Comment by to11mtm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by to11mtm | Hacker News Reader

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> Yeah I can just about get a decent crop of the moon on my Nikon Z50 with the 250mm lens on it that looks reasonable, if it’s on a tripod.

Yeah 300+ is more comfortable for moonshots on APSC sensors, unless you are in -really- good conditions (i.e. perfect sky, far away from artificial lighting.) With 400mm I was able to take a 'pretty dang good' moonshot just outside of my house, even with a little bit of haze that day. It took a good amount of tweaking in DXO to look -great-, but it was worth it.

> What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do you know it will be telling it?

This is one of the reasons I still don't care for getting rid of my DSLRs and shoot raw [0] (Besides, PureView was the last phone camera setup I actually enjoyed.)

At the very -least-, these should be settings that have very obvious controls including turning it off by default, and Ideally should be 'opted in.' Otherwise it opens up the possibility that what is happening could count as cheating at certain photo benchmarks.

[0] Okay I also shoot raw to laugh at how awkward some of Sony's E-mount lenses are without lens profile correction applied. Looking at you SEL16F28.

Edit: Context of what you can do at ~550mm equiv. F8, ISO 250, 1/320: https://imgur.com/a/ryoqQB9

I don't know if DSLRs have changed much - but don't they all require post-processing in order to get any type of sharp picture? Out of the camera they aways seemed to be fuzzy as crap until you ran a sharpening filter.

That is - any time you are shooting digital, you don't every look at what the camera saw, but at what some computer interpreted it to be.

I'd be interesting in knowing what that picture of the moon looked like right out of the raw capture.

Unless I misunderstood you, this is a common misconception — with digital cameras there is no "real" or "raw" picture. What the camera captures is just the output of an analog-to-digital converter. How that resembles a picture at all is always a matter of subjective interpretation, there is no ground truth.

RAW files so are as close to what the sensor saw as you might actually get. As opposed to the camera-created JPGs, which can look great but have much less data to work with. Or the JPGs created in-camera using in-camera processing (saturation, contrast, sharpness.

I shoot both, RAW and JPG fine. The latter for quick sharing, with in-camera processing except for action shoots at 9 fps. JPG fine never runs into buffer limits, RAW or JPGs using processing does so. And for birds in flight or sports or similar I don't care that mich about RAW anyway.

Thank you for calling them raw files and not images.

Too many people think of raw files as analogous to slides shot in film cameras. In reality they are digital representations of the analog voltages made by sensors. In order to “see” a raw file it has to be processed which usually means demosaicing and assigning color to values based on what the camera manufacturer has provided. Oh and of course different displays will reproduce colors and brightness levels differently as well.

In reality there isn’t any such thing as an unmediated digital photograph. What is being done by smartphone cameras is a little further down the processing curve but is on the same continuum of “regular” digital photography IMO. This second test shows to me that Samsung is trying to give the photographer as sharp a picture of what they took a picture of.

And analog photographers shouldn’t get but so smug about capturing the “actual” image. Even if you shoot transparency film or collodion wet plate the resultant image is still mediated by the materials. Color reproduction, contrast, and of course the translation from 3d world/object to 2d are still enormous manipulations. Taking a picture will always be transformative compared to the original subject.

So what is considered an “accurate” photograph will always be a philosophical question. IMO I wouldn’t what Samsung has done to be “fake.” A lot of these arguments really sound like DSLR owners being upset that decent pictures can be made with pocket cameras.

I wouldn't call what Samsung does with the moon a photo anymore. A picture? Sure. For being a photograph of the moon so, it way to close to what an AI generator would come up with when asked to create a picture of the moon. Samsung is somewhat using sensor data as prompt it seems.

As far as accurate representation goes, digital photos are court admissable as proof. And forensic ones goes through a deliberate processing pipeline, the original as taken in camera is never discarded while doing so. Which is close enough for me to be a representation of reality.

Personally, my opinion about those over-processed pictures you see on social media is the same as it is about Ssung faking the moon. I don't like neither, regardless if they are smartphone or "real" camera photos.

No they don’t require that. I honestly, and I know this will annoy people, shoot jpeg and it’s sharp out of the camera.

The camera-processed JPEGs already have filters applied, most likely including a sharpening pass.

Ah - that is useful to know. I'll admit my knowledge here is dated - the first DSLR I ever picked up, a Canon EOS20D + Sigma 70-300 F4-5.6 yielded incredibly disappointing results out of the camera - but (at least at the time) - it was widely understood that you had to run a sharpening filter.

Presumably the camera does this directly now?

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