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.
I think this particular big demonstrates a massive gap in what people think photoprocessing is, and what it has very recently become
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.
I think it is, Afterall that's what all the Instagram filters are for, and that's where most photos end up
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.
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.
I agree with your point though. I dislike "computational photography".
[1] guess it is called demosaicing
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.
But it does seem like they have quite a few high tech algorithms at play. More than just multi-frame noise reduction.
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...
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:
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.
> 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
As in, "Incredibly-cheap-but-sometimes-there's-rat-poop-in-it" lunch?
Assuming you don't have a sampling error here, of course.
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
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.
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.
The processor still doesn't have access to said "real dof", which is the point of this comment thread.
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.
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.
(And as a digital camera user - at least I can hot swap batteries. I miss my old cell phones that allowed for this.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
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?”
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.
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.
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.