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As an amateur photographer… can someone smarter/more educated than me explain to me why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? This look

As an amateur photographer… can someone smarter/more educated than me explain to me why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? This looks really cool, but there are dozens of apps and filters out there that do stuff like this, no? That’s not to take away from how cool this is, just asking as a practical thing why someone else beside the person in question would buy another lease and do this vs use a digital solution to get a similar effect.

taeric 6y ago
Same reason folks generally like kaleidoscopes, but I don't see as many of those in screen savers anymore. That is, I don't think there is an objective answer. A lot of the fun in this is the unexpected and unrepeatable nature of the results.
udev 6y ago
An extreme version of your question: Why even bother taking pictures? Just ray-trace or otherwise render your images.
LASR 6y ago
It’s same reason you’ve already outlined. It’s cool. With computational capabilities these days, you can really get whatever look like purely through software.
dv_dt 6y ago
Serendipity in the real world can produce effects that you may not think to work to create digitally. On the flip side, digital processing can do things that would be a pain to do with a physical pipeline. Imho more possibilities from all avenues makes for a richer world.
dylan604 6y ago
Why would anybody do anything in camera vs digital? Because somethings just aren't the same when done in post. Is this one of them? Maybe the person doing something physically isn't a software person to make something that doesn't exist now, but they have old lenses laying around and are not afraid to tinker. Much faster results. The "bokeh" from these smart phone cameras are still annoyingly not right, so there's that aspect as well.
imwillofficial 6y ago
This is cool in two ways. 1) He is using physical elements to get the interesting shot. There is something that is difficult to describe, but innately alluring about "real" or physical aspects of our increasingly digital world. The bending of light, the crystals in film, the feeling of the pages of a real book. There is something about the medium itself carrying meaning, even if the actual communicated value is the same. Perhaps it speaks to a timelessness, or durability of good ideas, beautiful pictures, and powerful words that can last thousands of years. Where as in the digital realm, my worlds sometimes only last as long as the hard drive they live on. I think it is deeper than that. Physicality is something we can relate to, touch, smell, taste, we experience it far deeper than an abstract concept represented by pixels on a screen. E.g. Why is a book better than a PDF? I have no good answer. 2) Although being in photography for decades, I was unaware of this specific effect when manipulating the elements inside a lens. I had no idea this effect was possible. The tinkering, the curiosity followed down a path few would bother with, isn't that what hackers are all about? I am inspired by His diving deep on topics of interest.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I am looking at it from the point of view of the finished product, the photograph, rather than the process of creating it. I personally tend to do things “the hard way” at times because I feel like I, for the lack of a better term, put my soul into the thing that way. But as a practical matter, people viewing a photograph generally don’t know how it was produced and as such is this particular effect unique and/or hard to reproduce?
  - platz 6y ago
    You wouldn't be able to recreate the exact effect digitally. You could try to approximate a crappier version of it but there would be noticeable differences, and sometimes nuance in art matters.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      Even if it was an exact replica, there is, as the french say, a je ne sais quoi about an object crafted lovingly in a manual fashion. Definition of je ne sais quoi : something (such as an appealing quality) that cannot be adequately described or expressed. This sounds like fluff driven by emotion and not reason, but I encourage readers to embrace the lack of reason for some elements of human experience. We are anything but perfectly rational beings, this is one powerful aspect where efficiency and logic are sacrificed on the alter of subjective experience.
tomc1985 6y ago
I'm so tired of this arrogant attitude. "Why should I do something in the real world when I can simulate it with a good-enough-but-ultimately-inferior digital process?"
- sigg3 6y ago
  How is it arrogant? He's honestly asking. There might be good reason for using a digital solution, such as keeping valuable equipment intact.. We can have both. The world is not boolean.
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    It's arrogant when seen in a larger trend of technologists constantly trying to substitute everything with technology. "When all you have is a hammer, everything seems like a nail" I too am an amateur/prosumer photographer who uses an entirely digital process. But tech has its weaknesses, especially in photography -- digital tech still can't replicate a lot of what analog can do, and its important to embrace that. That $4000 mirrorless still can't replicate the dynamic range of 35mm film. Photoshop still can't replicate the contrasty reds of Velvia film. And so on...
  - cpach 6y ago
    Your last sentence there made me think of an old Welle: Erdball song… “Es gibt kein Kompromiss / Es zählt nur ja und nein / Wir sehn wies wirklich ist / Wir denken digital”
- vecter 6y ago
  I don't think the OP is arrogant. I think it's a genuine question. I didn't think of the question itself, but after it was posed, I didn't know the answer (because I have no background in photography or image processing). A few other folks have responded with a technical answer, which is that rendering this would require depth information which obviously isn't available in a 2D image.
- Dig1t 6y ago
  I think the many qualifications in OP's question make it clear that the intention was not to be arrogant, but simply to ask a question and maybe learn something about photography. I had the same question, not because I'm looking down on people who do this but because I genuinely don't know very much about the photography world and think that it might be possible that there are some unknown advantages to one method over the other.
rileyphone 6y ago
Depth information is lost once light hits the sensor. Software can attempt to account for this (portrait mode) but it's imperfect.
0-_-0 6y ago
Because no digital solution can recognize depth correctly from a single image, which would be needed for this effect.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Granted, but also haven’t we done this: https://corephotonics.com/products/digital-bokeh/ https://corephotonics.com/products/digital-bokeh/
  - tokai 6y ago
    It's not from a single image.
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    That's from multiple images, and if you look closely it looks really bad. Just look at her hand in the "far focus" image. A digital method needs to fill out information that's just not present in the image.
thesuitonym 6y ago
Why climb a mountain when you can just send a drone to the top? Some things are worth doing just because they are.
- geocrasher 6y ago
  This. It's easy to get into the mindset that "It's all been done" or "somebody already did it better, so why bother?" Sometimes it's good to just do things for the experience and nothing more. This is especially true for many hobbies such as Amateur Radio. Guys can armchair quarterback antennas, coax, baluns/ununs, whatever, all day long, arguing about which is right. Then a guy goes out and just tries it, does it all wrong according to the "in" crowd, and has tons of fun. <--- this is me. Doing it because I can and it's fun not because it's "better"
jedimastert 6y ago
Why take pictures at all? Photorealistic renders are at our fingertips with things like Blender and Cycles. Just take a look at /r/rendered. It's fun to fiddle and tinker. As much as someone could make the image in a render (I actually seriously doubt the picture could be recreated with post-processing alone unless there was a light field camera involved or something) who would think to do so? This didn't come about because someone was looking for the effect, but because someone was exploring and found it.
cpach 6y ago
Different strokes for different folks. I’ve been using computers and digital graphics applications for about thirty years now. If I were to get myself a new hobby I wouldn’t necessarily want to have one that made me spend more time in front of a computer. That’s one reason people might want to do things the analog way. I’m currently reading a book written in 2017 by an author who still uses a typewriter. A good book, and it might help him to avoid distractions when writing.
marcan_42 6y ago
A lens shapes a light field onto a sensor. Once light hits the sensor, it is flattened into a 2D image, quantized, and saturated based on the limitations of the sensor. You cannot do with software what you can do with a lens. The information is lost by the time it's in a raw file. Not just depth, but also brightness. Any white highlights are also lost information; a lens can shape a highlight to look different in a way which cannot be done in software without using HDR (i.e. multiple exposures).
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Damn, I wanted to link Lytro's website but they shut down ? :(
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    Making up new bokeh shapes, depth-based special effects, etc. are the type of thing Lytro should have done with their cameras, instead of just «focus after capture time», which is mathematically interesting but doesn’t enable fundamentally new art.
  - jobigoud 6y ago
    They ate working on the other side of the equation now, making displays that directly reproduce light fields. Checkout https://www.lightfieldlab.com/ https://www.lightfieldlab.com/
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      "Real holograms. No headgear." https://variety.com/2018/digital/features/light-field-lab-holographic-display-demo-1203026693/ https://variety.com/2018/digital/features/light-field-lab-ho... However those don't seem to be "real real holograms", but rather something closer to the glasses-free stereoscopic 3D like the Nintendo 3DS or some 3D TVs ? I wonder how they can manage to have a picture cross the frame of the screen, AFAIK this isn't possible neither with "real real holograms" nor stereoscopic 3D ? (For previous research into "real real holographic video", see these : https://www.media.mit.edu/spi/holoVideoAll.htm https://www.media.mit.edu/spi/holoVideoAll.htm https://phys.org/news/2010-05-holographic-3d.html https://phys.org/news/2010-05-holographic-3d.html https://www.businessinsider.com/cheap-holographic-video-coming-2013-6?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/cheap-holographic-video-comi... https://phys.org/news/2018-11-big-application-d-holography-high-performance.html https://phys.org/news/2018-11-big-application-d-holography-h... )
mschaef 6y ago
> why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? The camera lens has a bunch more information to work with in terms of depth. Along the same lines, an iPhone can fake bokeh by applying a filter masked by depth information, but it's not really in the same league as the real optical effect you get from a real lens in the field. (In terms of responsiveness and the quality of detail that's captured.) OTOH, as much as I think legitimate optical effects can be useful/special at capture time, I have limited use for computational effects at capture time. As long as the 'digital negative' has all the information, I'd much rather be able to apply the computational effect later. (This is an advantage of digital techniques - you can adjust them later.)
adolph 6y ago
Software is typically immature hardware. To the extent that you can do something in hardware the results are more often superior, if less flexible.
gopalv 6y ago
> can someone smarter/more educated than me explain to me why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? Practical effects always feel better over computational ones - in terms of feedback. Which is weird to say because it only really happened for me after digital cameras gave instant previews with zoom & I could tweak/click while getting to know some new hardware. I did some digital tilt-shifts and then played around with a manual shifted lens once - seeing what you click is so "tactile" (& the bar for it will shift was more computation can be done in preview). The thing is that the digital thing is still guessing depth with some gradient map, particularly at such a long focal length. The reason a lot of the in-app portrait modes have improved massively is because there are secondary depth sensors which fill in the data that is needed to compute a good looking depth map. > why someone else beside the person in question would buy another lease I can't think of a single reason except to mess with things till you get the photo you want :) I wasted a bunch of time with a very cheap (but great) Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D for different bokehs during a party shoot, which turned out to be a fun project "makeable" for a tutorial I was doing later. And eventually turned to a lensbaby bokeh punchable + a lot of vinyl clips of random shapes (mostly Om/ॐ shapes for temple pictures). I'm sure I could get a digital solution for that, but it involved a lot less work to punch a pattern and go nuts with it. [1] - https://www.flickr.com/photos/t3rmin4t0r/4362410419/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/t3rmin4t0r/4362410419/
DanBC 6y ago
> As an amateur photographer… can someone smarter/more educated than me explain to me why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? This looks really cool People like to play. People like to place artificial constraints upon their work, and then see what they can make within those constraints. People get very used to a particular camera and lens, and sometimes they get a bit stuck in a rut and want to break away from that. People sometimes like unpredictability, and it can lead them onto different ways of working or different ways to present a result.
ska 6y ago
> This looks really cool, but there are dozens of apps and filters out there that do stuff like this, no? Such filters live in 2D, optics in 3D - part of why most filter for things like "bokeh" don't work particularly well is that without an accurate depth map you are guessing or ignoring that 3rd dimension. On the flip side - this stuff is aesthetic, so there isn't one "proper" way to do it.

taeric 6y ago

Same reason folks generally like kaleidoscopes, but I don't see as many of those in screen savers anymore. That is, I don't think there is an objective answer. A lot of the fun in this is the unexpected and unrepeatable nature of the results.

udev 6y ago

An extreme version of your question: Why even bother taking pictures? Just ray-trace or otherwise render your images.

LASR 6y ago

It’s same reason you’ve already outlined. It’s cool. With computational capabilities these days, you can really get whatever look like purely through software.

dv_dt 6y ago

Serendipity in the real world can produce effects that you may not think to work to create digitally. On the flip side, digital processing can do things that would be a pain to do with a physical pipeline. Imho more possibilities from all avenues makes for a richer world.

dylan604 6y ago

Why would anybody do anything in camera vs digital? Because somethings just aren't the same when done in post. Is this one of them? Maybe the person doing something physically isn't a software person to make something that doesn't exist now, but they have old lenses laying around and are not afraid to tinker. Much faster results. The "bokeh" from these smart phone cameras are still annoyingly not right, so there's that aspect as well.

imwillofficial 6y ago

This is cool in two ways. 1) He is using physical elements to get the interesting shot. There is something that is difficult to describe, but innately alluring about "real" or physical aspects of our increasingly digital world. The bending of light, the crystals in film, the feeling of the pages of a real book. There is something about the medium itself carrying meaning, even if the actual communicated value is the same. Perhaps it speaks to a timelessness, or durability of good ideas, beautiful pictures, and powerful words that can last thousands of years. Where as in the digital realm, my worlds sometimes only last as long as the hard drive they live on. I think it is deeper than that. Physicality is something we can relate to, touch, smell, taste, we experience it far deeper than an abstract concept represented by pixels on a screen. E.g. Why is a book better than a PDF? I have no good answer. 2) Although being in photography for decades, I was unaware of this specific effect when manipulating the elements inside a lens. I had no idea this effect was possible. The tinkering, the curiosity followed down a path few would bother with, isn't that what hackers are all about? I am inspired by His diving deep on topics of interest.

IgorPartola 6y ago
That makes a lot of sense. I am looking at it from the point of view of the finished product, the photograph, rather than the process of creating it. I personally tend to do things “the hard way” at times because I feel like I, for the lack of a better term, put my soul into the thing that way. But as a practical matter, people viewing a photograph generally don’t know how it was produced and as such is this particular effect unique and/or hard to reproduce?
- platz 6y ago
  You wouldn't be able to recreate the exact effect digitally. You could try to approximate a crappier version of it but there would be noticeable differences, and sometimes nuance in art matters.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    Even if it was an exact replica, there is, as the french say, a je ne sais quoi about an object crafted lovingly in a manual fashion. Definition of je ne sais quoi : something (such as an appealing quality) that cannot be adequately described or expressed. This sounds like fluff driven by emotion and not reason, but I encourage readers to embrace the lack of reason for some elements of human experience. We are anything but perfectly rational beings, this is one powerful aspect where efficiency and logic are sacrificed on the alter of subjective experience.

tomc1985 6y ago

I'm so tired of this arrogant attitude. "Why should I do something in the real world when I can simulate it with a good-enough-but-ultimately-inferior digital process?"

sigg3 6y ago
How is it arrogant? He's honestly asking. There might be good reason for using a digital solution, such as keeping valuable equipment intact.. We can have both. The world is not boolean.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  It's arrogant when seen in a larger trend of technologists constantly trying to substitute everything with technology. "When all you have is a hammer, everything seems like a nail" I too am an amateur/prosumer photographer who uses an entirely digital process. But tech has its weaknesses, especially in photography -- digital tech still can't replicate a lot of what analog can do, and its important to embrace that. That $4000 mirrorless still can't replicate the dynamic range of 35mm film. Photoshop still can't replicate the contrasty reds of Velvia film. And so on...
- cpach 6y ago
  Your last sentence there made me think of an old Welle: Erdball song… “Es gibt kein Kompromiss / Es zählt nur ja und nein / Wir sehn wies wirklich ist / Wir denken digital”
vecter 6y ago
I don't think the OP is arrogant. I think it's a genuine question. I didn't think of the question itself, but after it was posed, I didn't know the answer (because I have no background in photography or image processing). A few other folks have responded with a technical answer, which is that rendering this would require depth information which obviously isn't available in a 2D image.
Dig1t 6y ago
I think the many qualifications in OP's question make it clear that the intention was not to be arrogant, but simply to ask a question and maybe learn something about photography. I had the same question, not because I'm looking down on people who do this but because I genuinely don't know very much about the photography world and think that it might be possible that there are some unknown advantages to one method over the other.

rileyphone 6y ago

Depth information is lost once light hits the sensor. Software can attempt to account for this (portrait mode) but it's imperfect.

0-_-0 6y ago

Because no digital solution can recognize depth correctly from a single image, which would be needed for this effect.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
IgorPartola 6y ago
Granted, but also haven’t we done this: https://corephotonics.com/products/digital-bokeh/ https://corephotonics.com/products/digital-bokeh/
- tokai 6y ago
  It's not from a single image.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  That's from multiple images, and if you look closely it looks really bad. Just look at her hand in the "far focus" image. A digital method needs to fill out information that's just not present in the image.

thesuitonym 6y ago

Why climb a mountain when you can just send a drone to the top? Some things are worth doing just because they are.

geocrasher 6y ago
This. It's easy to get into the mindset that "It's all been done" or "somebody already did it better, so why bother?" Sometimes it's good to just do things for the experience and nothing more. This is especially true for many hobbies such as Amateur Radio. Guys can armchair quarterback antennas, coax, baluns/ununs, whatever, all day long, arguing about which is right. Then a guy goes out and just tries it, does it all wrong according to the "in" crowd, and has tons of fun. <--- this is me. Doing it because I can and it's fun not because it's "better"

jedimastert 6y ago

Why take pictures at all? Photorealistic renders are at our fingertips with things like Blender and Cycles. Just take a look at /r/rendered. It's fun to fiddle and tinker. As much as someone could make the image in a render (I actually seriously doubt the picture could be recreated with post-processing alone unless there was a light field camera involved or something) who would think to do so? This didn't come about because someone was looking for the effect, but because someone was exploring and found it.

cpach 6y ago

Different strokes for different folks. I’ve been using computers and digital graphics applications for about thirty years now. If I were to get myself a new hobby I wouldn’t necessarily want to have one that made me spend more time in front of a computer. That’s one reason people might want to do things the analog way. I’m currently reading a book written in 2017 by an author who still uses a typewriter. A good book, and it might help him to avoid distractions when writing.

marcan_42 6y ago

A lens shapes a light field onto a sensor. Once light hits the sensor, it is flattened into a 2D image, quantized, and saturated based on the limitations of the sensor. You cannot do with software what you can do with a lens. The information is lost by the time it's in a raw file. Not just depth, but also brightness. Any white highlights are also lost information; a lens can shape a highlight to look different in a way which cannot be done in software without using HDR (i.e. multiple exposures).

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Damn, I wanted to link Lytro's website but they shut down ? :(
- jacobolus 6y ago
  Making up new bokeh shapes, depth-based special effects, etc. are the type of thing Lytro should have done with their cameras, instead of just «focus after capture time», which is mathematically interesting but doesn’t enable fundamentally new art.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  They ate working on the other side of the equation now, making displays that directly reproduce light fields. Checkout https://www.lightfieldlab.com/ https://www.lightfieldlab.com/
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    "Real holograms. No headgear." https://variety.com/2018/digital/features/light-field-lab-holographic-display-demo-1203026693/ https://variety.com/2018/digital/features/light-field-lab-ho... However those don't seem to be "real real holograms", but rather something closer to the glasses-free stereoscopic 3D like the Nintendo 3DS or some 3D TVs ? I wonder how they can manage to have a picture cross the frame of the screen, AFAIK this isn't possible neither with "real real holograms" nor stereoscopic 3D ? (For previous research into "real real holographic video", see these : https://www.media.mit.edu/spi/holoVideoAll.htm https://www.media.mit.edu/spi/holoVideoAll.htm https://phys.org/news/2010-05-holographic-3d.html https://phys.org/news/2010-05-holographic-3d.html https://www.businessinsider.com/cheap-holographic-video-coming-2013-6?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/cheap-holographic-video-comi... https://phys.org/news/2018-11-big-application-d-holography-high-performance.html https://phys.org/news/2018-11-big-application-d-holography-h... )

mschaef 6y ago

> why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? The camera lens has a bunch more information to work with in terms of depth. Along the same lines, an iPhone can fake bokeh by applying a filter masked by depth information, but it's not really in the same league as the real optical effect you get from a real lens in the field. (In terms of responsiveness and the quality of detail that's captured.) OTOH, as much as I think legitimate optical effects can be useful/special at capture time, I have limited use for computational effects at capture time. As long as the 'digital negative' has all the information, I'd much rather be able to apply the computational effect later. (This is an advantage of digital techniques - you can adjust them later.)

adolph 6y ago

Software is typically immature hardware. To the extent that you can do something in hardware the results are more often superior, if less flexible.

gopalv 6y ago

> can someone smarter/more educated than me explain to me why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? Practical effects always feel better over computational ones - in terms of feedback. Which is weird to say because it only really happened for me after digital cameras gave instant previews with zoom & I could tweak/click while getting to know some new hardware. I did some digital tilt-shifts and then played around with a manual shifted lens once - seeing what you click is so "tactile" (& the bar for it will shift was more computation can be done in preview). The thing is that the digital thing is still guessing depth with some gradient map, particularly at such a long focal length. The reason a lot of the in-app portrait modes have improved massively is because there are secondary depth sensors which fill in the data that is needed to compute a good looking depth map. > why someone else beside the person in question would buy another lease I can't think of a single reason except to mess with things till you get the photo you want :) I wasted a bunch of time with a very cheap (but great) Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D for different bokehs during a party shoot, which turned out to be a fun project "makeable" for a tutorial I was doing later. And eventually turned to a lensbaby bokeh punchable + a lot of vinyl clips of random shapes (mostly Om/ॐ shapes for temple pictures). I'm sure I could get a digital solution for that, but it involved a lot less work to punch a pattern and go nuts with it. [1] - https://www.flickr.com/photos/t3rmin4t0r/4362410419/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/t3rmin4t0r/4362410419/

DanBC 6y ago

> As an amateur photographer… can someone smarter/more educated than me explain to me why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? This looks really cool People like to play. People like to place artificial constraints upon their work, and then see what they can make within those constraints. People get very used to a particular camera and lens, and sometimes they get a bit stuck in a rut and want to break away from that. People sometimes like unpredictability, and it can lead them onto different ways of working or different ways to present a result.

ska 6y ago

> This looks really cool, but there are dozens of apps and filters out there that do stuff like this, no? Such filters live in 2D, optics in 3D - part of why most filter for things like "bokeh" don't work particularly well is that without an accurate depth map you are guessing or ignoring that 3rd dimension. On the flip side - this stuff is aesthetic, so there isn't one "proper" way to do it.