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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

I think Nikkor assumes that you would use software to do the post processing. It gives you something a lot closer to what's coming from the sensor, so you can choose which $XXX image editing suite you want to run it through. The iPhone knows the vast majority of people won't do that with their photos, so they can go all-out, but you're stuck with their specific result baked in to your photo.

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By the way I know this is not your point, but there are excellent editing options for zero dollars! Which, I suppose X=0 is valid for your comment.

https://www.rawtherapee.com/

Ehh...RawTherapee (and also Darktable) are certainly capable of editing, but I've found that in practice they require far more effort to get results comparable to Adobe or Capture One's RAW processing.

The workflow of Darktable gets me confused compared to Lightroom/Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw tool; there are so many options and features that it can be overwhelming. Capture ONE from my experience delivers superior RAW decoding vs. Adobe Camera Raw, but I still use ACR.

Oh absolutely -- I wanted to give Darktable a chance, and I really worked to figure out enough to actually do meaningful edits.

I think it's a great example of the phrase "took many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth". For any given editing task you want, there are like 5 different modules that all do basically different variations on the same thing, and each one has quirks that presumably only make sense to the original author of that module.

This makes sense. I run Linux and have no interest in adobe software. It does seem like sometimes it’s tricky to use RawTherapee, but so far I’ve been happy with the results. I got a used Canon Pro 100 photo printer and I’ve been printing 13x19” (A3+) photos edited with RawTherapee. I’m not using it professionally or anything, but I’ve been very happy with it for my use!

I switched to RT and I love it. Some techniques are outright impossible to achieve in LR or other raw interpretation software.

Apple has always been about making the choice for it’s users. Jobs always thought giving users too many options was problematic.

While in training at my first restaurant job I asked a party where they would like to sit in the dining room. The owner pulled me aside and said to never give people a choice. They'll get confused and think that there's a "best" table and that their dinner could suffer if they feel like they didn't get it.

I don't know if it's "real" or not but between work and my personal life I've got decision fatigue. Help make decisions. Especially about non-important ones that feel important at the time.

In one of my best sales jobs, I got a full day training course on choice fatigue and how to guide customers to both maximize revenues and their happiness. The business I worked for had high rates of customer return, so the training was centered not around scalping the most money today but how to develop a lifetime relationship where we maximize LTV.

It was pretty fascinating. I ended up doing a fair bit of independent research on the topic to see if it was just same sales BS or a known psychological phenomenon, and it turns out it's a well-known branch of psychology/sociology. (Not necessarily related to the Decision Fatigue / Ego Depletion theory which has been tough to replicate, but is probably true in some respect).

Coincidentally enough, I took that education to my next job, which was waiting tables, and it held up there very well. The key, in my opinion, is actually being deeply knowledgeable about the product so your recommendations are authentic. Bonus points if you use the product.

Circuit City stores, back when they had entire walls of VCRs and tape decks and receivers, all of which were "on sale" (ahem), instructed their salespeople to always give customers definitive advice in their price range. "Oh, this Sony is the absolute best tape deck." Once people had reassurance that they were making the right choice, even from a total stranger, they'd open their wallets. But not before.

The current stereotype for this is the peppy young salesperson having "this exact model at home".

I wonder what kind of mansions they live in, because I've seen the same 20something dude have like 5 different washing machines and 7 different fridges at home =)

It's definitely real! At least as far as my N=1 dataset is concerned. I dislike having to pick a seat when they're all kind of the same. Just tell me where to go, I have to make enough decisions at other times in life.

There is obviously better tables. Near the windows. Away from busy traffic.

Fascinating.

It seems like some table choices are better for the customer, some are better for the server. As a customer I like to be away from the other tables and the server wants everyone together in a noisy clump.

I suspect the other option here is to just ask. “We’re getting to know each other. Do you think we could sit in the booth in the corner over there?”

I absolutely loathe those setups in some tiny restaurants where they line up 2 person tables in a row with 6-12" between tables so you can hear the stranger next to you talking more clearly than your partner across the table. Nothing else triggers my unbearable social anxiety like it. I've gotten seated at those when there's, like, an entire half of the restaurant empty.

Yes, I remember that campgrounds in the American Rockies let you choose your spot, while in the Canadian Rockies they assign you one. And I realized we were simply happier in Canada!

Ah, so applying the parenting strategy to adults.

“Allow the illusion of choice”.

Not just Jobs! There is no end[0] to research[1] showing that many options is terrible[2], and "too many options" is terrible by definition.

0. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/07/31/br...

1. https://mediaroom.iese.edu/new-research-shows-why-the-human-...

2. https://bigthink.com/thinking/choice-analysis-paralysis/

That's a bit silly in this context. It's not like the person's intentions aren't fairly clear when they decided between buying an iPhone or buying a $3000 DSLR setup. Is it really so evil that Apple "decided" the person who bought the iPhone probably wanted the pictures to be heavily post processed instead of raw data from the sensor?

I don't see how that's relevant. You can tap the RAW button in the iOS camera app to switch between the two choices, both of which looks great. Most DSLRs only have one option because the second one (in-camera JPEG) looks like crap. They can barely do auto focus/wb/iso/shutter/aperture let alone postprocessing.

And honestly history has mostly vindicated him.

A lot of post processing that modern phones are doing isn't really practical though in post. For super low light shots for example, the iPhone will take hundreds of exposures and merge them. If you were going to save this all as RAW, it's multiple gigabytes of data per frame.

"How would you do {night, portrait} mode on a real camera" has been brought up a few times in this post and the answer is: you don't, because it's not needed. I can prop an iPhone on the windowsill and let it do a 30 second night mode capture, and I can also prop my Nikon Z7 on the same windowsill and let it do a 2-5 second exposure. The latter is so much higher quality it's no comparison at all. (And 2s can be hand-held at 24 mm, unlike the 30s night mode)

Though of course deep sky photographers do actually just this - many exposures composited together - but then we are talking about subjects so dim you need effective exposures of 30 minutes or so.

> For super low light shots for example, the iPhone will take hundreds of exposures and merge them. If you were going to save this all as RAW, it's multiple gigabytes of data per frame.

A bit of a digression but the reason why phones need so many exposures to get a decent low light image is due to their sensors/optics being relatively poor at low light. You would only need a small fraction of the exposures from a modern pro-grade camera to generate a comparable final image. This also lets you capture objects in motion in low light far, far better since you can get your required image data in a smaller temporal window.

It does not take hundreds of exposures. That is impractical and above all not a good idea. In low light the shutter speed is likely slow (1/10th of a second for a example). Even 16 frames is more than a seconds worth of frames. At that point the differences start to become too high for stacking to be worthwhile, especially because it is hand held. Secondly, the reduction of noise by merging is at best the sqrt (number of frames). Past even 12 frames the benefits start to be questionable.

> Secondly, the reduction of noise by merging is at best the sqrt (number of frames)

This assumes the (typically Gaussian) noise is applied to a static image. Arguably, one could exploit the slight shakiness in a handheld shot to create an image with even less noise.

As a thought experiment, consider thousands of shots of a perfectly static scene made with an idealized, noiseless camera that is moved a very tiny amount for each shot. You could continue improving the resolution of a generated, composite image quite a bit until warping due to camera displacement became noticeable.

Recent techniques like this are actually being used for cryo-electron microscopy to create extremely high-resolution imaging of proteins.

Yes what you are referring to is implemented already by Google and probably others. The Google camera uses it to skip demosaicking by shifting the image by a pixel using OIS. Still the original post was under the impression that hundreds of exposures are merged which is just not the case

Sorry, I'm a photo-noob. What type of post-processing is the iPhone doing that professional would do themselves with RAW? Looking at RawTherapee, it looks like colour profiling. What other operations do people do?

The iPhone does a lot of stuff: - correcting for lens distortion - automatically setting white balance - optimizing color and contrast - blending multiple exposures when it's dark and has some advanced denoising tricks (which sometimes gives photo's a bit of an 'oil painting' look) - sharpening to get that 'crisp' look (even if your lens is not that sharp)

I think correcting for lens distortion is the main thing that wasn't already mentioned in the article. Regular cameras can't do that, but the iPhone knows exactly what lens is being used and can take advantage of that.

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