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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

It's not really possible to have zero processing of an image. At some point you have to interpret the sensor data and turn it in to a JPEG. The line people decide an image is "processed" is pretty subjective though. It's somewhere between the camera deciding what the white balance / exposure is, and AI replacing the sun with a moon.

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The line I draw is at semantic editing. Manipulating images based on abstract geometric or statistical features like edges or color histograms is acceptable. Attempting to guess what those features mean is not. Traditional sharpening, color balance correction, focus stacking, lens distortion correction, etc. is fine. Red eye removal, skin tone correction, traditional dodging and burning, replacing a detected moon with a higher resolution photo, etc. is not. Unlabeled semantic editing is dishonest. AI image processing does not distinguish between geometric and semantic features, so it's always unacceptable, even for simple tasks like sharpening.

The one exception I make is cropping, because photographers have always had the ability to choose where to point the camera. Cropping based on meaning is not dishonest because it's inherent in the process of photography.

That doesn't seem like a very sharp line (hah). "Abstract geometrical or statistical features like edges" have semantic meaning. An "edge" is just an area of the image with a high derivative, but as soon as you use that information to process it in some way, you are making some implicit assumption about what this statistical feature means - the boundary of an object, a discontinuity in depth, etc.

There is no dividing line between syntax and semantics - semantics is just syntax scaled. Godel proved it, LLMs exploit it.

If I run an unsharp mask filter I'm not making any decision about what individual edges mean. I might look at the result and decide to apply more or less sharpening, but that's still not "semantic editing", because the edit itself only sees derivatives.

raw images exist

You can't see a raw image though. Any time you look at an image, decisions had to be made about how to interpret that raw image.

It's still not a jpeg

Any file format or data structure you can display on the screen is processed. The whole point is the debate around phone processing is not as clear cut as photos being processed vs unprocessed.

only because you're arguing in bad faith. The layperson does not consider the result of standard sensor debayering to be "processed".

The layperson also doesn't really consider the result of their smartphone app to be "processed", until they get slapped in the face with it. The layperson's intuition isn't reliable.

The layperson doesn’t have any idea what they are talking about so it’s hard to pull a coherent statement out of it.

People claim they want unprocessed photos but it’s not clear what they even mean by that. I think we can rule things like ai replacing the sun with a moon as obviously too far, but most phones like the iPhone aren’t AI generating or filtering things.

Someone manually selecting an exposure, white balance, and tint in Lightroom isn’t any less real than letting the camera do that automatically because the camera doesn’t know which values are real either.

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