5 ms·

Cool, but am I the only one who thinks the photos on the right (toward the bottom) are a little overexposed / bland / washed-out?

by mholt 9y ago

Synaesthesia 9y ago
The point is they recovered the shadow detail of people’s faces which would otherwise be lost.
- justhackedme 9y ago
  What's the point in recovering something just to waste it again?
jwarren 9y ago
As landscapes, they may well be less interesting. As communicative portraits, they're (IMO) more successful. The first one is probably the best example. Having a clearer and brighter picture of (for example) your partner and daughter would likely be preferable. If it was a candid and unposed shot, it might look weird and unnatural though. This is why the fourth example is probably the least successful, that hazy summer glow in the "before" picture is somewhat desirable. To my eyes, the shadow boost is a little too much. I'd ideally like a slider to customise exactly how much brightness you're adding. Personally, I'd probably turn most of these down a touch. Google clearly has fantastic technology driving this image processing, but I think they need a little more work on their taste.
- rndmio 9y ago
  IMO from a photography point of view the first is the worst displaying very clear haloing around the subjects, one of the clear signs of "not good" HDR. I guess it depends what exactly you're optimising for but the results aren't pleasing to my eye.
- dharma1 9y ago
  I would also like more controls. You can have that shooting RAW and editing with Snapseed, but it's a bit more involved and the usable dynamic range of a single mobile raw image is below exposure fusion from HDR+.
mtgx 9y ago
No, I noticed it right away and I'm no photography expert. I suppose it's easy to control that in software, though, preferably before they actually enable the feature in Android 8.1. I also don't know if Google actually consults with real photography experts when creating these machine learning techniques. Apple made a big deal out of doing that at the last event to create "beautiful photos". It's not enough to just "mathematically improve" something. It should look very pleasing to the human eye, too. Perhaps if Google did that, too, it would have avoid issues such as this one, or the somewhat unrealistic look of its portrait mode blur in photos. It's hard to explain, but to me the Pixel 2 portrait shots look like the person doesn't "belong" in the environment. Like they have a linear-blur wallpaper behind them and they photograph themselves in front of it. Or almost like they are photoshopped into the image. I wouldn't say it's that bad. And a majority of people probably won't notice it immediately, but I still think it needs to be improved (perhaps, I don't know, by actually using a dual-camera setup like Apple and Samsung?). https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_2_xl-review-1670p4.php#image17 https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_2_xl-review-1670p4.php...
- jayd16 9y ago
  >Apple made a big deal out of doing that at the last event to create "beautiful photos". It's not enough to just "mathematically improve" something. There are many non-obvious issues with this as well. You're most likely thinking of, for example, an non-centered subject can create an interesting composition and algorithmically centering the subject would not create better looking photos. However, in film's history, we've seen older technology briefly preferred for no other reason than momentum. An example off the top of my head is higher frame rate video does not have the "movie feel" that 24 fps film does. That doesn't mean 24 fps is ideal, its simply familiar.
- nicpottier 9y ago
  I feel the same way in that their portrait mode just doesn't look right compared to what you would get from a real shallow depth of field and a fast lens. But I think the (depressing) truth of it is that I notice it because I've had fast lenses and spent a lot of time taking photos, so I know what natural looking bokeh looks like. And bokeh is also just an artifact of a lens and aperture combo, so who is to say that extreme blur with a sharp line as they are doing isn't just going to be the new standard? I suspect the next generation will come to prefer this look (if it continues) and find the "natural" effect with real glass as weird.
abainbridge 9y ago
Yeah, agreed. I screen captured the unprocessed image from the webpage (which has been jpeg'd and therefore lost lots of the shadow detail). I loaded it into a paint package and did a simple (and computationally cheap) histogram adjustment. IMO, the results were at least as good as theirs. And these are the results they cherry picked. Not impressive. I guess most people won't load the image into a paint package to fix it, so their aim is just to automatically do a job nearly as good as a trivial change a human would make. Still, I was hoping for more.
- sdrothrock 9y ago
  I don't think the Pixel Visual Core is supposed to do anything new or revolutionary -- the primary purpose is to do these old things FASTER for the user.
  - abainbridge 9y ago
    But a simple histogram stretch can be done with very little processing power by modern standards. 50 ms on one core of the application processor would be enough. I think they just chose bad examples. The results from this Google Research blog post are much much more impressive: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-photography-with.html https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nightti... I wish my smartphone could do _that_ automatically.
    - phs318u 9y ago
      Thanks for that. That was amazing.
    - dharma1 9y ago
      You end up with a lot more noise with simple histogram adjustment from a single image, plus the dynamic compression to a final 8bit image won't look as good for many use cases. Exposure fusion from multiple images has much higher usable dynamic range and lower noise.
  - glenneroo 9y ago
jacobolus 9y ago
Their results are quite bad compared to a passably competent Photoshop user willing to spend 2 minutes per picture. But if you need the computer to do all the color adjustment for you, so you can post your snapshot on facebook or print it at the local drug store with no manual intervention, this might be a good enough result.
- windexh8er 9y ago
  I think you are missing the point with improvements of this nature. Take for example: you have kids. You're at an event with said kids. While I still own a mirror-less micro 4/3rds, I often time don't have it with me. It's easy to snap hundreds of photos in random life events with a good smart phone camera. I personally have almost 2TB of family photo and video and I've got a long way to go. Can you imagine me spending 2 minutes, per picture, on even a fraction of that? Not only have you discounted the "sharability" aspect, the "instant gratification" aspect, and ultimately the tradeoff of results over time. When phones started to wield cameras I intentionally avoided them because of less-than-potato level quality. Now a phone I'm buying must have a fast, quality shooter. I own both Google and Apple products and the Pixel has pushed the bar up significantly in my personal opinion. Do I occasionally edit (mostly in-phone)? Sure. Simple grading and some vignetting goes a long way. Is it professional? No. But the point is I'm not shooting the pictures to win anyone else over. It's an investment in preservation. If I have all of that overhead, as you suggest, it will never get done. I have more useful things to spend time on than editing a few dozen photos on my computer, after I transfer them, then upload them SmugMug and then send out an email or note about it. Instead I can send a group message on Signal and everyone gets the gist in a fraction of the time. This thread seems to be filled with amateur professionals thinking that their iPhone or Pixel will magically do something optically it can't (yet?). It's good enough, and in some cases a spectacular ROI (both Apple/Google/Samsung/LG/etc) for the price. The photography giants wouldn't sell or develop new products if they felt a lot of pressure in this space. You shouldn't have an expectation that your $1000 phone competes with a few thousand in camera, glass and filters in the right hands. It won't. Edit: words
  - matwood 9y ago
arrrg 9y ago
Those are challenging circumstances for taking photos (backlit). The point here is to recover shadow detail. Them looking bland is a function of them being made in challenging circumstances.

Cool, but am I the only one who thinks the photos on the right (toward the bottom) are a little overexposed / bland / washed-out?

by mholt 9y ago

Cool, but am I the only one who thinks the photos on the right (toward the bottom) are a little overexposed / bland / washed-out?

Synaesthesia 9y ago

The point is they recovered the shadow detail of people’s faces which would otherwise be lost.

justhackedme 9y ago
What's the point in recovering something just to waste it again?

jwarren 9y ago

As landscapes, they may well be less interesting. As communicative portraits, they're (IMO) more successful. The first one is probably the best example. Having a clearer and brighter picture of (for example) your partner and daughter would likely be preferable. If it was a candid and unposed shot, it might look weird and unnatural though. This is why the fourth example is probably the least successful, that hazy summer glow in the "before" picture is somewhat desirable. To my eyes, the shadow boost is a little too much. I'd ideally like a slider to customise exactly how much brightness you're adding. Personally, I'd probably turn most of these down a touch. Google clearly has fantastic technology driving this image processing, but I think they need a little more work on their taste.

rndmio 9y ago
IMO from a photography point of view the first is the worst displaying very clear haloing around the subjects, one of the clear signs of "not good" HDR. I guess it depends what exactly you're optimising for but the results aren't pleasing to my eye.
dharma1 9y ago
I would also like more controls. You can have that shooting RAW and editing with Snapseed, but it's a bit more involved and the usable dynamic range of a single mobile raw image is below exposure fusion from HDR+.

mtgx 9y ago

No, I noticed it right away and I'm no photography expert. I suppose it's easy to control that in software, though, preferably before they actually enable the feature in Android 8.1. I also don't know if Google actually consults with real photography experts when creating these machine learning techniques. Apple made a big deal out of doing that at the last event to create "beautiful photos". It's not enough to just "mathematically improve" something. It should look very pleasing to the human eye, too. Perhaps if Google did that, too, it would have avoid issues such as this one, or the somewhat unrealistic look of its portrait mode blur in photos. It's hard to explain, but to me the Pixel 2 portrait shots look like the person doesn't "belong" in the environment. Like they have a linear-blur wallpaper behind them and they photograph themselves in front of it. Or almost like they are photoshopped into the image. I wouldn't say it's that bad. And a majority of people probably won't notice it immediately, but I still think it needs to be improved (perhaps, I don't know, by actually using a dual-camera setup like Apple and Samsung?). https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_2_xl-review-1670p4.php#image17 https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_2_xl-review-1670p4.php...

jayd16 9y ago
>Apple made a big deal out of doing that at the last event to create "beautiful photos". It's not enough to just "mathematically improve" something. There are many non-obvious issues with this as well. You're most likely thinking of, for example, an non-centered subject can create an interesting composition and algorithmically centering the subject would not create better looking photos. However, in film's history, we've seen older technology briefly preferred for no other reason than momentum. An example off the top of my head is higher frame rate video does not have the "movie feel" that 24 fps film does. That doesn't mean 24 fps is ideal, its simply familiar.
nicpottier 9y ago
I feel the same way in that their portrait mode just doesn't look right compared to what you would get from a real shallow depth of field and a fast lens. But I think the (depressing) truth of it is that I notice it because I've had fast lenses and spent a lot of time taking photos, so I know what natural looking bokeh looks like. And bokeh is also just an artifact of a lens and aperture combo, so who is to say that extreme blur with a sharp line as they are doing isn't just going to be the new standard? I suspect the next generation will come to prefer this look (if it continues) and find the "natural" effect with real glass as weird.

abainbridge 9y ago

Yeah, agreed. I screen captured the unprocessed image from the webpage (which has been jpeg'd and therefore lost lots of the shadow detail). I loaded it into a paint package and did a simple (and computationally cheap) histogram adjustment. IMO, the results were at least as good as theirs. And these are the results they cherry picked. Not impressive. I guess most people won't load the image into a paint package to fix it, so their aim is just to automatically do a job nearly as good as a trivial change a human would make. Still, I was hoping for more.

sdrothrock 9y ago
I don't think the Pixel Visual Core is supposed to do anything new or revolutionary -- the primary purpose is to do these old things FASTER for the user.
- abainbridge 9y ago
  But a simple histogram stretch can be done with very little processing power by modern standards. 50 ms on one core of the application processor would be enough. I think they just chose bad examples. The results from this Google Research blog post are much much more impressive: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-photography-with.html https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nightti... I wish my smartphone could do _that_ automatically.
  - phs318u 9y ago
    Thanks for that. That was amazing.
  - dharma1 9y ago
    You end up with a lot more noise with simple histogram adjustment from a single image, plus the dynamic compression to a final 8bit image won't look as good for many use cases. Exposure fusion from multiple images has much higher usable dynamic range and lower noise.
- glenneroo 9y ago

jacobolus 9y ago

Their results are quite bad compared to a passably competent Photoshop user willing to spend 2 minutes per picture. But if you need the computer to do all the color adjustment for you, so you can post your snapshot on facebook or print it at the local drug store with no manual intervention, this might be a good enough result.

windexh8er 9y ago
I think you are missing the point with improvements of this nature. Take for example: you have kids. You're at an event with said kids. While I still own a mirror-less micro 4/3rds, I often time don't have it with me. It's easy to snap hundreds of photos in random life events with a good smart phone camera. I personally have almost 2TB of family photo and video and I've got a long way to go. Can you imagine me spending 2 minutes, per picture, on even a fraction of that? Not only have you discounted the "sharability" aspect, the "instant gratification" aspect, and ultimately the tradeoff of results over time. When phones started to wield cameras I intentionally avoided them because of less-than-potato level quality. Now a phone I'm buying must have a fast, quality shooter. I own both Google and Apple products and the Pixel has pushed the bar up significantly in my personal opinion. Do I occasionally edit (mostly in-phone)? Sure. Simple grading and some vignetting goes a long way. Is it professional? No. But the point is I'm not shooting the pictures to win anyone else over. It's an investment in preservation. If I have all of that overhead, as you suggest, it will never get done. I have more useful things to spend time on than editing a few dozen photos on my computer, after I transfer them, then upload them SmugMug and then send out an email or note about it. Instead I can send a group message on Signal and everyone gets the gist in a fraction of the time. This thread seems to be filled with amateur professionals thinking that their iPhone or Pixel will magically do something optically it can't (yet?). It's good enough, and in some cases a spectacular ROI (both Apple/Google/Samsung/LG/etc) for the price. The photography giants wouldn't sell or develop new products if they felt a lot of pressure in this space. You shouldn't have an expectation that your $1000 phone competes with a few thousand in camera, glass and filters in the right hands. It won't. Edit: words
- matwood 9y ago

arrrg 9y ago

Those are challenging circumstances for taking photos (backlit). The point here is to recover shadow detail. Them looking bland is a function of them being made in challenging circumstances.