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This is the dark side of "smart" devices that replace high-quality physical sensors with clever algorithms. When something weird happens, they might misbehave i

This 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 ago
This 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Unless 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 ago
      The 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 ago
        I 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.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        In a competent camera, you actually wouldn't. You would take a picture in RAW format, and change the White Balance afterwards. Whereas in a tiny phone, the RAW images are of exceedingly low quality.
        blahblah4332 6y ago
        That's not generally how it works. Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process. This is probably especially true for people like photojournalist, who shoot thousands of photos in a session and don't want to spend hours processing them afterward. What about shooting in mixed light, where you have different color light sources inside and outside of a room? Do you think photographers are just saying "meh, this looks fine purple, I'll fix it in post"... or are they trying to capture the scene as close to accurate as possible (perhaps biasing exposure to compensate for limits in highlight or shadow detail capture) Edit: Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    No. A bigger lens (more light) would correct for gain errors. A bigger sensor would improve either spatial resolution or gain error or both. None of that has anything to do with color balance. All digital color photography is computational because sensor physics, display physics, and human biology are distinct processes. Whenever you have multiple color channels you need to make assumptions about the relationships between them. This is color balance and it happens in software.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      That's not how it actually works out in practice. Small lenses mean small apertures which means you get diffraction, and you get it pretty fast. With a 1-2mm aperture lens you get diffraction limiting resolution to around 8-10Mpx. As for color balance, sure, but the parent wasn't limited to color balance.
agumonkey 6y ago
we need a RFC for AI stupid mode

jeffbee 6y ago

This 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Unless 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      I 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.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        In a competent camera, you actually wouldn't. You would take a picture in RAW format, and change the White Balance afterwards. Whereas in a tiny phone, the RAW images are of exceedingly low quality.
        blahblah4332 6y ago
        That's not generally how it works. Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process. This is probably especially true for people like photojournalist, who shoot thousands of photos in a session and don't want to spend hours processing them afterward. What about shooting in mixed light, where you have different color light sources inside and outside of a room? Do you think photographers are just saying "meh, this looks fine purple, I'll fix it in post"... or are they trying to capture the scene as close to accurate as possible (perhaps biasing exposure to compensate for limits in highlight or shadow detail capture) Edit: Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  No. A bigger lens (more light) would correct for gain errors. A bigger sensor would improve either spatial resolution or gain error or both. None of that has anything to do with color balance. All digital color photography is computational because sensor physics, display physics, and human biology are distinct processes. Whenever you have multiple color channels you need to make assumptions about the relationships between them. This is color balance and it happens in software.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    That's not how it actually works out in practice. Small lenses mean small apertures which means you get diffraction, and you get it pretty fast. With a 1-2mm aperture lens you get diffraction limiting resolution to around 8-10Mpx. As for color balance, sure, but the parent wasn't limited to color balance.

agumonkey 6y ago

we need a RFC for AI stupid mode