots that are blurry in shadows due to
               | aggressive noise reduction or let some fugly color noise
               | pass through the alghoritms. You just need to open any
               | night photo on bigger computer screen instead of just
               | phone.
               | 
               | You have much much better starting point with a full
               | frame.
               | 
               | Of course if you compare a clueless FF user with clueless
               | phone user, phone can win but thats an unfair comparison.
               | You don't invest often 5k into photo equipment and then
               | be oblivious of what options it gives you. And even if
               | you don't actively try to improve yourself, just using
               | the camera will get you there (somewhere) eventually. Its
               | not a rocket science, just keep doing it. That's not a
               | "master" level, more like experienced beginner.
               | 
               | And even in the case of ignorant users, all cameras these
               | days have auto setting which is actually pretty good and
               | you can take final jpegs from it, ignoring the power of
               | raw edit completely. Counter-intuitively, holding a
               | bigger camera system steady for a good shot is easier
               | commpared to lightweight, awkwardly-shaped phone.
               | 
               | That all being said, I will invest into some top-end
               | phone next year mainly due to its camera power these days
               | and convenience of always having it with you, and sharing
               | kids photos with family instantly. No more always lugging
               | around 2.5 kg of Nikon D750 with 24-120 lens and good
               | bag. I will _not_ make technically better pictures with
               | it, but in my case other aspects outweight this.
        
               | eezurr wrote:
               | Snapping good low light photos really comes down to how
               | fast your lens is (smaller f stop number). A lot of kit
               | lens (the ones sold with cameras, even nice cameras), are
               | surprisingly low quality lens, and don't really open up
               | much. My Sony A7-3 came with a kit lens that opens up to
               | F3.5.
               | 
               | This summer I purchased the 24mm GM F1.4 and WOW does it
               | take fantastic night photos. No tripod needed, it lets in
               | enough light that I can use 1/30+ shutter speed.
               | https://i.imgur.com/CcNEUsM.jpg (photo I took recently.
               | 1/40s, 1.4F, 1250 ISO. No photoshop magic, just basic
               | lightroom adjustments)
               | 
               | Also, the iphone opens up to 1.4f, so you're probably not
               | making a fair comparison to your camera (assuming your
               | lens does open up as much)
               | 
               | EDIT: Sony has a 1.2F 50mm lens I really want to get my
               | hands on, but now I am an entrepreneur so my spending
               | days are over for awhile.
        
               | emkoemko wrote:
               | f1.4 on a tiny sensor does not equal f1.4 on a FF
               | sensor.... that's why they have to use "AI" to fake the
               | bokeh. Yea a f1.2 might be nice but you would have to be
               | really skilled to get stuff in focus wit that razor thin
               | dof.
        
           | elif wrote:
           | That depends entirely on what you consider "messing up"
           | 
           | if it had put that leaf over some other leaves in the
           | background that weren't captured well, would we have noticed?
           | would it be a better photo?
           | 
           | What if it was meant to be a beautiful leaf photo? If you
           | want an accurate representation of reality, the moment, etc,
           | the majority of cellphone photos would be considered "messed
           | up" imo
        
           | KarlKemp wrote:
           | Indeed. I wish I had a list of everyone parroting the wisdom
           | that "it's all about the size of the lens, a smartphone can
           | never be as good as a DSLR" so as to ignore their future
           | opinions. Camera phones now beat cameras worth thousands of
           | dollars with better software and larger R&D budgets, at least
           | in low light performance and color gamut.
           | 
           | Closely related: "It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image
           | to make a license plate readable. Lost information ist lost".
           | This was big due to some US TV show at the time, I guess.
           | Here, the error was in the assumption that the information
           | was lost: as it turns out, there's a wide space of
           | possibilities for image quality to be too low for us to
           | easily read some letters, but good enough to contain the
           | clues allowing a smart algorithm to reconstruct them.
        
             | toss1 wrote:
             | Yes, this is getting better, but it reminds me of a story
             | from a friend who was doing work on some classified
             | satellite imaging systems (he was in hardware, iirc) and
             | went to an internal seminar/briefing by some experts on
             | how, from the front to the end of the system, to get the
             | best images for the customers.
             | 
             | He said they went through hours of details on how the
             | various enhancement algorithms and systems worked, and at
             | the end, the bottom line was basically 'take a better
             | picture in the first place' - as in get the lens, lighting,
             | and parameters right in the first place, and that'll be the
             | biggest factor in how far the processing HW/SW/people can
             | take the enhancements.
             | 
             | Maybe the new software with huge R&D budgets is now better,
             | but I'd suspect this advice is still not obsolete...
        
               | sundvor wrote:
               | I saw your post got a down vote, however for eg any given
               | webcam, the best way to improve your video for your
               | mmeetings is likely not to upgrade the camera but to
               | invest in better lighting (eg a couple of key lights) and
               | optimise your visual setup (framing).
               | 
               | It is good advice indeed.
               | 
               | Still, it's amazing how processing has evolved. I took a
               | picture of my 3yo daughter having finally fallen asleep
               | after a bout of night terrors, in the dark light (using a
               | Hue Ambiance in her room; best things ever) - in the S21
               | Ultra viewfinder I could see absolutely nothing, however
               | after 3 seconds of a steady hand I was rewarded with a
               | fantastic picture better lit than what my eyes had
               | adjusted to.
               | 
               | (If I had any complaints, it would be that I'd like it to
               | be darker - however I can understand why on average most
               | would like the processed result.)
        
               | toss1 wrote:
               | I definitely agree with the lighting bit, and I think
               | that was indeed included in the category of "first, take
               | a better picture". So yes, focus, exposure, no motion
               | blur, etc...
        
             | laurent92 wrote:
             | > It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a
             | license plate readable.
             | 
             | Well, a phone can reconstruct this license plate, and in
             | fact _any_ license plate in lieu of this one! And invent a
             | new one!
             | 
             | Which is worrisome for justice. Presenting proof, that was
             | uploaded to servers, horodated and geostamped, won't be
             | enough in a court of law. Anyone can answer: "What if the
             | iPhone recreated and inferred the presence of a knife using
             | the neural engine? This face, is it real? The distance, is
             | it repositionned?"
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | > This face, is it real? The distance, is it
               | repositionned?
               | 
               | Deepfakes, robocalls and Caller ID and voice
               | impersonation, automatic ML in photos, if this train
               | keeps going, we won't know what's real at all. I am
               | struggling to see how we will function.
        
               | pishpash wrote:
               | You will need a transcript of processing and intermediate
               | results.
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | But how do you know a particular transcript is not fake?
        
               | nimbleal wrote:
               | > we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to
               | see how we will function
               | 
               | That's where we started, in a way. Perhaps our short time
               | of feeling we had a grip on reality will just have been a
               | passing phase, before returning to normality.
        
               | ruined wrote:
               | the difference is, before media, everyone understood that
               | if they didn't experience something directly, they had to
               | trust someone who spoke, and that speech was always
               | understood to be an interpretation and possibly fiction.
               | 
               | but now we have all these artificial experiences that
               | might clock real to the senses and have a reputation of
               | fidelity, yet have always been editable and are
               | increasingly made of black box constructive
               | interpretations that value who-knows-what over fidelity.
               | and no part of the process can be interrogated for
               | motivations or detail.
        
               | hughrr wrote:
               | That has always been the case for photographs from every
               | device that has ever been capable of recording images.
        
               | sodality2 wrote:
               | Film camera?
        
               | hughrr wrote:
               | Yes especially film cameras.
        
             | jeffreygoesto wrote:
             | Nope. The image data _is_ actually lost. What happens is
             | that it gets pimped with what on average was lost when a
             | training process artificially degraded a training set. For
             | the results to look(sic) natural, you need both the
             | training set and the degradation to be close to what you're
             | shooting. If that is not the case, hallucination happens.
        
             | IgorPartola wrote:
             | In theory what prevents me from using a huge lens and
             | sensor on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and then using the
             | same advanced software but now running on a desktop
             | computer or a server that is many times more powerful than
             | a smartphone to do advanced post processing?
        
               | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
               | The iphone's depth sensor is one factor. I don't know of
               | any lidar integrated cameras that aren't phones, for
               | example.
               | 
               | Also, because phone cameras have gotten so good, the
               | skill floor for what you're talking about is higher.
               | There's more skill involved in using software like
               | lightroom than you might think. I'm a hobbyist
               | photographer, and sometimes my iphone just seems more
               | skillful than I am using my nicer camera and Lightroom.
        
               | alkonaut wrote:
               | Nothing at all. It's honestly surprising that it's not a
               | bigger thing.
               | 
               | Guessing what stops you is that the Apple team that makes
               | camera software has a budget that makes the Nikon pc app
               | team look quite small.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | Cameras don't have DoF sensors which I believe the phone
               | uses in its processing to know if there's a subject in
               | frame.
        
               | emkoemko wrote:
               | they have that dof sensor so they can emulate dof, we get
               | real dof.
        
               | KarlKemp wrote:
               | It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the
               | same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not
               | limited by processing power.
               | 
               | DSLR and mirrorless cameras have better optical
               | properties. But they are held back by starting too late
               | and being much worse when it comes to software. These
               | cameras also _are_ limited by their CPUs, which are a
               | decade behind, and by their batteries, which are much
               | smaller but expected to last for thousands of exposures.
        
               | perardi wrote:
               | I had to check that, as these big chunky camera batteries
               | "feel" like they should have a lot of mAH compared to a
               | phone.
               | 
               | And I am wrong. Depending on the phone.
               | 
               | A Nikon battery: 2280 mAh.
               | 
               | An iPhone 13: anywhere from 2406-4352 mAH.
               | 
               | Yeah, that's a way smaller power budget than a Pro
               | iPhone, especially as you have autofocus and image
               | stabilization systems that have to move around a lot more
               | mass.
        
               | nucleardog wrote:
               | Keep in mind that my Nikon really only consumes power
               | when it's _doing_ something. I can leave my camera "on"
               | for months at a time and come back to a fully charged
               | battery.
               | 
               | The screen is off except when I'm previewing a photo. The
               | viewfinder is physical. The metering is only on for 10-20
               | seconds after I wake the camera by touching the shutter
               | release and is only displaying on a low power
               | monochromatic LCD. Autofocus only happens while I'm
               | holding the shutter release until it finds focus then
               | locks.
               | 
               | Meanwhile the iPhone battery is powering what is,
               | effectively, an entire laptop with a 5+" screen and
               | cellular, wifi and bluetooth radios.
               | 
               | Articles I can find are quoting an iPhone taking a few
               | hundred shots on a charge. Nikon's testing puts my camera
               | able to take a few _thousand_ per charge. There's
               | literally an order of magnitude difference from my
               | Nikon's 1400mAh battery to a iPhone's 2500-4500mAh
               | battery. Two to three times the capacity for 1/10 the
               | pictures.
        
               | AuryGlenz wrote:
               | That comparison doesn't work for newer mirrorless
               | cameras. I have a DSLR and mirrorless strapped to my body
               | at each wedding and I go through more than twice the
               | amount of batteries in the mirrorless.
               | 
               | They also take a second or so to wake from standby which
               | is super annoying for my job, so I have it set to 5
               | minutes. That essentially means it never goes in to
               | standby on a wedding day.
        
               | Zak wrote:
               | It is not accurate to compare the capacity in Amp-hours
               | because the Nikon EN-EL15C battery has twice the voltage
               | (two Li-ion cells in series) of a single-cell smartphone
               | battery.
        
               | numpad0 wrote:
               | Napkin math: 7V/2280mAh = 16Wh or equivalent to
               | 3.7V/4300mAh (USB power banks are always measured and
               | marked in 3.7V and mAh as unit to produce largest
               | comparable numbers)
        
               | Zak wrote:
               | I've always thought it was odd powerbanks didn't
               | advertise in mWh. That's a bigger number and comparable
               | regardless of voltage.
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | If you want napkin math then just multiply 2280 by two.
               | It'll be faster and more accurate than converting to watt
               | hours.
        
               | wholinator2 wrote:
               | As well I'd like to add the thought that the smart phone
               | could be running all kinds of battery draining things in
               | the background. So actual battery life depends not only
               | mAh but how efficiently the device uses its capacity.
        
               | SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
               | And the camera batteries are replaceable. Quickly. In the
               | field. There are also "battery grips" that have extra
               | battery slots in them and automatically switch between
               | the batteries. The camera never has to sit on a charger,
               | only a spare battery does.
        
               | johnmaguire wrote:
               | Alternatively: I'd point out that the camera app tends to
               | be a highly battery-draining activity on a phone. Most
               | phone users do not leave the camera app up 24/7.
               | 
               | (And as a digital camera user - at least I can hot swap
               | batteries. I miss my old cell phones that allowed for
               | this.)
        
               | emkoemko wrote:
               | held back? why on earth would anyone want the camera to
               | do more then just give you a raw image file back? if you
               | don't want to be creative then yea i guess go with a
               | phone and let it make all the choices for you.
        
               | judge2020 wrote:
               | > recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's
               | MacBooks
               | 
               | I mean, sure, but the A15 bionic is much more power
               | constrained and effectively has less 'GPUs' and cores
               | than the M1, likely because the SoC is also constrained
               | by its size within the phone housing.
        
               | user_7832 wrote:
               | > It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the
               | same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not
               | limited by processing power.
               | 
               | Correct me if I'm wrong but there's still a huge issue
               | with silicon processing capabilities/power when it comes
               | to image sensors (which is why camera sensors buffer
               | images between shots). I unfortunately don't remember the
               | context but it said something that it was (very far) from
               | possible to actually get all the sensor data into the
               | processor and as a result you only take a small fraction
               | of the actual incident light/photos practically.
        
               | sciencesama wrote:
               | iphones come with a15 not m1
        
               | hug wrote:
               | This isn't true, really: there are massive amounts of
               | data being pushed about in a modern camera, through
               | custom image pipelines that will do many gigabytes per
               | second of throughout, but none of those are really
               | bottlenecks for the sensor data per se.
               | 
               | Most of it ends up in a RAM-like write buffer, because SD
               | cards, or even faster formats like CF-express, can't keep
               | up with the write speed of tens of 50 megapixel shots
               | coming through every second.
               | 
               | There _are_ sensor readout speed limits, which is why you
               | don't see cameras exceed 30 frames per second of 8k
               | recording, but there's no reason why you couldn't read
               | out the entire full-well capacity of the sensor each of
               | those frames.
        
               | floatboth wrote:
               | But that CPU shouldn't really do anything other than
               | shoveling raw sensor data to flash as fast as possible.
               | All the processing can happen on your workstation (or an
               | iPad or whatever).
        
               | numpad0 wrote:
               | You don't want to shovel 12MP 14-bit-effective multi-
               | frame raw pixel data along its metadata into the flash...
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | Sure I do. Or very minimally compressed.
               | 
               | Hell, one of the major selling points of the most recent
               | iphones is prores recording! Dump half a second of that
               | into a file. If that means a half-full phone can only fit
               | a thousand photos before it's emptied, then sure I'll
               | take it.
        
               | hughrr wrote:
               | I've got nearly the same CPU in my iPad, MacBook and
               | iPhone. I can do the processing on any device...
        
               | wtallis wrote:
               | You don't have the same heatsink on all three, and not
               | necessarily the same number of cores.
        
               | sundvor wrote:
               | This.
               | 
               | My Corsair H150i Pro AIO water cooler and decent airflow
               | case (Define 7 W/Corsair ML140s) allows me to run my
               | Ryzen 3900XT at 4.4ghz constantly, all cores, for any
               | kind of real life workload.
               | 
               | Good luck trying that with a laptop.
        
               | Tepix wrote:
               | The M1-Max at 30W seems to have tge same Geekbench 5
               | multicore benchmark score as the Ryzen 3900XT at 105W.
               | Think about that. Also a better single core score. You
               | won't be using all cores all the time.
        
               | hughrr wrote:
               | All the image processing is short bursts so this is
               | mostly irrelevant.
        
               | jimnotgym wrote:
               | Isn't that what Lightroom is for?
        
             | TedShiller wrote:
             | I use my iPhone when I want convenience. I use my DSLR when
             | I want high quality photos.
        
           | TedShiller wrote:
           | No free lunch is right. iPhone photos look incredible on
           | iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution
           | desktop screen. Instagram kids don't know this, but that's
           | ok, because we don't need them to, and neither do they.
        
             | hansel_der wrote:
             | > iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They
             | look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen
             | 
             | yea, whith our first child we still used a dedicated camera
             | (compact, no dslr) and there is a very noticeable drop in
             | imagequality after that because we got lazy and use our
             | phones.
             | 
             | then again "the best camera is the one you have with you"
        
             | trompetenaccoun wrote:
             | Increasingly these photo"graphs" have nothing to do with
             | reality either. I may be part of a weird minority but when
             | I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want
             | them to be all fake and wrong. Some Chinese manufacturers
             | have taken this to a ridiculous extreme, they make normal
             | friendly faces look outright scary.
             | 
             | Pictures shouldn't be edited by default, the user should be
             | given the option if they want to. And lets not even get
             | started on the fact that we have all these face recognition
             | algos and such in a device constantly connected to the
             | internet, with people taking pictures of themselves and
             | everyone around them. What could go wrong...
        
               | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
               | > when I take pictures I do it to document things, I
               | don't want them to be all fake and wrong
               | 
               | > Pictures shouldn't be edited by default
               | 
               | I don't think you can have both of these things. In
               | general, if you want to closely reproduce what your eye
               | sees, you're going to have to do some editing.
        
               | aembleton wrote:
               | With a lot of phones you can have it save the raw image
               | file so that you can convert it to jpeg yourself.
        
               | Zak wrote:
               | > _Pictures shouldn 't be edited by default_
               | 
               | This statement requires more precision. A camera sensor
               | usually has more dynamic range than the display can
               | represent. Lenses often introduce distortions. Sensors
               | capture noise. The tint and color temperature of light
               | sources vary greatly. Here's a set of seven images taken
               | at steps along the path starting from as close as a JPEG
               | can represent to the raw sensor data to a finished image
               | that reasonably represents how my eyes saw the scene:
               | 
               | https://imgur.com/a/4paCKaL
               | 
               | When using a dedicated camera and generating a JPEG in
               | the camera, a similar set of steps is applied
               | automatically. There's no such thing as "no filter" in
               | digital photography; even the "unprocessed RAW" is one
               | program's opinion of how 12 bits per channel should be
               | rendered at 8 bits per channel to display on your screen
               | (as well as downsampled and compressed, in this case).
               | There are often user-selectable profiles that each have a
               | bit of a different look, much as different film stocks
               | produce different looks (Fuji cameras actually call their
               | profiles "film simulations" and name them after the
               | company's film stocks).
               | 
               | So I think what you really mean is that you want the
               | camera to produce an image that appears on a screen as
               | much like what you saw with your eyes as it can.
        
         | caslon wrote:
         | You can set Apple's devices to shoot RAW, and it's usually
         | pretty great, without the painting-like qualities of its
         | default image processing.
        
           | mr_toad wrote:
           | RAW just means uncompressed, unlike JPEG or HEIF. You can
           | still manipulate a RAW image.
        
             | ryeights wrote:
             | >RAW just means uncompressed
             | 
             | This is not accurate.
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format
        
               | kortex wrote:
               | A) I'm not sure what nit you are picking, RAW formats are
               | typically not compressed, and if they are (I haven't
               | encountered any personally) they would be losslessly
               | compressed. They certainly aren't quantized.
               | 
               | Edit: ok here's some lossless and lossy compression of
               | RAW. IMHO, "lossy compressed raw" is an oxymoron.
               | https://photographylife.com/compressed-vs-uncompressed-
               | vs-lo...
               | 
               | B) the context is whether a raw photo can be
               | "manipulated" in any way. The answer is a resounding yes.
               | See: Darpa MediFor project. Search for work by Siwei Lyu
               | (I'm on mobile and don't feel like digging through the
               | links, there's tons of published work out there)
        
           | sudosysgen wrote:
           | You actually can't. The RAW an iPhone will give you is
           | highly, highly processed.
        
           | alkonaut wrote:
           | How raw is "raw"? If you take a long exposure in a dark room
           | with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake
           | being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than
           | it should. Would a "raw" version of that photo be a
           | traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked
           | image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a
           | short video sequence? (that would actually make the most
           | sense)
           | 
           | I have an iPhone11 but not sure that has the raw option.
        
             | wrboyce wrote:
             | It wouldn't make any difference in this instance, all the
             | computational stuff still happens.
             | 
             | I just took a long exposure on my 12 Pro and purposely
             | moved the camera around a bit and my phone produced a sharp
             | RAW image.
        
               | nullifidian wrote:
               | That's the definition of a non-RAW image.
        
             | Zak wrote:
             | Recent iPhones (and many Android phones) have optical image
             | stabilization; an element in the lens moves to compensate
             | if the phone shakes during the exposure. Very new iPhones
             | (and some Android devices) also have sensor-shift image
             | stabilization, which moves the image sensor.
             | 
             | These features are also available on many dedicated cameras
             | and interchangeable camera lenses.
        
             | liversage wrote:
             | I don't have an iPhone but I've always been shooting RAW on
             | my phones and then processed the photos in LightRoom. As
             | soon as I use one of the "lenses" on my phone (like "night
             | shot" or "panorama" or even "wide angle"/"tele") I only get
             | a JPG. The RAW file is only created when I shoot using the
             | basic camera. This is the case for my current OnePlus but
             | also previous phones (Google, Nokia).
        
             | kalleboo wrote:
             | If you use a third-party app like Camera+ to shoot RAW,
             | then it is the raw, completely unprocessed sensor data as a
             | DNG file, like any DSLR. Shooting RAW on the ultra-wide
             | camera in a dark environment results in a completely
             | unusable image.
             | 
             | If you use the iOS camera on an iPhone 12 or newer and
             | enable the "ProRAW" option (which is shown as just "RAW" in
             | the camera), you get a processed image, but with the data
             | used as a base for the processing intact for re-processing
             | when you edit it.
        
         | mc32 wrote:
         | Apple possibly caught a break here.
         | 
         | It could have been worse and people would probably have accused
         | Apple of being bigoted or something else.
        
           | KarlKemp wrote:
           | Or, maybe, knowing that releasing software that turns out to
           | deliver markedly lower quality results for people already
           | weary from centuries of marginalization would open them up to
           | such accusations, they didn't get lucky so much as their are
           | enjoying the benefit of having listened to such criticism,
           | testing their software across a set of data as diverse as
           | their customers, instead of just that set of photos from
           | D'Brickshaw Ferguson's and Abigail Cumberbatch's wedding.
        
             | mc32 wrote:
             | They still caught a break.
             | 
             | Here people are like "lol Apple" and understand it's the
             | fault of the software and there isn't incipient malice
             | intended. Whereas on the other hand people are apt to make
             | it into something it isn't.
        
               | d3ad1ysp0rk wrote:
               | Yes I'm more likely to let Apple off for not training
               | enough "people with a leafy backdrop" than "people with
               | different colored skin" into their ML.
        
               | mc32 wrote:
               | Zoom showed lots of glitches for all kinds of people
               | -when using "backgrounds", but "Twitter people" latched
               | on to certain outcomes --and Zoom is heavily developed
               | overseas.
        
         | avrionov wrote:
         | There is a big difference between color correction or exposure
         | compensation and adding non existing objects by ML algorithm.
        
           | alkonaut wrote:
           | Modern phones take long exposures and try to make sense of it
           | by analyzing it.
           | 
           | Basically, a one second really dark video can be summed up
           | into one very blurry but bright enough photo. But if you
           | carefully move each frame to compensate for camera movement
           | when summing it up - you might also get a sharp picture. But
           | then the subject moves, or a leaf moves, and the algorithm
           | has to decide _which_ parts of the photo should be a priority
           | for not being blurry. And that would be faces, usually. So
           | the camera now needs to decide what is a face and what isn't.
           | Just to take one single telephoto picture.
           | 
           | Only doing "in camera processing" like a 2015 digital camera
           | with some sharpening, color curves etc doesn't cut it
           | anymore. If your phone does that, it'll be laughed at. Phones
           | these days need to do clever long exposure stacking with
           | image recognition and all.
        
             | flemhans wrote:
             | Does anything like that exist as a computer-attachable cam,
             | e.g. for Linux? Or are we stuck with <2015 cameras unless
             | they come as part of a smartphone?
        
               | sudosysgen wrote:
               | There is software to do that, yes. Many cameras are able
               | to do smart multiframe stacking, even fairly old ones.
               | 
               | It's just that photographers would rather not have to
               | rely on this, because it has a lot of issues.
        
             | usrusr wrote:
             | Wouldn't they even move different parts of the scene
             | differently for summing up? And the summing is for
             | denoising, not for rising levels out of darkness, so it
             | would be perfectly fine to sum only the parts where there
             | is plenty of confidence about the movement, leaving others
             | noisy (or, if more noisy than one would like to admit, de-
             | noise spatially instead of temporally in those places,
             | which brings us back to blurry. Add an "unsharp mask" step
             | to compensate and you get that watercolors look we all
             | know).
             | 
             | Back to moving different parts differently: this seems very
             | similar to the motion prediction parts of video encoding. I
             | wonder if and how much the stacking algorithms make direct
             | use of elements of the video encoding implementations those
             | cameras also have?
        
         | 1123581321 wrote:
         | Short-lived joy, sadly. :( It turns out the leaf was actually
         | in the foreground and correctly captured.
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749950
        
           | alkonaut wrote:
           | I liked the original story arc better!
           | 
           | "It's amazing how well these work if just one screwup makes
           | headlines"
           | 
           | Also true for zero screwups I suppose
        
         | formerly_proven wrote:
         | > Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for
         | the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often
         | come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at
         | least take some joy in this "no free lunch" demonstration.
         | 
         | Can't replace sensor area with anything other than more sensor
         | area. Week ago I got the perfect demo of that when I filmed a
         | happening at around 10pm with only some dim garden lights off
         | the scene for light. Some other people had their iPhones, I had
         | an f2 lens on my Z6 - while the videos from the iPhones looked
         | like crap even on the phone screens, basically just blobs of
         | dark noise, the Nikon produced a remarkably clean 4K video - at
         | ISO 16000 or so - that made it look like the scene was lit by
         | floodlights.
        
           | alkonaut wrote:
           | With video you can't "cheat". You can't gather up a second of
           | frames and stack to one photo. That's what phones to quite
           | well. You only have 1/24s (say) to get the shot before you
           | need to get the next one.
           | 
           | I bet an Iphone12 would have made better stills than my aging
           | canon 60D which I try to keep at 1600 or lower. And that's
           | pretty remarkable to be honest.
        
             | Zak wrote:
             | > _You can't gather up a second of frames and stack to one
             | photo._
             | 
             | Oh, but you can. A full second would make for a very choppy
             | video of course so you don't have as long in which to do it
             | as you might for a still, but there are benefits to be
             | gained and the Pixel 6 series does exactly that.
             | 
             | https://9to5google.com/2021/08/02/google-pixel-6-video-
             | hdr-t...
        
             | usui wrote:
             | I don't understand, why is this ruled out? Assuming that
             | phones reach a point where this is computationally cheap,
             | what would be so hard about having a sliding window for
             | each frame in the video?
        
               | alkonaut wrote:
               | Nothing prevents that, but if there is a lot of movement
               | (which would be the point of using video) then the great
               | results aren't as easy to get. You can't take a still of
               | someone dancing in a dark room with an iPhone, you can
               | take a still of someone standing reasonably still in a
               | dark room.
        
               | usui wrote:
               | Isn't this a similar problem to the blurry-face vs. leaf-
               | face issue discussed? If yes, then one would hand it off
               | to computation to figure out which parts matter and need
               | doctoring, except scaled up to video.
        
               | withinboredom wrote:
               | The camera moving?
        
               | usui wrote:
               | Then increase the rate at which frames get captured since
               | the video is destined to be [?]24-30 fps anyway?
        
               | floatboth wrote:
               | But the higher the framerate, the less time you have for
               | exposure on each frame.
        
             | ekianjo wrote:
             | the iphone 12 has no depth of field so a larger sensor is
             | anyway much better. there is no way around it. You cant
             | hack your way to photography.
        
               | creato wrote:
               | A shallow depth of field isn't always what you want
               | though. Sometimes a shallow depth of field is good,
               | sometimes it isn't.
        
             | sudosysgen wrote:
             | Oh yeah you definitely can. Multiframe mode on my old A7ii
             | gets me all the way to 1/2 of a second handheld.
             | 
             | You have a 60D, which is very old, and it would still do
             | much better than an iPhone 12 with a fast lens on top.
        
         | boogies wrote:
         | > everyone asking for "unmodified raw photos" to be produced
         | don't understand what they are asking for. Those "unmodified"
         | photos would be unusable in most cases outside very bright
         | conditions.
         | 
         | I'm asking for unmodified raw photos _and_ modified ones. Or I
         | would be if Megapixels didn't already give me both on my GNU
         | /Linux smartphone. The processed versions of the photo's I've
         | taken look great IMO, but I don't see the harm in keeping the
         | raws around, they'd probably be quite useable for producing
         | even better edited versions if I were to import them into a
         | full desktop image manipulaton program and let it process them
         | with desktop power and more than a couple seconds of time to do
         | it. And I'd think Apple would be be happy to sell bigger
         | overpriced emmcs and iCloud subscriptions to SD-slotless iPhone
         | users with raw image filled phones, and/or pop up a
         | notification to delete them all with a tap when space was low.
        
       | jinto36 wrote:
       | Here's a link to the image in question directly:
       | https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FH0N9HNWQAE0n9R?format=jpg&name=...
        
       | nutanc wrote:
       | This is now popular enough that the owner should probably create
       | an NFT out of this :)
        
       | beervirus wrote:
        
       | lloydjones wrote:
       | I wonder whether there's a point where photographic evidence
       | can't reasonably be used in court etc because of this?
       | 
       | I'm aware that Photoshop has been around for an age.
        
       | dmitshur wrote:
       | I had a feeling of recalling something relevant to this topic
       | recently. Turns out it was a video by Marques Brownlee,
       | "Smartphone Cameras vs Reality!". This instance would've been a
       | great example there. The section at t=364 [1] is quite relevant.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ8giCWDcyE&t=364
        
       | dcdc123 wrote:
       | MKBHD made a relevant video.
       | 
       | https://youtube.com/watch?v=VTrCPywCG5A
        
       | 725686 wrote:
       | Reminded me of the infamous Xerox copier bug that changed numbers
       | in copies!
       | 
       | https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
        
         | arnaudsm wrote:
         | The fact that a bug this severe and overengineered took so look
         | to be noticed is both hilarious and extremely scary about how
         | we trust modern software.
        
       | rrauenza wrote:
       | There was an update -- sounds like a leaf was really in the shot:
       | 
       | > Big news! I sent @sdw the original image. He theorized a leaf
       | from a foreground tree obscured the face. I didn't think anything
       | was in view, and the closest tree is a Japanese Maple (smaller
       | leaves). But he's right! Here's a video I just shot, showing the
       | parallax. Wow!
        
         | agar wrote:
         | I wish this could be pinned to the top. Perhaps a follow-up
         | post to HN would be worthwhile.
         | 
         | So many people will leave this thread incorrectly believing
         | this was an iPhone problem. It could easily become the data
         | point people use to cast doubt on all pictures they don't like.
        
         | darkwizard42 wrote:
         | LOL amazing that the explanation was so simple!
        
         | roryokane wrote:
         | Link to that tweet:
         | https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026.
         | Nitter proxy:
         | https://nitter.net/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026
        
         | tqi wrote:
         | This thread has been an amazing example of confirmation bias.
        
       | tomduncalf wrote:
       | I had something like this happen the either week - someone took a
       | photo of a group of us against a wooden wall in low light with
       | the front camera of the iPhone 13 Pro Max, and while the photo
       | looked great zoomed out, if you looked closely it had applied the
       | vertical line and texture of the wooden slats to my face, so I
       | had a sort of wooden face!
       | 
       | My assumption is that this is over enthusiastic ML processing
       | trying to enhance photos in challenging conditions... makes me
       | think of e.g. https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-
       | accidentally-a...
       | 
       | Similarly, I've noticed that the iPhone 13 Pro tends to use the
       | wide angle lens for 3x zoom photos in low light then upscale it.
       | This makes some sense as it can capture more light and the photos
       | look good zoomed out, but if you zoom in, you'll see things like
       | text and small faces have been replaced with random blurry "ML-
       | looking" smudges.
       | 
       | If you want to avoid this, right now I think the only way to do
       | so is to use a third party camera app. I use Halide and it's
       | excellent, it will only use the lens you have selected even if it
       | is in challenging lighting conditions, and it applies much less
       | processing (and you can further disable more processing if you
       | like, I've not had the need).
       | 
       | The default camera is generally great for snapshots that you
       | aren't going to zoom into etc. though. Would be nice if they
       | could tweak it to be a bit less aggressive in its processing,
       | perhaps adding a "pro" mode or similar.
        
         | albert_e wrote:
         | I worry that smartphone photos will become inadmissible in
         | court as evidence ... and will also give all shady characters
         | like politicians a cover to change narratives
        
           | retube wrote:
           | I think we're already past that point....
        
           | rowanG077 wrote:
           | I hope that smartphones photos become inadmissable. Because
           | photos taken don't reflect what really happened.
           | 
           | I also hope smartphones start storing unprocessed version of
           | every photo that will be admissable in court.
        
           | BeFlatXIII wrote:
           | I hope for the advancement of deepfake technology for exactly
           | the opposite reason. All that surveillance footage and vox
           | populi photos? Now they're all suspect as tampered, even when
           | they're genuine.
        
           | syshum wrote:
           | Good defense attorneys already will
           | 
           | I am more shocked that you are not concerned that image
           | manipulation technology could (and likely already has) been
           | used to send an innocent person who can not afford the use of
           | an expert to challenge the image to jail
           | 
           | Evidence presented in court should reflect exactly what
           | happen, a true and accurate representation. Not what some ML
           | algorithm believes happened. This is especially true in a
           | criminal cast where a persons freedom is at stake, and often
           | the captured criminality is not the focus of the image but
           | rather something in the background making the ML processing
           | even less reliable, and would allow for more interpretation
           | by the viewer.
           | 
           | I am a firm believer that is better for 100 guilty to go free
           | than it is for 1 innocents to falsely convicted, sad that
           | many do not share that world view any more
        
       | vardump wrote:
       | I wonder if this has any implications over iPhone (or cellphones
       | in general) photos in court.
       | 
       | This might be brought up to overturn any photo evidence from
       | phones.
        
         | hughrr wrote:
         | All photos regardless of the source are a corruption of reality
         | both semantically and technically speaking. I think they should
         | always be used on a case by case basis with corroborating
         | evidence.
        
           | iamacyborg wrote:
           | I recall reading a lot of fantastic essays on the "reality"
           | of photos when I studied photography at A Level. I'll have to
           | see if I can dig stuff up, but I recall there being a lot of
           | controversy surrounding posing of bodies in early war
           | photography.
        
             | roywiggins wrote:
             | Probably the most famous one:
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Soldier
        
               | iamacyborg wrote:
               | That one definitely but I was thinking of Alexander
               | Gardner's Home of a rebel sharpshooter.
        
         | post_break wrote:
         | This came up big time with the Rittenhouse trial when the judge
         | didn't want to use the pinch to zoom method on video of the
         | event. A lot of people laughed because he talked about AI but
         | he was on the right path, it does inject pixels to scale the
         | image.
        
           | dagmx wrote:
           | No. He wasn't on the right path because he was talking about
           | the wrong thing.
           | 
           | It astounds me how people are so quickly conflating multiple
           | different scenarios.
           | 
           | Playback and capture are very different things. Would you be
           | accepting people complaining about log4j vulnerabilities with
           | regards to a C++ code base for example? No, because you'd
           | know the nuanced difference that's inherent in a code base.
           | Image processing is the same. It's not just all one catch all
           | Boogeyman
        
             | xdennis wrote:
             | It's not clear what you're disputing.
             | 
             | Criminal trials are generally biased towards the defense.
             | If it's unclear if the evidence is doctored or not it
             | shouldn't be introduced to potentially mislead the jury.
        
               | dagmx wrote:
               | I'm disputing people using this case of the iPhone
               | CAPTURE process screwing up as vindication for the judges
               | distrust of the PLAYBACK process.
               | 
               | A) video scaling is a well documented and well understood
               | field. The judge's mistrust was wrong to begin with, and
               | if he distrusted the scaling algorithm, then there's no
               | reason to trust any capture process either. It's
               | reductionist if they're not going to try and understand
               | what's going on.
               | 
               | B) if the judge mistrusted it, there should be a standard
               | platform for playback that can be trusted by them
               | otherwise it's an easy out for dismissing any evidence
               | 
               | C) again, people are conflating capture and playback.
               | They're different, and issues in one don't translate
               | directly to the other.
        
         | fknorangesite wrote:
         | ...um: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/11/11/defense-in-
         | kyle-r...
         | 
         | Regardless of the validity of the objection in this specific
         | case, yes it's already happening.
        
       | Zak wrote:
       | This seems like it might be a case of the phone combining images
       | taken with two or more of its cameras.
        
       | ronenlh wrote:
       | Can this be an argument for plausible deniability in court?
        
       | bargle0 wrote:
       | How long until your phone won't let you take pictures of certain
       | things?
        
       | bendbro wrote:
       | If anyone remembers the infamous "pickles" drama in the
       | Rittenhouse case, this is another example of why it's so
       | important to know exactly what technology is doing to a
       | photograph.
       | 
       | An aside, the judge's demonstrated understanding of pixels,
       | despite being slimed by most media, was actually quite good.
       | During the trial he demonstrated understanding of how an
       | algorithm can take as input the original pixels and calculate
       | estimated (or interpolated, whatever you want to call it
       | generically) pixels from that input.
        
       | hulitu wrote:
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | The cause of this is image-stacking.
       | 
       | The phone takes ~20 frames, over 0.2 seconds. In that time, lots
       | of people and things in the frame move.
       | 
       | Optical flow is used to track all moving parts of the image, and
       | then 'undo' any movement, aligning all parts of the image.
       | 
       | Then the frames are combined, usually by, for each pixel, taking
       | something like the median or throwing out outliers and using the
       | average.
       | 
       | When the optical flow fails to track an object in more than half
       | the frames, the 'outliers' that are thrown out can in fact be the
       | image content you wanted.
       | 
       | It happens with leaves a lot because they can flutter fast from
       | one frame to the next, so tracking each individual leaf is hard.
       | A few bad tracking results on more than half the frames, and all
       | you end up seeing is leaves where there should be a face..
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | Oflow "glitches" are some of the most fun things in image
         | processing, and definitely my favorite render glitches. When it
         | works, it's amazing. When it doesn't, it's also just as
         | amazing, but in a different manner.
        
       | [deleted]
        
         | beervirus wrote:
        
       | kgen wrote:
       | This is so interesting, I how you debug something like this
       | (assuming there is no copy of the original pre-processed image as
       | well)?
        
       | busia wrote:
       | A.I. is watching you
        
       | pryce wrote:
       | how do we exclude the possibility that we are just seeing a leaf
       | on its way falling (or blowing) between the subject that the
       | photographer?
       | 
       | Logically an event like that would be followed by the iphone not
       | detecting a face, and therefore not applying its usual face-
       | related black-box features?
       | 
       | Supposing this is the case and is 'bad', what exactly do we
       | expect 'better behaviour' would mean in this situation?
        
         | function_seven wrote:
         | The leaf that takes the place of the face is still attached to
         | its branch. It's not falling down, it's hanging from the tree.
         | And the person's head is missing in the areas you'd expect to
         | still see it if it was a falling leaf.
        
           | dathinab wrote:
           | The was taken under zoom on a smartphone known to apply all
           | kinds of "make thinks look nice AI magic".
           | 
           | Both of following scenarios is possible:
           | 
           | - Due to a combination of various post-processing steps
           | including image stabilization the leaf replaced the head.
           | 
           | - The leaf is on a branch which is above the head and was
           | pushed down by the wind hiding the face, due to the unusual
           | angel of the branch that is non-obvious. And the artifacts
           | around the "face" come form the image
           | sharpening/stabilization magic not knowing what to do with
           | that pixels.
           | 
           | - The leaf might also be falling and it's connection to the
           | branch can be an optical illusion, that kind of leafs
           | sometimes have a "mini branch part" attached to them when
           | they fall.
           | 
           | I would say both is likely, and given that it was supposedly
           | done under high zoom I wouldn't be sure if the human doing
           | the photo can/does see it correctly, because our brain also
           | does "magic" to make the things we see look "better" (like
           | our brain actually fills in details from memory/eperience in
           | some situations).
        
       | netcan wrote:
       | When I was 12 I learned to make autocorrect replace my 8 yr old
       | brother's name with "poophead." It was a genius prank.
       | 
       | If I worked at Apple today, I'd do the same thing with his 30
       | year old head.
        
       | nla wrote:
       | Welcome to computational photography!
        
       | anigbrowl wrote:
       | Probably because she is Canadian
        
       | micheljansen wrote:
       | This gives me the same feeling as those ML-powered "enhanced
       | zoom" features: where does the photograph end and the machine
       | made-up fantasy start?
        
         | nitrogen wrote:
         | AI enhancement of imagery injecting made-up data was a minor
         | plot point in the novel Congo (the one about diamonds and
         | apes), if I recall correctly, so this has been a known risk for
         | a long time, and ML educators and practitioners aren't doing a
         | good enough job of managing and talking about that risk.
        
         | gsliepen wrote:
         | Obligatory Red Dwarf reference:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo
        
           | 14 wrote:
           | Take my upvote. This has been posted to HN before but I love
           | seeing it again. Red Dwarf was truly an amazing show way
           | ahead of its time imo. For those who have never heard of it,
           | it is a space based comedy I would recommend to all.
        
             | chris_wot wrote:
             | Definitely the best spoof of Blade Runner I've seen so far.
        
           | sergiotapia wrote:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tIDad3xxs
           | 
           | I love these guys so much
        
         | dathinab wrote:
         | "ML-powered" enhanced zoom can't be trusted.
         | 
         | The moment you need ML magic to magnify you are basically
         | telling the ML "guess what is there based on what we can see
         | and the training database you where trained on". Also due to
         | the nature of such algorithm they do not have any form of
         | common sense or "realistic general purpose" world view, and
         | tend to be black box so it's hard to check if they learned
         | something "stupid"/"ridiculous".
         | 
         | So it's totally possible that somehow it learned to place
         | knifes into the hyper-magnified hands if they have a specific
         | skin color and a turquoise sleeve on a picture with a color
         | scheme as if it's a cloudy day. Or similar arbitrary things.
         | Sure it's supper unlikely but not impossible and there is not
         | good way to find such "bugs". Worse multiple ML systems trained
         | on the same data might share some mistakes and there are just
         | that many huge comprehensive datasets.
        
           | andbberger wrote:
           | OK sure but the distribution of natural images is highly
           | redundant ie pixels are not independent and there is
           | structure to exploit. It's not magic obviously but done
           | properly it's a pretty reasonable thing
        
             | MauranKilom wrote:
             | > OK sure but the distribution of natural images is highly
             | redundant ie pixels are not independent and there is
             | structure to exploit.
             | 
             | Sure, but that depends _very_ strongly on the number of
             | natural images you trained on and the specificity of the
             | situation you present to the algorithm. Maybe one such
             | structure in the training set just happens to be people
             | holding knives given  "a specific skin color and a
             | turquoise sleeve on a picture with a color scheme as if
             | it's a cloudy day".
        
               | andbberger wrote:
               | I said if done properly. My point is that in principle
               | using a natural image prior to 'enhance' an image is not
               | a totally crazy thing.
        
               | dathinab wrote:
               | It isn't (EDIT: isn't crazy) .
               | 
               | But there is no good way to reliably know if it's done
               | well for this specific image.
               | 
               | So it can't be trusted.
               | 
               | Which doesn't mean it's worthless.
               | 
               | It's kinda like someone saying "I think I maybe have seen
               | <something> when passing by but I didn't pay attention."
               | 
               | It's not trustable as the human mind if fickle but it can
               | be a good starting point.
        
             | Dah00n wrote:
             | Sure, if it is an option applied after the fact by the user
             | editing the photo. Any camera that does this automatically
             | is utterly broken. Otherwise where is the line? Some
             | sharpening? Adding bigger boobs by default? Make people
             | less black?
        
       | peterkelly wrote:
       | Autotune for photography.
        
       | lattice_epochs wrote:
       | This just reminds me of the early iPhone panorama stitching.
        
       | aloer wrote:
       | I upgraded from an iPhone X to a 13 pro when it was released and
       | since then it's been a very mixed experience. The range of
       | quality is incredibly frustrating.
       | 
       | I enjoy the speed with which I can take pictures that are not
       | blurry. But in most cases I wish I could reduce the "AI
       | aggressiveness" since they all look so artificially sharp. But
       | that's only part of it.
       | 
       | I have pictures of my family this Christmas where we posed in the
       | same location, same light and with just a few seconds apart and
       | the pictures look completely different when it comes to the
       | colors.
       | 
       | "Different AI interpretation" I tell those around me that haven't
       | come in contact with computational photography yet.
       | 
       | Then I apologize, saying that I can't know how the picture will
       | turn out before it's taken. And that there is no way to
       | reanalyze. No way to feed RAW back to "the AI".
       | 
       | But such is the future...
       | 
       | There's a picture of me and my partner against a perfectly blue
       | sky. I am a few cm behind her. She looks normal while my face
       | looks half transparent / whitened like a ghost in the sky.
       | 
       | There's pictures of text and logos on billboard and such that are
       | so smooth as if they are photoshopped on top.
       | 
       | I often tell those people that not only do we need to accept that
       | photos now are not the same concept as photos in the past, we
       | also have to accept that the next iOS update could change the
       | algorithm and photos from this Christmas will be different to
       | photos from next Christmas even when shot with the same camera.
       | Frustrating
        
       | dehrmann wrote:
       | Remember that bit in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial about image
       | resizing?
        
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