9 ms·

Computational Photography with Luminar 4

88 points by deathtrader666 7y ago

itronitron 7y ago
ugh, horrible, this is as bad as LED stage lighting
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  What is?
- dang 7y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
simonw 7y ago
Not great that the demo video makes a portrait "more beautiful" partly by lightening the skin tone (at 43 seconds in).
- gedy 7y ago
  I think the effect is really about improving contrast to make features stand out. It's effective even if someone is already lily white. Nothing to do with race imo.
  - simonw 7y ago
    I think you're right. But I still think they should change the video. People (myself included) are understandably sensitive to potentially racism embedded in AI.
  - Rotten194 7y ago
    Unfortunately a lot of these models are trained more on white faces and end up lightening everyone's skin as a result. My photographer friend is constantly fighting with photo-retouching tools to not whitewash their subjects.
Exuma 7y ago
Very cool concept, but the video copy made me laugh out loud. "Hours of learning" for your hobby.... God .... anything but that!!
WhiteNoiz3 7y ago
Does this qualify as 'computational photography'? My interpretation of that term is that it is more about using non-standard optics processed with a computer, than it is about applying deep learning and other AI based techniques which seems to be what this is. Otherwise, this looks cool ;) I am glad to see AI image processing becoming more accessible.
- falcrist 7y ago
  Computational photography is basically anything that uses a digital process for a chemical or optical technique. You don't need to be using non-standard optics or deep learning AI techniques. It can be as simple as averaging a bunch of pictures together. HDR is computational photography, as is a panorama. I'm sure Luminar 4 has similar capabilities, but all they show is dodging and burning, beauty filters, and some sky replacement. Those technically fit the definition, but often aren't thought of as computational photography.
  - balls187 7y ago
    > Computational photography is basically anything that uses a digital process for a chemical or optical technique. By that definition, every digital camera/phone is computational photography
    - somemath 7y ago
      It is. Browsing pictures maybe not, but certainly capturing and transforming.
    - falcrist 7y ago
      By "using a digital process", I mean altering the image rather than simply capturing it. However, every single camera phone I've ever had had PLENTY of computational photography built into it.
- GuiA 7y ago
  Any digital photography is by definition computational. You can make an argument that using deep learning to affect the sky is “more computational” in a way than a “basic” CCD to JPEG pipeline, but the boundaries become fuzzy and arbitrary.
jermaustin1 7y ago
At the presale price, its worth the $99, even just to experiment with it and see how well it does.
willis936 7y ago
It’s interesting that most of the demonstrated applications are examples of how to lie with photos. Images alone can’t be trusted, but it makes me a little sad the more readily these tools are made available. Oh look, a program based around making photos that lie that’s cheap. I suppose I’ll have to start defaulting to trusting nothing even more. It’s not really a direction I’d like public discourse to have to go in, if we could collectively agree to behave a little.
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  It's almost impossible to draw a bright line here. All photography, even film-based, involves some amount of interpretation. Different choices of film, or various options in Lightroom, Luminar, or whatever, entail changing the appearance of the output at least in the dimensions of brightness, contrast, saturation, white balance, and so forth. You can't not make a choice, you're always going to be imposing some artistic interpretation.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I agree although news organizations try to have bright line rules as much as they can. You're right that there is still a lot of flexibility within those lines but certainly some manipulations that would generally be considered fine in an art photo (e.g. editing out distracting objects that aren't relevant to the main subject) are strictly verboten in photojournalism.
    - CWuestefeld 7y ago
      And you're right that photojournalism attempts to define some lines here. I'm a serious photographer. For myself, I'll create any imagery I want - after all, I'm not trying to convince a jury of something objectively true. The line that I personally choose to draw is to make it something that could be true - I won't do the crazy oversized full moons, for example. But that doesn't mean that nobody else should create such an image. But I'll go back to my original claim, that EVERY image involves interpretation. The data coming off your camera sensor isn't readily interpreted by the human eye at all. It needs to impose some transformation to get to a visual representation. Looking at it from the other way around, we're all aware that our own eyes are lying to us. We interpret brightness and shades relative to what we see around them, so just being in different lighting will make us see things differently. It's physiologically impossible to create an image that will always be seen the same, even by a single pair of eyes.
vanniv 7y ago
Luminar is really neat. I've been using Luminar 3 for awhile, and it does some really cool stuff -- but 3 didn't really live up to it's hype. Don't get me wrong, I use it sometimes to clean up and enhance my images, but really it's not so dramatically different from other tools. Some of the AI features are really slick, but not quite as magical as the demos suggest. Or maybe you just have to actually spend 100s of hours to learn to use it effectively, and I'm just a n00b.
- GuiA 7y ago
  A big problem with these new AI techniques as applied to photography is that the algorithms tend to be very opaque, and typically gives very little control to the user. You can get better over time at using the dodge/burn tools, or selection masks, or color curves, etc in Photoshop - and use them at very granular, minute levels. If the final result is not up to your expectations, you know that it’s due to your own doing and you can try again, get someone to help you, watch a tutorial, etc. However, all these magical AI sliders give you very little insight about what’s actually going on behind the scenes, and typically only expose a few vague sliders for the photographer to manipulate, often in an all-or-nothing fashion. If you like what cranking up the "AI Skin Defect Removal" slider does to the texture of the nose but not the tone of the cheek, there's no much you can do to address that. While it makes for cool demos, and the appeal of “one click and your boring sky becomes picturesque” is clear for an entire category of users, this makes them pretty boring and limited as creative tools.
boromi 7y ago
Is Luminar 4 a suitable Lightroom replacement?
- CharlesW 7y ago
  The "Luminar Libraries" feature provides Lightroom-like photo management, but based on Luminar 3 reviews it's probably not going to be as rich as Lightroom's. (I've pre-ordered Luminar 4 in hopes that it's good enough that I can ditch Lightroom).
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    There's a big vendor lock-in thing going on, isn't there? I've got 10s of thousands of images cataloged in LR. It would be hard to move away from that and re-index all the images again.
- glenngillen 7y ago
  It says on the site that it's usable as a LR plug-in too.
- vondur 7y ago
  It also works as a plugin to Apple Photos, allowing you to use Photos to organize, and Luminar to edit them.
bmarquez 7y ago
If you're thinking of pre-ordering Luminar 4, I'd strongly urge you to wait for actual reviews or try the demo yourself. I purchased Luminar 3 and it was a sluggish, unstable mess, especially on Windows. They promised many features like a DAM, which was still missing features like the ability to edit metadata. But hey, it checked off the marketing checkbox, right? They're prioritizing adding new features to generate publicity and hype while ignoring actual speed, stability, and usability. Only the comment sections of photography websites actually comment on speed, example: https://www.dpreview.com/news/3286739394/luminar-4-available-for-pre-order-comes-with-new-ai-features-and-revamped-ui https://www.dpreview.com/news/3286739394/luminar-4-available...
- harshalizee 7y ago
  Yup, listen to this guy. I have the top of the line MacBookPro and Luminar is not even barely usable even with nothing else running on it. The features are ok, but it's basically an unusable product.
  - missosoup 7y ago
    I mean, if it's using DNN then you're going to be pretty much shit out of luck for perf unless your machine has an nvidia graphics card right?
    - eeeficus 7y ago
      If you’re using pretrained models then they should run ok. It’s the same reason why Tensorflow runs on phones: to run models, not necessarily to train models. DNNs take a lot of time to train.
      - missosoup 7y ago
        TF runs at seconds-per-frame speeds on phones without dedicated accelerators. Even inference is going to be slow when working on a 20 megapixel image. That's as much work as a 1220 sample batch at 128x128 resolution.
dmos62 7y ago
I've used Google's Snapseed, which has very similar controls and aims to streamline a lot of "photoshopping". It's free (though mobile only) and works great, I've had _a lot_ of fun just playing around, changing the distance between my eyes, giving myself an ogrish forehead, turning a smile into a frown, and in general changing anything and everything about the photos I played with.
- sorenjan 7y ago
  If you want to change the shape of a face Photoshop has face aware liquify since a while back. I'm guessing a lot of photographers already have Photoshop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zhgvNfJTnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zhgvNfJTnM
m0zg 7y ago
My experience with Luminar 3 was weird. It was one of those pieces of software which looks great in screenshots and promo materials and then disappoints you profoundly when you try it out. It just didn't produce the same quality of results as Lightroom, nor was it as easy to work with as Lightroom. I really wanted to like it too, I'm not a fan of subscription software, and the best alternative to Lightroom (Capture One Pro) is either $300 for a license, or $20/mo, both of which sound pretty pricey for hobbyist use. After a couple of weeks of trying I was back to Lightroom. So before you rush to plop down your credit card for Luminar "preorder", I encourage you to wait for a trial version and try it out. There, I saved you $99. You're welcome.
blackhaz 7y ago
Am I alone thinking the originals are way better than the processed versions, even in the demo on that link? Somehow all this excessive tone filtering, "smart" unsharp masking, artificial noising and noise-filtering - all that computational stuff - takes the life out everything? The dynamic range is narrow. Stuff is compressed into flat mess of colors, similarly to how they compress audio these days. Huge "ringing" artifacts on contrasting edges. Gross. How is that elevated photography?
carlosgg 7y ago
Also Computational Photography: https://www.udacity.com/course/computational-photography--ud955 https://www.udacity.com/course/computational-photography--ud...
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I know this is just automating how people have been touching up photos for decades, but IMO it is still a bit sad, especially when it comes to touching up people's faces. God forbid we should see each other as we are, slightly yellowed teeth, pores and all. Again, I know this has been going on for decades, but I still worry that by automating more of it, it will lead to a bigger degree of "sameness" in photos.
- jxcl 7y ago
  I used to think this way too, but I’ve since come around to a different way of thinking. Unless photos are taken for documentation, it’s more important for the photo to capture the feeling they photographer is trying to convey. 5 minutes after you talk to someone, you’re not going to remember every single blemish on their face; you’ll remember the general shape and a few distinguishing features. I would much rather the photo match the memory than the fact. Of course, this can and has been taken too far in some instances, but I see no problems with removing a pimple and whitening teeth to more warmly represent (and therefore remember) my subject.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    I think the problem is that since portrait retouching is usually so subtle, you actually start confusing it with real life. People start subconsciously thinking that this falsity is how you should look. And to clarify, it's one thing to hide a pimple, but when it comes to the core features of one's face (e.g. "face slimming", pore smoothing, even undereye color IMO) you start distorting who that person actually is.

itronitron 7y ago

ugh, horrible, this is as bad as LED stage lighting

jermaustin1 7y ago
What is?
dang 7y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

simonw 7y ago

Not great that the demo video makes a portrait "more beautiful" partly by lightening the skin tone (at 43 seconds in).

gedy 7y ago
I think the effect is really about improving contrast to make features stand out. It's effective even if someone is already lily white. Nothing to do with race imo.
- simonw 7y ago
  I think you're right. But I still think they should change the video. People (myself included) are understandably sensitive to potentially racism embedded in AI.
- Rotten194 7y ago
  Unfortunately a lot of these models are trained more on white faces and end up lightening everyone's skin as a result. My photographer friend is constantly fighting with photo-retouching tools to not whitewash their subjects.

Exuma 7y ago

Very cool concept, but the video copy made me laugh out loud. "Hours of learning" for your hobby.... God .... anything but that!!

WhiteNoiz3 7y ago

Does this qualify as 'computational photography'? My interpretation of that term is that it is more about using non-standard optics processed with a computer, than it is about applying deep learning and other AI based techniques which seems to be what this is. Otherwise, this looks cool ;) I am glad to see AI image processing becoming more accessible.

falcrist 7y ago
Computational photography is basically anything that uses a digital process for a chemical or optical technique. You don't need to be using non-standard optics or deep learning AI techniques. It can be as simple as averaging a bunch of pictures together. HDR is computational photography, as is a panorama. I'm sure Luminar 4 has similar capabilities, but all they show is dodging and burning, beauty filters, and some sky replacement. Those technically fit the definition, but often aren't thought of as computational photography.
- balls187 7y ago
  > Computational photography is basically anything that uses a digital process for a chemical or optical technique. By that definition, every digital camera/phone is computational photography
  - somemath 7y ago
    It is. Browsing pictures maybe not, but certainly capturing and transforming.
  - falcrist 7y ago
    By "using a digital process", I mean altering the image rather than simply capturing it. However, every single camera phone I've ever had had PLENTY of computational photography built into it.
GuiA 7y ago
Any digital photography is by definition computational. You can make an argument that using deep learning to affect the sky is “more computational” in a way than a “basic” CCD to JPEG pipeline, but the boundaries become fuzzy and arbitrary.

jermaustin1 7y ago

At the presale price, its worth the $99, even just to experiment with it and see how well it does.

willis936 7y ago

It’s interesting that most of the demonstrated applications are examples of how to lie with photos. Images alone can’t be trusted, but it makes me a little sad the more readily these tools are made available. Oh look, a program based around making photos that lie that’s cheap. I suppose I’ll have to start defaulting to trusting nothing even more. It’s not really a direction I’d like public discourse to have to go in, if we could collectively agree to behave a little.

CWuestefeld 7y ago
It's almost impossible to draw a bright line here. All photography, even film-based, involves some amount of interpretation. Different choices of film, or various options in Lightroom, Luminar, or whatever, entail changing the appearance of the output at least in the dimensions of brightness, contrast, saturation, white balance, and so forth. You can't not make a choice, you're always going to be imposing some artistic interpretation.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I agree although news organizations try to have bright line rules as much as they can. You're right that there is still a lot of flexibility within those lines but certainly some manipulations that would generally be considered fine in an art photo (e.g. editing out distracting objects that aren't relevant to the main subject) are strictly verboten in photojournalism.
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    And you're right that photojournalism attempts to define some lines here. I'm a serious photographer. For myself, I'll create any imagery I want - after all, I'm not trying to convince a jury of something objectively true. The line that I personally choose to draw is to make it something that could be true - I won't do the crazy oversized full moons, for example. But that doesn't mean that nobody else should create such an image. But I'll go back to my original claim, that EVERY image involves interpretation. The data coming off your camera sensor isn't readily interpreted by the human eye at all. It needs to impose some transformation to get to a visual representation. Looking at it from the other way around, we're all aware that our own eyes are lying to us. We interpret brightness and shades relative to what we see around them, so just being in different lighting will make us see things differently. It's physiologically impossible to create an image that will always be seen the same, even by a single pair of eyes.

vanniv 7y ago

Luminar is really neat. I've been using Luminar 3 for awhile, and it does some really cool stuff -- but 3 didn't really live up to it's hype. Don't get me wrong, I use it sometimes to clean up and enhance my images, but really it's not so dramatically different from other tools. Some of the AI features are really slick, but not quite as magical as the demos suggest. Or maybe you just have to actually spend 100s of hours to learn to use it effectively, and I'm just a n00b.

GuiA 7y ago
A big problem with these new AI techniques as applied to photography is that the algorithms tend to be very opaque, and typically gives very little control to the user. You can get better over time at using the dodge/burn tools, or selection masks, or color curves, etc in Photoshop - and use them at very granular, minute levels. If the final result is not up to your expectations, you know that it’s due to your own doing and you can try again, get someone to help you, watch a tutorial, etc. However, all these magical AI sliders give you very little insight about what’s actually going on behind the scenes, and typically only expose a few vague sliders for the photographer to manipulate, often in an all-or-nothing fashion. If you like what cranking up the "AI Skin Defect Removal" slider does to the texture of the nose but not the tone of the cheek, there's no much you can do to address that. While it makes for cool demos, and the appeal of “one click and your boring sky becomes picturesque” is clear for an entire category of users, this makes them pretty boring and limited as creative tools.

boromi 7y ago

Is Luminar 4 a suitable Lightroom replacement?

CharlesW 7y ago
The "Luminar Libraries" feature provides Lightroom-like photo management, but based on Luminar 3 reviews it's probably not going to be as rich as Lightroom's. (I've pre-ordered Luminar 4 in hopes that it's good enough that I can ditch Lightroom).
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  There's a big vendor lock-in thing going on, isn't there? I've got 10s of thousands of images cataloged in LR. It would be hard to move away from that and re-index all the images again.
glenngillen 7y ago
It says on the site that it's usable as a LR plug-in too.
vondur 7y ago
It also works as a plugin to Apple Photos, allowing you to use Photos to organize, and Luminar to edit them.

bmarquez 7y ago

If you're thinking of pre-ordering Luminar 4, I'd strongly urge you to wait for actual reviews or try the demo yourself. I purchased Luminar 3 and it was a sluggish, unstable mess, especially on Windows. They promised many features like a DAM, which was still missing features like the ability to edit metadata. But hey, it checked off the marketing checkbox, right? They're prioritizing adding new features to generate publicity and hype while ignoring actual speed, stability, and usability. Only the comment sections of photography websites actually comment on speed, example: https://www.dpreview.com/news/3286739394/luminar-4-available-for-pre-order-comes-with-new-ai-features-and-revamped-ui https://www.dpreview.com/news/3286739394/luminar-4-available...

harshalizee 7y ago
Yup, listen to this guy. I have the top of the line MacBookPro and Luminar is not even barely usable even with nothing else running on it. The features are ok, but it's basically an unusable product.
- missosoup 7y ago
  I mean, if it's using DNN then you're going to be pretty much shit out of luck for perf unless your machine has an nvidia graphics card right?
  - eeeficus 7y ago
    If you’re using pretrained models then they should run ok. It’s the same reason why Tensorflow runs on phones: to run models, not necessarily to train models. DNNs take a lot of time to train.
    - missosoup 7y ago
      TF runs at seconds-per-frame speeds on phones without dedicated accelerators. Even inference is going to be slow when working on a 20 megapixel image. That's as much work as a 1220 sample batch at 128x128 resolution.

dmos62 7y ago

I've used Google's Snapseed, which has very similar controls and aims to streamline a lot of "photoshopping". It's free (though mobile only) and works great, I've had _a lot_ of fun just playing around, changing the distance between my eyes, giving myself an ogrish forehead, turning a smile into a frown, and in general changing anything and everything about the photos I played with.

sorenjan 7y ago
If you want to change the shape of a face Photoshop has face aware liquify since a while back. I'm guessing a lot of photographers already have Photoshop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zhgvNfJTnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zhgvNfJTnM

m0zg 7y ago

My experience with Luminar 3 was weird. It was one of those pieces of software which looks great in screenshots and promo materials and then disappoints you profoundly when you try it out. It just didn't produce the same quality of results as Lightroom, nor was it as easy to work with as Lightroom. I really wanted to like it too, I'm not a fan of subscription software, and the best alternative to Lightroom (Capture One Pro) is either $300 for a license, or $20/mo, both of which sound pretty pricey for hobbyist use. After a couple of weeks of trying I was back to Lightroom. So before you rush to plop down your credit card for Luminar "preorder", I encourage you to wait for a trial version and try it out. There, I saved you $99. You're welcome.

blackhaz 7y ago

Am I alone thinking the originals are way better than the processed versions, even in the demo on that link? Somehow all this excessive tone filtering, "smart" unsharp masking, artificial noising and noise-filtering - all that computational stuff - takes the life out everything? The dynamic range is narrow. Stuff is compressed into flat mess of colors, similarly to how they compress audio these days. Huge "ringing" artifacts on contrasting edges. Gross. How is that elevated photography?

carlosgg 7y ago

Also Computational Photography: https://www.udacity.com/course/computational-photography--ud955 https://www.udacity.com/course/computational-photography--ud...

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I know this is just automating how people have been touching up photos for decades, but IMO it is still a bit sad, especially when it comes to touching up people's faces. God forbid we should see each other as we are, slightly yellowed teeth, pores and all. Again, I know this has been going on for decades, but I still worry that by automating more of it, it will lead to a bigger degree of "sameness" in photos.

jxcl 7y ago
I used to think this way too, but I’ve since come around to a different way of thinking. Unless photos are taken for documentation, it’s more important for the photo to capture the feeling they photographer is trying to convey. 5 minutes after you talk to someone, you’re not going to remember every single blemish on their face; you’ll remember the general shape and a few distinguishing features. I would much rather the photo match the memory than the fact. Of course, this can and has been taken too far in some instances, but I see no problems with removing a pimple and whitening teeth to more warmly represent (and therefore remember) my subject.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I think the problem is that since portrait retouching is usually so subtle, you actually start confusing it with real life. People start subconsciously thinking that this falsity is how you should look. And to clarify, it's one thing to hide a pimple, but when it comes to the core features of one's face (e.g. "face slimming", pore smoothing, even undereye color IMO) you start distorting who that person actually is.