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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?q=snapchat+cartoon+eyes&tbm=is...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They were awful.
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. :)
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
Unless there is massive unit variance, which is even worse.
So much for taste :)
What's your point?
Which is what many of us do.
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.
It doesn't have much effect. I make fried rice with and without it and can't really tell the difference.
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.
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.
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.
Of course getting good results with this approach requires the user to have more knowledge of and practice at photography.
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.
Historically cameras have merely altered the style of images. These days smartphone cameras are altering the content of images.
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.
How?
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 :)
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.
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.
You need to change API to Camera2 and then you will be able to enable RAW.
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.
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).
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.
How can you trust the picture taken if it might not reflect reality?
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.
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.