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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 th

by 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.

lmilcin 7y ago
Computational means the image was computed as opposed to being revealed. It is the same difference as scanning and copying book text with a different font vs translating and rewriting text. You would say that the book that was scanned and OCR-ed is basically the same while translated and rewritten is no longer exactly the same text. The same is with the image. Making a photo is preserving an image. We can do couple of different transforms like sharpening or converting to black and white, but the image is basically the same content. On the other hand rewriting the image like changing the weather, removing people from background or making the subject look younger changes the content, the meaning of the image.
- GuiA 7y ago
  “Revealed” implies that there is some sort of single source of truth for the image (as in your book example, where the source of truth is the original book, to which transcriptions could be compared for accuracy). That is not the case for photography. In film photography, the “latent image” is mere fiction - there is no single image waiting to be revealed. What there is is a bunch of silver salts suspended in gelatin reacting to temperature, electromagnetic radiation, etc. When you want to turn this into an image that the human eye can make sense of, you make them react further with a specific developer/fixer at a specific dilution, in a controlled environment. Changing any of these parameters will lead to a different image, well after the initial exposure was made. In digital photography, you have a set of charge readings, that you then turn into colored pixels following an arbitrary process that can be as complex as you want it to be. You can merely average nearby values and use the result, or run them through a neural network designed to <make colors more accurate | make people look younger | replace trees with sharks | whatever you want> and use the result. Either is a computational process. Now we can certainly draw semantic distinctions, like “this person wasn’t in the picture when it was taken”, or “this person had a pimple on their nose that was removed”. But as mentioned earlier, these are fuzzy and arbitrary. Is a long shot exposure of the Milky Way a “rewritten” image? What about an HDR image? What to make of early digital photography features like red eye removal? (Answer: it doesn’t matter, all photography is the result of a chemical or computational process, and there is no such thing as a “true” image)
CharlesW 7y ago
> Any digital photography is by definition computational. That's not what "computational photography" means to most. For example, the QuickTake is not considered to have done computational photography. Computational photography uses computation to go beyond what a simple lens → sensor → sensor-to-image algorithm (like a demosaicing algorithm) can do.
- GuiA 7y ago
  What determines whether a particular “sensor-to-image algorithm” qualifies as “computational photography” or not? (keeping in mind that we are really talking about many different algorithms running at across the hardware stack, ie likely distributed across multiple chips)
- balls187 7y ago
  Certainly most digital cameras use far more sophisticated sensor-to-image algorithms. Not to be outdone by in camera processing, photographers will opt to shoot in RAW and have PC's do the conversion/post-processing, which in many cases is even more sophisticated algorithms.

by GuiA 7y ago

lmilcin 7y ago

Computational means the image was computed as opposed to being revealed. It is the same difference as scanning and copying book text with a different font vs translating and rewriting text. You would say that the book that was scanned and OCR-ed is basically the same while translated and rewritten is no longer exactly the same text. The same is with the image. Making a photo is preserving an image. We can do couple of different transforms like sharpening or converting to black and white, but the image is basically the same content. On the other hand rewriting the image like changing the weather, removing people from background or making the subject look younger changes the content, the meaning of the image.

GuiA 7y ago
“Revealed” implies that there is some sort of single source of truth for the image (as in your book example, where the source of truth is the original book, to which transcriptions could be compared for accuracy). That is not the case for photography. In film photography, the “latent image” is mere fiction - there is no single image waiting to be revealed. What there is is a bunch of silver salts suspended in gelatin reacting to temperature, electromagnetic radiation, etc. When you want to turn this into an image that the human eye can make sense of, you make them react further with a specific developer/fixer at a specific dilution, in a controlled environment. Changing any of these parameters will lead to a different image, well after the initial exposure was made. In digital photography, you have a set of charge readings, that you then turn into colored pixels following an arbitrary process that can be as complex as you want it to be. You can merely average nearby values and use the result, or run them through a neural network designed to <make colors more accurate | make people look younger | replace trees with sharks | whatever you want> and use the result. Either is a computational process. Now we can certainly draw semantic distinctions, like “this person wasn’t in the picture when it was taken”, or “this person had a pimple on their nose that was removed”. But as mentioned earlier, these are fuzzy and arbitrary. Is a long shot exposure of the Milky Way a “rewritten” image? What about an HDR image? What to make of early digital photography features like red eye removal? (Answer: it doesn’t matter, all photography is the result of a chemical or computational process, and there is no such thing as a “true” image)

CharlesW 7y ago

> Any digital photography is by definition computational. That's not what "computational photography" means to most. For example, the QuickTake is not considered to have done computational photography. Computational photography uses computation to go beyond what a simple lens → sensor → sensor-to-image algorithm (like a demosaicing algorithm) can do.

GuiA 7y ago
What determines whether a particular “sensor-to-image algorithm” qualifies as “computational photography” or not? (keeping in mind that we are really talking about many different algorithms running at across the hardware stack, ie likely distributed across multiple chips)
balls187 7y ago
Certainly most digital cameras use far more sophisticated sensor-to-image algorithms. Not to be outdone by in camera processing, photographers will opt to shoot in RAW and have PC's do the conversion/post-processing, which in many cases is even more sophisticated algorithms.