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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

From the sample images, all I can see is that the "DSLR"-ized images look brighter and have subtly more pleasing colors. But is that all to it? Am I missing the big picture?

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If you right click and view the images in a tab (at higher resolution!), they basically all look look like they've had a brightness/contrast and sharpness filter applied. Honestly, I much prefer the originals, they look cleaner and the lighting is less harsh with better contrast. But maybe I just have unusual æsthetic tastes.

e.g. http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~ihnatova/demo/iphone/1_0.jpg (original) vs http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~ihnatova/demo/iphone/1_2.jpg (modified)

Having actually seen DSLR output, I can say that neither the original nor the "enhanced" version looks anything like what a DSLR can do. The debayering artifacts and noise are still there.

They tested quality in a blind test, where people were asked to choose a better looking photo originally taken with an iPhone and enhanced by one of the three methods: Apple Photo Enhancer, their CNN method, and a professional graphics artist using Photoshop. 42 people were shown 9 pictures each. From the paper:

"Although human enhancement turns out to be slightly preferred to the automatic APE, the images enhanced by our method are picked more often, outperforming even manual retouching."

Someone should put this online as a service and allow things like batch processing. I'd pay for that.

Was thinking exactly the same thing. From those images alone, it's not entirely clear that the same can't be achieved by brightness/contrast and hue/saturation sliders.

But then somebody has to decide how much contrast and saturation to set?

I agree. It looks like something you could do quickly in Lightroom. Raise the shadows, lower the highlights, set white balance. Maybe you could use the same algorithm for DSLR RAW pictures and then get real DSLR quality?

In which case, the neural net doing the sampling is yours.

I believe the whole point of this method is it automatically chooses /how far/ to move those sliders to get closest to the result you'd expect.

my first reaction was, it looks like an HDR effect

Maybe the AI determined brightening the image is all it’s needed, who knows what the reasoning was lol

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