Hacker News Reader

Comment by make3 | Hacker News Reader

it's not a crime but applying post processing in an overly generous way that goes a lot further than replicating what a human sees does take away from what makes pictures interesting imho vs other mediums, that it's a genuine representation of something that actually happened.

if you take that away, a picture is not very interesting, it's hyperrealistic so not super creative a lot of the time (compared to eg paintings), & it doesn't even require the mastery of other mediums to get hyperrealistism

View on HN

Do you also want the IR light to be in there? That would make it more of 'genuine representation'.

Wouldn't be a genuine version of what my eyes would've seen, had I been the one looking instead of the camera.

I can't see infrared.

But the camera is trying to emulate how it would look if your eyes were seeing it. In order for it to be 'genuine' you would need not only the camera to genuine, but also the OS, the video driver, the viewing app, the display and the image format/compression. They all do things to the image that are not genuine.

Perhaps interestingly, many/most digital cameras are sensitive to IR and can record, for example, the LEDs of an infrared TV remote.

But they don't see it as IR. Instead, this infrared information just kind of irrevocably leaks into the RGB channels that we do perceive. With the unmodified camera on my Samsung phone, IR shows up kind of purple-ish. Which is... well... it's fake. Making invisible IR into visible purple is an artificially-produced artifact of the process that results in me being able to see things that are normally ~impossible for me to observe with my eyeballs.

When you generate your own "genuine" images using your digital camera(s), do you use an external IR filter? Or are you satisfied with knowing that the results are fake?

Silicon sensors (which is what you'll get in all visible-light cameras as far as I know) are all very sensitive to near-IR. Their peak sensitivity is around 900nm. The difference between cameras that can see or not see IR is the quality of their anti-IR filter.

Your Samsung phone probably has the green filter of its bayer matrix that blocks IR better than the blue and red ones.

Here's a random spectral sensitivity for a silicon sensor:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRkffHX...

"of what I would've seen"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com