Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
axios.com
axios.com
The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result.
The thesis of the article "I don't understand white balance, so smartphone cameras are bad"
Broadly, the camera is doing the right thing here. Nobody developed these auto white balance algorithms to factor in the sky turning orange. The camera/imaging pipeline is seeing this crazy orange cast, assuming it’s deep incandescent light, and then trying to compensate, which is generally what you want it to do.
Edit: Not to mention that the auto WB algorithm out dates smartphones by more than a decade.
If, in winter sport season, you sent your photos from the Sahara to be developed, chances were you got what looked like snow landscapes back. Conversely, sending winter sport photos in july/august might give you ‘beach with skiers’ photos back (I think that was because of operator error, not automation)
(Which is for the best. I was an extremely homely child. It's for the good of all we shot with slow, blurry film.)
The reason this article is so frustrating to me is that instead of the author highlighting what has been true since the dawn of photography - that cameras never truly capture the scene as we view it - they chose to baselessly attack a specific set of devices which happen to have cameras attached to them.
If this were to happen 10 years ago to someone using a Nikon Coolpix 1234Whatever, they would be equally disappointed, and someone using an Olympus Stylus somethingorotherD may have been very pleased. The color representation in images has always been the property of the medium's manufacturer, from Kodak to Polaroid and so on.
It would have been nice to see the author share information instead of just ignorant disappointment
I realise that why I see is just one "interpretation" of the reality, but it seems sensible that one possible ideal for cameras would be to perfectly match my perception of the world. Is it just impossible because the difference in perception is just so big between individuals that what would be perfect for me would be way off for someone else?
You can also create (at least theoretically, no idea how they compare currently) cameras that are better than human eyes at things like resolution, contrasts and so on, and that seems like another possible ideal; but which one is more relevant seems very context dependant.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad ideal, though. Smartphone cameras do a very good job at automatically performing all the right corrections in most circumstances. It's just nontrivial, and thus unsurprising that the normal algorithms fail in weird edge cases like "the entire sky is deep red".
Also, with smartphone sensor/lens quality improvements as well as computational photography enhancements, smartphones are for _all_ picture takers. Point and shoot cameras are no longer relevant.
A better version of your reply is: Expecting accurate results in photographs is not for people who are ignorant of general photographic principles and technology.
It has the exposure right, it's just trying to compensate for what it thinks is "bad lighting."
When I spend time editing photos my dad would claim I was "lying" by editing them, he thought any modification to digital photos was wrong because the jpeg the camera produces is "reality."
But of course, as this article shows, the camera is adding its own interpretation to the scene. Since our eyes can adjust to many lighting situations, the camera has to try to compensate and reproduce what it thinks our eyes would see, but it has no way to know if it's right! So, sometimes it's necessary to go back to the raw data and recreate the image as you remember it, along with whatever emotions you want it to elicit, rather than taking what comes out of the camera as "gospel".
Of course, most photography is not about color reproduction but about telling a story.
And automatic cameras (like the way phones are mostly used) take a way a lot of control when it comes to deciding how color look in the photo. On most phones you can frame the image, zoom a bit, and decide when to take the image. Other controls like aperture, shutter speed and color balance are automatic.
It's all similar to how many people used disposable film cameras (no options except aim and push the capture button) or cheap reusable cams (zoom, maybe exposure, etc) but film cameras that let you adjust everything existed at the same time
What I haven't seen yet in this conversation is that back in the film days you changed your white balance setting by changing... your film.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
It's funny that you mention this because to me the car kind of looks like it's grey, lit by orange light from all sides except the top. Edit: after looking at it a bit more I think you're right and I'm wrong
If I'm editing photos and someone has a temporary blemish or a pimple, I'm more than likely to edit it out. We don't remember faces to the same level of detail as a camera can, so it feels more correct to touch up such blemishes.
Rules are even stricter than that for photojournalists. Photographers have lost jobs just for editing out extraneous objects (like a telephone pole "growing out" of someone's head) to make a photo look better. The thinking is likely along the lines of it's a slippery slope once you start editing out things.
How Un-Cromwellian!
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/warts-and-all.html
> This phrase 'warts and all' is said to derive from Oliver Cromwell's instructions to the painter Sir Peter Lely, when commissioning a painting.
> At the time of the alleged instruction, Cromwell was Lord Protector of England. Lely had been portrait artist to Charles I and, following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he was appointed as Charles II's Principal Painter in Ordinary.
> Lely's painting style was, as was usual at the time, intended to flatter the sitter. Royalty in particular expected portraits to show them in the best possible light, if not to be outright fanciful. Lely's painting of Charles II shows what was expected of a painting of a head of state in the 17th century. It emphasizes the shapely royal calves - a prized fashion feature at that time.
> Cromwell did have a preference for being portrayed as a gentleman of military bearing, but was well-known as being opposed to all forms of personal vanity. This 'puritan Roundhead' versus 'dashing Cavalier' shorthand is often used to denote the differences in style of the two opposing camps in the English Commonwealth and subsequent Restoration. It is entirely plausible that he would have issued a 'warts and all' instruction when being painted and it is unlikely that Lely would have modified his style and produced the 'warts and all' portrait of Cromwell unless someone told him to.
Of course, the source of the phrase is, itself, unsourced, and Cromwell likely never said it.
And then there's color blindness or tetrachromacy where some people see less/more colors than others.
So one of my eyes faced the inside of the house, the other eye faced the outside of the house. I waited a little bit and then pulled away from the door. One eye had adjusted to the brightness - and color - of the inside and the other hd done the same for outside.
Our eyes have white balance plus physical and chemical exposure. pretty cool.
All digital color photography is computational because sensor physics, display physics, and human biology are distinct processes. Whenever you have multiple color channels you need to make assumptions about the relationships between them. This is color balance and it happens in software.
As for color balance, sure, but the parent wasn't limited to color balance.
What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait garbage for the photographically and technologically ignorant. The replies to it are disappointingly similar.
This is probably especially true for people like photojournalist, who shoot thousands of photos in a session and don't want to spend hours processing them afterward.
What about shooting in mixed light, where you have different color light sources inside and outside of a room? Do you think photographers are just saying "meh, this looks fine purple, I'll fix it in post"... or are they trying to capture the scene as close to accurate as possible (perhaps biasing exposure to compensate for limits in highlight or shadow detail capture)
Edit: Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
Of course, but when issues arise, you can always change it in post. Also, you can batch set Auto WB in pretty much any competent image editor. But yes, in the vast majority of cases one would set a given WB.
> Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
I totaly understand that too, whenever I can I try to use vintage glass because it brings something enjoyable to the experience. But the photographers that shoot in JPEG typically do it in places where a missed shot isn't that big of a deal.
FWIW, every photojouranlist I've known shoots RAW+JPEG all the time or whenever the light gets fucky for this exact reason. And as someone who shoots multiple hundreds to a thousand images relatively often in a single day, it doesn't really add much issues to my workflow - I'm not going to be doing much anything with all but a few dozen images, and I'm going to be editing all of them even if it takes me two hours or so to make sure I'm getting the most out of my pictures. So if someday I forget to set my white balance, it doesn't make that huge of an issue to my workflow, main problem is that I'm not going to get as good af an impression of what they'll end up looking like when I press the shutter.
That said, in this particular situation, you'd be changing the WB in post.
I definitely would not be doing that lol. I would prefer to set up the camera so that I can get an idea of what I'm actually capturing before I go out. In this case you can take a moment to adjust WB and exposure and then just go out and focus on your images without worrying about too much changing in terms of exposure. I would be super annoyed shooting this type of scene if every time I looked down at the LCD I just saw a normalized scene.
You're wrong OK, just deal with it lol
You can use the same receptacle to discard your notion that this article had any value.
I had to really boost the ISO, the camera thought it was so dark outside. In fact the light sensors for the man automatic light controls around our property, including some street lights, were still detecting that it was evening.
Auto white-balance vs manual, taken seconds apart. The second one is closer to reality (but still too bright).
in LA, we had a bit of a clearing yesterday, but the bobcat fires (and others) have turned us hazy and slightly orange again. i can feel it in my airways. it's more worrisome than the corona everyone else seems to be fretting about, because it certainly will cause unseen damage to everyone's lungs in varying amounts. hundreds of thousands die every year from air pollution.
[0] delillo, white noise
(i didn't even see the photos because google amp infests the site and i block it out of principle. not a fan of leading every paragraph with bold in an effort to be hard-punchingly pithy either.)
Even in the default camera app you can point at something white, like white paper lit with white light, and long-press to get an auto focus and auto exposure lock. Then you can get a picture of the orange sky / landscape and it will use the locked white balance setting.
Such a naive statement. Once those phones' white balance is corrected, they should be able to capture the orange tinge. Even in a DSLR, if the white balance is set to auto, it would not capture the orange tinge. Cloudy might be a good starting point.
This is entirely besides the point because the issue stated here involves color interpretation based on a selected white point. Left to their own devices digital cameras will compensate for scene color on purpose, because 99% of the time people don't want color casts in their photos. The author is trying to blame the camera for people's ignorance of photography, which is just silliness.
Don't agree? Set your phone's white balance to daylight for a week and see how often you agree that the captured picture is what you actually wanted
(FWIW: My "dumb" camera is collecting dust. I rarely take it out, and never bring it on vacation.)
If you want the best of both worlds you can get a mirrorless which is less bulky, but still have a big sensor.
Whereas a very sharp lens for a DSLR might have a maximum sharpness of 90+MP.
Essentially you are telling your camera post capture what the temperature of the source is.
A white countertop lit with fluorescent light would work.