Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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> unclear to me what they gain

It's clear to me! I have an iPhone Pro 13, and I tell you: the Dolby and HEIC formats are a key reason I use the Apple ecosystem instead of Android. The pictures and video I take have a huge dynamic range, accurate true-to-life colour, and have a surprisingly small encoded size. The 4K Dolby Vision HDR video the iPhone takes looks like it has been professionally graded and rarely needs any further touching up. To reproduce it with any other device would require a significant setup of something like DaVinci Resolve and a RAW video workflow.

I don't know if everyone but me is colorblind or what, but it's night & day to me. The Apple + Dolby Vision videos are mindblowingly good, whereas everything I've seen taken by or displayed on an Android device is always incorrect in some way. Blown highlights, oversaturated, or whatever.

Google has little clue about colour, HDR, standards, quality, or anything at all along those lines that photographers or videographers care about. They're still releasing SDKs and entire operating systems with the baked-in assumption that images are always 8-bit sRGB SDR. Then they don't bother color-managing that at all, leading to the inevitable end result of either desaturated or garish color depending on the display panel used.

PS: Microsoft used to be the best of the bunch back in the Vista days, and is now regressing to be the worst of the bunch. In part, this is driven by the need to be "cross platform" and compatible with Google's Android. Only Windows and Mac uses 16-bit linear light blending for the desktop window manager, whereas Android uses 8-bit unmanaged God-only-knows-what-color-space.

> I don't know if everyone but me is colorblind or what

Possibly. In most blind tests, for shots straight out of the camera, people prefer the Google Pixel photos to iPhone photos. Professionals complain that google over-amps the HDR, but consumers prefer that. Apple may have better codecs, but Google has better software post-processing.

iPhone still wins in video though.

> Possibly. In most blind tests, for shots straight out of the camera, people prefer the Google Pixel photos to iPhone photos.

People tend to favor shots that are punchy and high contrast, as far as I can tell from the many blind tests various youtubers have performed over the years.

From my viewpoint, iPhones have almost always had better color processing straight out of the camera as it is much closer to true to life than Samsung or Google's. Google's image processing in other areas seems to be better. Low light continues to not be that great on iPhone, which is a big use case while the Pixel excels at it. Denoising isn't great. The iPhone can also tend to lose some fine details that are present in Google's photos.

Overall, I think Apple's photos are more accurate and serve better as a baseline to edit photos, but Pixel wins out in many common scenarios that the iPhone just doesn't do as well along with having a more pleasing image straight out of the camera (because most people want to look better than real life, not like real life).

Yeah, because "True to life" is irrelevant for people's personal photos.

"True toMEMORY of life" is what's more important, and Pixel photos absolutely feel like they more match what I feel like I see.

I think this is right. To me the Google pixel photos look unnatural. But everything (dark areas to bright areas) is very clearly visible and it has a certain professional look to it. I can see why people like it. But to me, it looks unnatural.

Maybe it’s a matter of getting used to.

…yet for all that focus on proper color reproduction, Apple *still* can't be bothered to gamma-correct when blurring colors.

Fun experiment that will have you filing radars until the end of time: find a red notification bubble on an iPhone home screen. Now, slightly pull down the screen (as if to open the search screen) slowly. Note how the blurred bubble suddenly got darker instead of retaining the same visual brightness only redder.

Does this really work..? I just switched to an iPhone 14 from a Pixel 5 and the pictures are so much worse. Maybe if I bothered with a raw workflow, but in automatic mode, the pixel photos are way better...

At the time of writing this comment all siblings and their children are about comparing Stills, where GP is specifically talking about Video.

Keying/Grading video is a significantly bigger chore than color correcting a still.

Not that I’ve had either phone but I would say you’re likely in the minority. I have the iPhone 12 and have always been happy with the iPhone cameras. It’s not like it even comes close to my DSLR but they’re decent for phones. I haven’t had a lot of Androids either but all of the ones I owned had terrible cameras.

You don’t need to shoot in RAW to get good results. I’m curious what your complaints are?

The Pixels are a standout among the usual Android crapfest. Google has really good computational photography. The images are much better balanced, not oversaturated, much sharper, night mode is awesome, etc.

Even with the 48 MP sensor I'm getting subpar results. Apple might have better hardware but their computational photography hasn't quite caught up yet.

Here's a sample gallery (not mine) https://imgur.io/a/vG6Yskx

I was expecting a major upgrade going from the Pixel 5 to the 14 Pro. It's actually a slight downgrade.

Keep in mind that it is borderline impossible to show iPhone photos in full fidelity in a web gallery. The benefit you get out of iDevices is the wide gamut and HDR photo format. Converted to sRGB SDR JPG images, there's not much difference compared to every other phone manufacturer.

This is my point: Apple is far above the lowest common denominator.

If I'm hearing you right, it's possible to capture higher-fidelity photos on iPhone, but then you require either special hardware to view it correctly and/or a special workflow to make a better end product for web viewing by tweaking the values yourself?

Whereas the Pixels just make better web-ready photos from the get-go, not because their hardware is better, but because their algorithms are. That seems a lot more useful to me because you can actually capture good photos nearly every time, with zero effort, and send them to anyone.

If you have a specialized professional workflow, I entirely believe that you can -- with effort -- generate a better end product. But that's not what most people use their phones for. "Dynamic range" doesn't mean anything to the average person, and if they use HDR it's to create that 2000s-like super amplified gimmicky lighting effect. There's not really even a way to get real HDR to properly/intercompatibly show on most consumer computing devices anyway... same with gamut and color spaces.

IMO (only) making it look good on the average device should be a more important goal than making a workflow that only professionals with specialized knowledge and software can utilize.

You are misunderstanding.

> special hardware

Any iPhone, or any Mac device. The other vendors refusing to support HEIC and/or HDR image formats is their prerogative. Keep in mind that the Apple formats are just h.265 still frames, not some bizarre propriety standard!

> special workflow

I press the shutter button and send the result via iMessage. Is that some esoteric professional workflow?

Again, “web ready” means precisely: the lowest common denominator supported by browsers as far back as NetScape Navigator 4.

Apple decided not to limit themselves to 1990s era standards.

Google is content to remain hobbled.

Yes, this is also what I most appreciate about Apple’s approach. They’re the only company that care about calibrated displays on consumer products. Even top-end TVs like LG OLEDs ship with terrible default settings. The only display that’s as color accurate out-of-box as Apple’s are the ones on my professional camera.

If I edit a photo and I send it to someone with an iPhone I know the colors will look exactly like how I intended it to look. You can’t say the same about Androids because the screens often aren’t even trying to be color accurate.

I’m never sure if some of the photo file types are an extension of Apple’s “walled garden” approach or if other companies just make lazy products. But the rarity of consumer displays that aren’t tuned for maximum blue-light emission is maddening and other companies really need to step up their game in this area.

>Even top-end TVs like LG OLEDs ship with terrible default settings.

I'm sure LG and all the other manufacturers know what they're doing.

Consumers must prefer the garish vivid mode, aka "torch mode". Implying that they shouldn't seems to disregard their preferences.

My Samsung phone can take HEIF pictures and HDR10+ video, but both of those are disabled by default.

I think we're dealing with the classic "Professional vs. Regular/Consumer opinion" here.

The person you responded to seems to work with media or at least knows some things about video formats and editing. To them, true, raw colors and representations are what they want. You on the other hand may like the slightly unrealistic, but appealing look of the Pixel phones, which tend to look oversaturated to professionals, but better to consumers.

Similar to how audiophiles like headphones which sound flat and boring to regular people, yet audiophiles think regular peoples headphones have way too much bass and treble.

Different products and needs for different use-cases, I guess.

These things aren't mutually exclusive, FWIW. I'm not a professional, but I was a passionate amateur back when SLRs were still a thing. I hate the gimmicky Instagram-style photos myself and overwhelmingly prefer "neutral" pictures -- it's one of the reasons I chose the Pixel.

IMO the Pixel phones aren't more saturated than the iPhones (and certainly less than default Samsungs), they just have better dynamic range and color balance. Here's a sample gallery from a sibling post (not my gallery): https://imgur.io/a/vG6Yskx

The pool picture with the red roof and teal/blue water, for example... the Pixel has a less saturated roof but better color correction for the pool. It's way sharper in the tree photo. In the last two photos with the yellow car by the fence, the iPhone completely blew out the sky but the Pixel captured it fine.

That's just one gallery, but that's been my experience the overwhelming amount of time. The Pixels are unique among Android cameras in their ability to process natural-looking photos at very high quality, very quickly, at a very reasonable price point. Other manufacturers ramp up hardware specs or added thirty lenses, but Google's approach is to tackle it all computationally, stacking and analyzing multiple exposures and using algorithms to produce a single output (all automatically). The results are really quite amazing -- to my eyes.

At the end of the day digital photography is always a series of judgment calls -- by the sensors, by the firmware, by the software, by the format, by the compressor, by the photographer, doing signals processing on detected light in various ways. Apple optimized the beginning and end stages of that, whereas Google focused on the middle.

It might be possible to get better output out of the iPhones if you run it through special software and workflows, but out of the box the Pixels generate better outputs, and I think that's the way most users (on either side) are going to use them...

You're guessing at my point of view... correctly.

I'm not exactly a professional, but I've done enough photography that I twitch slightly whenever I see color balance that hasn't been set correctly to neutral grey.

It's like a typesetter that can't handle bad kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/

I'm glad that I was able to guess correctly! :D

You're maybe not a professional per se, but if I read "color balance that hasn't been set correctly to neutral grey", I have no clue what that's supposed to mean. (I know a bit more now because I fell into a color balance rabbit-hole after reading your comment).

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