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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

Is this a “raw” photo or has a bunch of computional photography / AI been applied?

Computational:

> This image is a fusion from the minds of two astrophotographers, Myself and u/thevastreaches. The combined data from over 90,000 individual images captured with a modified telescope last Friday was jointly processed to reveal the layers of intricate details within the solar chromosphere. A geometrically altered image of the 2017 eclipse as an artistic element in this composition to display an otherwise invisible structure. Great care was taken to align the two atmospheric layers in a scientifically plausible way using NASA's SOHO data as a reference. The final image is the most detailed and dynamic full image of our star either of us have ever created. A blend of science and art, this image is a one-of-a kind astrophoto, as the ever-changing sun will never quite look like this again.

Here is what the author said:

> This image is a fusion from the minds of two astrophotographers, Myself and u/thevastreaches . The combined data from over 90,000 individual images captured with a modified telescope last Friday was jointly processed to reveal the layers of intricate details within the solar chromosphere. A geometrically altered image of the 2017 eclipse as an artistic element in this composition to display an otherwise invisible structure. Great care was taken to align the two atmospheric layers in a scientifically plausible way using NASA's SOHO data as a reference.

> If you're curious how I take these sorts of images, I have a write-up on my website. Check it out here: https://cosmicbackground.io/blogs/learn-about-how-these-are-...

The photographer here is one of the biggest users of topaz denoise/sharpening. It's an ai model that is really great at cleaning up back yard astrophotography.

It's considered cheating.

Or the guy is just having fun enjoying his hobby.

The photographer is very upfront about the process, too.

Who are they cheating? If they are upfront about the process, hardly the observer, or..?

I'll answer this here.

He is not upfront about it. Most lay people think that these amazing shots he gets are what is attainable with a backyard telescope. It's not.

It's bad for the same reason influencers using body filters is bad.

At some point the photo cameras or mobile phones are going to automatically include such denoising features (since it's an artefact of the photo capture, not a visible element) and then people would still call it "#nofilter"

Erm, that point has come since quite a while.

Recent controversy over fake sony moonshots:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601

*Samsung, though. Not Sony.

True, this was a fascinating one :)

Why is it considered cheating? What is it cheating against?

The models are trained on Hubble data. It's cheating against the rest of the astrophotography community if you're just replacing your pixels with NASA's pixels. Mcarthy takes a lot of flack for this and has said he'll back off use of the AI models.

There's no such thing as a "raw" photo.

Even your eyes process certain wavelengths and omit a lot of the spectrum that something like the Sun emits.

It’s pretty clear what is meant by “raw photo” here. This is not a raw photo, and probably not really what we’d call a “photo” at all, more like a visualization.

Captured radiant energy was involved in the process, so I think it can be considered a photo. But it’s not raw data straight out of the camera. That being said, a composite timelapse of the night sky isn’t a raw photograph either. I don’t think you find a lot of “raw photos“ in Astro photography

Photographers think of "RAW" as the unmodified original data from the image sensor. It is raw in the sense that no further processing has been applied yet to make a human viewable image (or whatever you want to do with it). It would need to be demosaic'd, adjusted for lens distortion, have dynamic range and gamma adjustments, and other things to make a nice image for humans to view.

> Photographers think of "RAW" as the unmodified original data from the image sensor. It is raw in the sense that no further processing has been applied yet to make a human viewable image (or whatever you want to do with it). It would need to be demosaic'd, adjusted for lens distortion, have dynamic range and gamma adjustments, and other things to make a nice image for humans to view.

Yes, but even besides that, image sensors only capture a part of the spectrum.

Is a combination image from 3 different spectrums (let's say UV/X-Ray/Visible) raw or no? Is it less or more raw than individual images?

That's what my comment was about.

The “raw” data in so-called “raw” image formats in not unprocessed data from the image sensor. The camera will already have done processing on the data, it’s just not fully processed.

If it was indeed raw data off the sensor, you’d see all kinds of “bad” things such as dead pixels. And camera vendors (obviously?) don’t want you to see that.

> The “raw” data in so-called “raw” image formats in not unprocessed data from the image sensor.

RAW images are completely un-demosaiced and otherwise unprocessed sensor data, dead or stuck pixels and all. It's the job of the RAW converter (whether performed in-camera or post-capture) to hide those in the conversion to a standard color space.

Manufacturers are now blurring the meaning of RAW to be closer to what you imagine. For example, Apple's ProRAW images are demosaiced and heavily processed.

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