Computational Photography with Luminar 4
skylum.com
skylum.com
I purchased Luminar 3 and it was a sluggish, unstable mess, especially on Windows. They promised many features like a DAM, which was still missing features like the ability to edit metadata. But hey, it checked off the marketing checkbox, right?
They're prioritizing adding new features to generate publicity and hype while ignoring actual speed, stability, and usability.
Only the comment sections of photography websites actually comment on speed, example: https://www.dpreview.com/news/3286739394/luminar-4-available...
Even inference is going to be slow when working on a 20 megapixel image. That's as much work as a 1220 sample batch at 128x128 resolution.
I’m more curious if the results are as consistently good as advertised, as usually NN results are cherry picked for good ones.
I mean, it goes further to your point -try it out. It seems that it depends _very_ much on the use cases.
OTOH, the absence of IPTC metadata editing means I can't use it to manage my image library, because I rely heavily on IPTC keywords.
Also, Luminar has a very strong "hands-off" attitude toward the file system and the original image files. So all the fancy improvements you make are held in the app's catalog. If you want an actual file containing your improved image you have to "Export" it. You can't use Luminar, as you could use Adobe Bridge, to move or copy image files from folder to folder.
You don't need to be using non-standard optics or deep learning AI techniques. It can be as simple as averaging a bunch of pictures together. HDR is computational photography, as is a panorama.
I'm sure Luminar 4 has similar capabilities, but all they show is dodging and burning, beauty filters, and some sky replacement. Those technically fit the definition, but often aren't thought of as computational photography.
By that definition, every digital camera/phone is computational photography
However, every single camera phone I've ever had had PLENTY of computational photography built into it.
You can make an argument that using deep learning to affect the sky is “more computational” in a way than a “basic” CCD to JPEG pipeline, but the boundaries become fuzzy and arbitrary.
It is the same difference as scanning and copying book text with a different font vs translating and rewriting text. You would say that the book that was scanned and OCR-ed is basically the same while translated and rewritten is no longer exactly the same text.
The same is with the image. Making a photo is preserving an image. We can do couple of different transforms like sharpening or converting to black and white, but the image is basically the same content.
On the other hand rewriting the image like changing the weather, removing people from background or making the subject look younger changes the content, the meaning of the image.
That is not the case for photography.
In film photography, the “latent image” is mere fiction - there is no single image waiting to be revealed. What there is is a bunch of silver salts suspended in gelatin reacting to temperature, electromagnetic radiation, etc. When you want to turn this into an image that the human eye can make sense of, you make them react further with a specific developer/fixer at a specific dilution, in a controlled environment. Changing any of these parameters will lead to a different image, well after the initial exposure was made.
In digital photography, you have a set of charge readings, that you then turn into colored pixels following an arbitrary process that can be as complex as you want it to be. You can merely average nearby values and use the result, or run them through a neural network designed to <make colors more accurate | make people look younger | replace trees with sharks | whatever you want> and use the result. Either is a computational process.
Now we can certainly draw semantic distinctions, like “this person wasn’t in the picture when it was taken”, or “this person had a pimple on their nose that was removed”. But as mentioned earlier, these are fuzzy and arbitrary. Is a long shot exposure of the Milky Way a “rewritten” image? What about an HDR image? What to make of early digital photography features like red eye removal?
(Answer: it doesn’t matter, all photography is the result of a chemical or computational process, and there is no such thing as a “true” image)
That's not what "computational photography" means to most. For example, the QuickTake is not considered to have done computational photography.
Computational photography uses computation to go beyond what a simple lens → sensor → sensor-to-image algorithm (like a demosaicing algorithm) can do.
(keeping in mind that we are really talking about many different algorithms running at across the hardware stack, ie likely distributed across multiple chips)
Not to be outdone by in camera processing, photographers will opt to shoot in RAW and have PC's do the conversion/post-processing, which in many cases is even more sophisticated algorithms.
Don't get me wrong, I use it sometimes to clean up and enhance my images, but really it's not so dramatically different from other tools.
Some of the AI features are really slick, but not quite as magical as the demos suggest. Or maybe you just have to actually spend 100s of hours to learn to use it effectively, and I'm just a n00b.
You can get better over time at using the dodge/burn tools, or selection masks, or color curves, etc in Photoshop - and use them at very granular, minute levels. If the final result is not up to your expectations, you know that it’s due to your own doing and you can try again, get someone to help you, watch a tutorial, etc.
However, all these magical AI sliders give you very little insight about what’s actually going on behind the scenes, and typically only expose a few vague sliders for the photographer to manipulate, often in an all-or-nothing fashion. If you like what cranking up the "AI Skin Defect Removal" slider does to the texture of the nose but not the tone of the cheek, there's no much you can do to address that.
While it makes for cool demos, and the appeal of “one click and your boring sky becomes picturesque” is clear for an entire category of users, this makes them pretty boring and limited as creative tools.
"Hours of learning" for your hobby.... God .... anything but that!!
So before you rush to plop down your credit card for Luminar "preorder", I encourage you to wait for a trial version and try it out. There, I saved you $99. You're welcome.
Again, I know this has been going on for decades, but I still worry that by automating more of it, it will lead to a bigger degree of "sameness" in photos.
Unless photos are taken for documentation, it’s more important for the photo to capture the feeling they photographer is trying to convey. 5 minutes after you talk to someone, you’re not going to remember every single blemish on their face; you’ll remember the general shape and a few distinguishing features. I would much rather the photo match the memory than the fact.
Of course, this can and has been taken too far in some instances, but I see no problems with removing a pimple and whitening teeth to more warmly represent (and therefore remember) my subject.
And to clarify, it's one thing to hide a pimple, but when it comes to the core features of one's face (e.g. "face slimming", pore smoothing, even undereye color IMO) you start distorting who that person actually is.
I'm a serious photographer. For myself, I'll create any imagery I want - after all, I'm not trying to convince a jury of something objectively true. The line that I personally choose to draw is to make it something that could be true - I won't do the crazy oversized full moons, for example. But that doesn't mean that nobody else should create such an image.
But I'll go back to my original claim, that EVERY image involves interpretation. The data coming off your camera sensor isn't readily interpreted by the human eye at all. It needs to impose some transformation to get to a visual representation.
Looking at it from the other way around, we're all aware that our own eyes are lying to us. We interpret brightness and shades relative to what we see around them, so just being in different lighting will make us see things differently. It's physiologically impossible to create an image that will always be seen the same, even by a single pair of eyes.
It's very similar to wine or whisky vs soft drinks. When you're making whisky you can select the ingredients, vary the process, age it in different casks etc but you can't add spices. If you're making a soft drink or something similar you can do whatever you want, just like in photoshop photography. Sure it's much more flexible but that probably also means that it will never be seen as quite as refined.
If you ask the average person on the street to name a photographer, probably the only answer you'll get is Ansel Adams. He's best known for his stunning imagery of America's national parks. I don't think there's anyone who would claim that his portrayals of them are inaccurate in any way, certainly not that they're lies.
Yet Adams was a master of darkroom manipulation. Part of what makes his portfolio so striking is his deft use of techniques like dodging and burning. This is certainly a bolder manipulation that something like aperture. He was doing this on film in the early-to-mid 1900s, so I think it's safe to say that this recognized master of traditional photography was already extensively manipulating imagery in many of the same ways that the unaware are currently decrying.
I’m not sure who is ‘unaware” of what but I do think that in general things that are more strictly “regulated”, where you have less freedom, like wine making, are more highly regarded. Maybe there are lots of exceptions, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just because old art forms tend to be less freely controlled, and by their nature have higher status.
But with photography, are there any photoshop magicians that are as highly thought of as this Anselm Adams?
Photos have always been edited. This is putting technology into the reach of a few more people, but it's only "lying" if you believe photos represent some absolute truth. They really haven't since almost the beginning of photogrophay
I'd suggest looking up "Self-portrait as a drowned man" to see how far back that reaches: http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/self_port...
"What is truth?"
I shot a music festival this past weekend, and I'm in the process of processing it in Lightroom. Part of what I'm doing is to make images that the artists can use for their own marketing. So I'm making various refinements to the images like making face a bit brighter and sharper, and smoothing out skin blemishes, and maybe whitening teeth.
Am I lying to people by creating an image that is brighter and sharper? Is it going too far to make the skin look smoother?
And even if we grant that I've changed beyond what the optics delivered, that's only part of the experience. Is it out of line for me interpret a bit to try to carry what's being lost from the rest of the senses - the fact that there was fantastic music all around, friendly people, and all that? Maybe a brighter, sharper face is a legitimate way for me to depict the gestalt of the experience.
I suspect you didn't even read my reply.
First, I never made any argument along the lines of "everyone does it". I don't know why you include that in your reply to me.
Second, the final paragraph of my reply specifically addresses whether it's "oversold". There's much more to an experience than can be seen from a photograph of the scene, and I think it's fair to try to capture some of that in the final image.
Finally, "it’s a lie made for profit." No, this is outright false. In fact, the music festival I was shooting was entirely free. Nobody paid a penny to see the performances. And the musicians performed because they love music and want to share it; they weren't paid a penny either. You're letting your own prejudices bias your judgment.
EDIT: and just to round out the not-for-profit thing, I was a volunteer, too. My own time, my own camera, my own computer and software. I love the music and I love photography. I do this because I want to give something back to the artists who are giving me their music.
If they're boring photos, sure. Great photos are great photos.
Sure, and additionally some decisions will be made for you depending on the underlying technology (e.g. film chemistry).
By "straight out of camera shots", the person I'm quoting meant a natural or realistic style, where images accurately (if not perfectly) represent what the scene looked like when the photographer took the picture. That absolutely doesn't mean "boring" — photos don't have to be over-manipulated or -stylized to be thrilling.
https://www.amazon.com/Instant-Cameras/b?ie=UTF8&node=291227