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Smartphone cameras struggle to capture San Francisco's orange sky
- geocrasher 6y agoScott Manley did a quite good video about "How The Red Skies From Fires Are Related To Blue Sunsets on Mars" in which he has this exact issue with his phone making the sky white instead of red- which he also discusses. If you aren't familiar with his channel, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOIBQIpdv10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOIBQIpdv10
- mc32 6y agoIs this different than when you have to adjust your camera a few steps so that snow is not rendered completely (blown out) white?
- majormajor 6y agoYes, this is the camera trying to figure out what "white" should be (e.g. "is this sunlight or are there clouds or is it a old street light or is it an indoor fluorescent...) and failing because its heuristics don't account for this sort of situation. It has the exposure right, it's just trying to compensate for what it thinks is "bad lighting."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hammock 6y agoYes . You are adjusting exposure while the other is adjusting white balance
- mholt 6y agoMy Pixel can't even capture sunsets because there's no way to turn off the HDR processing anymore :(
- sdenton4 6y agoHmmm... On my pixel there's an option in the 'advanced' callers menu to display hdr controls in the camera controls.
- geocrasher 6y agoTry the app called "OpenCamera". It does a lot of things that built-in camera apps won't.
- doc_gunthrop 6y agoIt's a great app and open source: https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/code/ci/master/tree/ https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/code/ci/master/tree/
- beenBoutIT 6y agoOpen Camera via Fdroid comes free without ads.
- thelean12 6y agoI found that bumping up the saturation and "warmth" got a more accurate color to what I was seeing. Other colors sucked but it was good enough to communicate to others what I was seeing.
- nomel 6y agoI did the same. I held the phone up to the sky while moving the sliders around so I could match the color. It worked pretty well, but also made me realize my eyes are also trying to correct. Standing outside and looking up looks very different than standing inside and looking out, with some artificial lighting and white walls acting as a reference.
- numpad0 6y agoLr Mobile app has camera feature that lets you calibrate on random gray pieces and produce very film-like(not as in Lomography-like)photos.
- orev 6y agoThe way they describe the “correct” image seems to imply that it has something to do with the car also being orange, but I’m pretty sure this has more to do with the surrounding parts of the gas station being white. That allows the phone to pick the correct white balance, which then sets all the colors correctly.
- muststopmyths 6y agoMy iPhone SE2020 handled the orange just fine, but damn did I miss my Lumia with the wide range of manual controls on everything.
- 30minAdayHN 6y ago> This was a moment for my Canon to prove that, despite its bulk, it can't always be replaced by a smartphone. Such a naive statement. Once those phones' white balance is corrected, they should be able to capture the orange tinge. Even in a DSLR, if the white balance is set to auto, it would not capture the orange tinge. Cloudy might be a good starting point.
- dividedbyzero 6y agoHow would I do this on iOS, if I had just my phone and no CaptureOne on a laptop or the like? Are there apps that let me use a gray card to set the white balance of raw photos?
- 30minAdayHN 6y agoWhen you click Edit on a photo, you will have bunch of edit options. Warmth and Tint sliders represent white balance. You can increase the warmth until it matches what your eye perceives. Essentially you are telling your camera post capture what the temperature of the source is.
- lawtalkinghuman 6y agoYou can also use a camera app with more settings like ProCam which lets you set the white balance manually.
- tedunangst 6y agoHold a small piece of white paper up in the corner of the frame. Or get a corner of street sign, etc. (may need to make sure it's illuminated though.)
- blahblah4332 6y agoJust set the image's white balance to daylight (3500K). The colors that you see will not be corrected. You can tweak from there.
- perardi 6y agoOr, as briefly mentioned in the article, use Halide, which outputs RAW files, which you can then edit in your app of choice. (Nice thing about iOS: it outputs Adobe DNG files, which is a standardized format, and broadly readable by a bunch of applications.)
- matthewowen 6y agoThis article is awful. It's about smartphone cameras not being able to capture, but the three photos included are all ones that at least somewhat worked. Seems like it would be better to include one that failed?
- newyorker2 6y agoIKR, went in expecting a natural derivative off based on the title. Not to witness three "perfect" shots which came out okay. Wonder why it's here. It isn't thorough, doesn't provide examples either.
- boogies 6y agoIt does link to them though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blahblah4332 6y agoAs someone with a professional photography background, this article was actually super upsetting. The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result. The thesis of the article "I don't understand white balance, so smartphone cameras are bad"
- svachalek 6y agoSmartphone cameras are not for people who know what white balance is, so that's a very solid thesis.
- blahblah4332 6y agoUnfortunately this reality applies to _all_ digital cameras, not just the oversimplified versions found on many smart phones. Also, with smartphone sensor/lens quality improvements as well as computational photography enhancements, smartphones are for _all_ picture takers. Point and shoot cameras are no longer relevant. A better version of your reply is: Expecting accurate results in photographs is not for people who are ignorant of general photographic principles and technology.
- jxcl 6y agoOne thing that I had to get through my head when I was learning photography was that there's no such thing as "no filter". Every image you take is an interpretation of the scene, either through digital signal processing or film chemistry or retouching. When I spend time editing photos my dad would claim I was "lying" by editing them, he thought any modification to digital photos was wrong because the jpeg the camera produces is "reality." But of course, as this article shows, the camera is adding its own interpretation to the scene. Since our eyes can adjust to many lighting situations, the camera has to try to compensate and reproduce what it thinks our eyes would see, but it has no way to know if it's right! So, sometimes it's necessary to go back to the raw data and recreate the image as you remember it, along with whatever emotions you want it to elicit, rather than taking what comes out of the camera as "gospel".
- phicoh 6y agoThere is a science of color reproduction. It is quite tough because they way we perceive colors is amazingly complicated. But it is quite possible to make an effort. Of course, most photography is not about color reproduction but about telling a story. And automatic cameras (like the way phones are mostly used) take a way a lot of control when it comes to deciding how color look in the photo. On most phones you can frame the image, zoom a bit, and decide when to take the image. Other controls like aperture, shutter speed and color balance are automatic.
- SECProto 6y agoOne note on the phones thing: some camera apps (on Android, dunno about iOS) provide additional settings. For example, the Samsung stock camera has a "pro" mode, which lets you adjust the white balance, exposure, metering, and "ISO". Third party apps will provide histograms, long exposure, time stamps, etc. It's all similar to how many people used disposable film cameras (no options except aim and push the capture button) or cheap reusable cams (zoom, maybe exposure, etc) but film cameras that let you adjust everything existed at the same time
- photojosh 6y ago
- gambler 6y agoThis is the dark side of "smart" devices that replace high-quality physical sensors with clever algorithms. When something weird happens, they might misbehave in the most bizarre fashion. The general pattern will hold for AI. If you give too much control over things to software that you don't really understand or control, it will behave unpredictably when you need it the most and there might not be a way to correct or override it.
- jeffbee 6y agoThis doesn't have anything to do with the sensor. How sensor outputs are mapped to display inputs lies 100% within the domain of software.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe fact that the sensors and lenses in phones are so small is why the software has so much less to work with and what allows so much more to go wrong.
- blahblah4332 6y agoUnless I missed something in the article, this has nothing to do with sensor or lens size. This is purely an artifact of default image processing settings and ignorance of white balance. Any user with any digital camera can perfectly capture the color of the scene by simply setting the white balance manually to daylight.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe top level comment was making a more general claim than just color balance. There are a lot of weird artifacts in phone pictures introduced by image processing overfitting.
- blahblah4332 6y agoI didn't really agree with the top level comment either. This isn't an artifact of sensor size or A/D conversion or any of that. You can encounter the exact same issue with a $40,000 medium format camera if you don't understand photography. What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait garbage for the photographically and technologically ignorant. The replies to it are disappointingly similar.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MattGaiser 6y agoDoes anyone have a failed photo? The article is awful.
- hundchenkatze 6y agohttps://twitter.com/ceejay35_/status/1303702328323653632 https://twitter.com/ceejay35_/status/1303702328323653632
- MattGaiser 6y agoThank you.
- xsmasher 6y agohttps://i.imgur.com/kWr50Wl.png https://i.imgur.com/kWr50Wl.png Auto white-balance vs manual, taken seconds apart. The second one is closer to reality (but still too bright).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
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- xg15 6y agoLooking forward to reading the first conspiracy theories/Facebook memes about how the wildfire is a hoax, the photos of the orange sky were doctored and the gray photos are the real ones...
- lxe 6y agoAre there no apps for iPhone with the ability to manually adjust white balance?
- sandofsky 6y agoAs the article mentions, there's Halide. (Disclaimer: I work on it.)
- xsmasher 6y agoThere are many; VSCO and camera+ for example. Even in the default camera app you can point at something white, like white paper lit with white light, and long-press to get an auto focus and auto exposure lock. Then you can get a picture of the orange sky / landscape and it will use the locked white balance setting.
- clairity 6y agoit's understandable given our relative disempowerment on the matter, but it feels a little bread-and-circusy to focus on picture-taking rather than a real-life approximation of an airborne toxic event[0]. in LA, we had a bit of a clearing yesterday, but the bobcat fires (and others) have turned us hazy and slightly orange again. i can feel it in my airways. it's more worrisome than the corona everyone else seems to be fretting about, because it certainly will cause unseen damage to everyone's lungs in varying amounts. hundreds of thousands die every year from air pollution. [0] delillo, white noise
- thethethethe 6y agoI don’t think this article is bread and circusy. I think it highlights how absurd this situation is. Our denial and assumptions about the world are so deep, they are encoded in our algorithms to the point where we can’t even record this event accurately.
- clairity 6y agosure, but that's because you've interpreted what is otherwise a pretty banal piece. you've said something more interesting in a sentence than that whole "article". (i didn't even see the photos because google amp infests the site and i block it out of principle. not a fan of leading every paragraph with bold in an effort to be hard-punchingly pithy either.)
- jxramos 6y agoI went out to shoot with my Alpha99 yesterday. I used the daylight AWB settings. It did a decent job, but didn't capture the degree of saturation of the actual color. I had to really boost the ISO, the camera thought it was so dark outside. In fact the light sensors for the man automatic light controls around our property, including some street lights, were still detecting that it was evening.
- bla3 6y agoIf you do statistical modeling, you have to watch your priors. Orange skies are very rare, so the priors in the camera image processing software are off.