7 ms·

I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. Bu

I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.

akomtu 5y ago
Big tech has this uni-modal aporoach to users: they find what maximizes a metric, and works for 75% of the users, but roll it out to 100%. Dealing with the remaining 25% would have low ROI.
- hetspookjee 5y ago
  I never understood this one size fits all approach of a lot of companies. Controlled opposition would often result in higher market penetration and more net happiness
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Mr Smarty Pants has the solution for all cameras to be 100% accurate 100% of the time pleasing 100% of the users. How humble of you to chat with us here on HN. /s You sound like you have not dealt with humans at the scale of the number of smart phone users. I've never dealt with the numbers of something like an iPhone, but over the course of my career have had multiple SKUs totaling over 1 million units. No matter what, there are always "people on the internet" that are dissatisfied enough to go online to voice their opinions. That's the only 100% is that there will always be someone unhappy for whatever reason(s).
- amelius 5y ago
  Not only tech. Try finding shoes or pants when your size is 1.5 times sigma away from the mean.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    As a 5’5 dude buying clothes from American brands is often hilarious. I bought an xs nike trail running tshirt and it’s a good 5 inches too long in the body.
    - Skunkleton 5y ago
      I'm a 6'6" dude and I feel your pain. Every time I get company swag, the best they can offer me is a super wide belly shirt :(
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Small people can use child size, which is usually much cheaper for the same thing. Large people are out of luck. But your point still holds, it is just that if you include children, small sizes don't follow a normal distribution, large sizes do.
annexrichmond 5y ago
Yeah I find that the front facing camera on the iPhone is notoriously bad. The pictures it takes don’t look like me because it alters the skin tone and does aggressive smoothing. I hate it.
naz 5y ago
This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  Gimmicks? Something that a company needs to invent to keep selling new versions of their product.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing. You can even see some of this going on when you open the photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder and the final image.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  It's common in pretty much anything targeted towards the masses. It's probably best to think about it in terms of food. Your average person has an "unrefined" palate. Be it for food, drink, art, etc. I think everyone has one of these in some areas of life. You can't be a connoisseur in every field - it takes too much energy.
- laumars 5y ago
  I’ve never owned Bose nor Beats specifically but more generally I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers. With room sized speakers it’s not a problem because you’ll have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some subs too. Thus it’s easy to have a rich low end without sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with headphones that’s much harder to pull off. So you either have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still still producing a rich and deep low end is very much desirable.
  - Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
    > I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality. Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for my mood/taste. Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You can do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening. However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?) reason is a bit unusual.
mrtksn 5y ago
It simply means that we no longer have measuring instruments who are used to draw accurate representation of the scene but seed samplers who are used to generate a representation of the scene, not necessarily accurately but artistically. Accuracy used to be the metric but someone figured out that most people are not after accuracy. IMHO it's not fundamentally evil, it's just that it's not the thing we are used to. Wouldn't have caused a confusion if they used some other word instead of photograph.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Cameras have never, ever been "accurate". It is not technologically possible to create a photograph that is "accurate". Cameras have always made big tradeoffs to output something that actually looks good to humans.
  - bigyikes 5y ago
    Sure, but there is a major difference between color correction and, say, replacing a head with a leaf. Historically cameras have merely altered the style of images. These days smartphone cameras are altering the content of images.
    - mr_toad 5y ago
      Most modern cameras have noise reduction, stabilisation, the ability to combine multiple exposures and track moving targets. They might not push the envelope as much as a cellphone, but they’re only a few years behind.
  - ixfo 5y ago
    Well, no, it's not perfectly possible to recreate a singular human vision system and capture and reproduce imagery to match that. But actually, we have lots of excellent, well-researched and proven standards for accuracy in imaging. Cameras generally target those standards, certainly professional ones. Many cameras - quite clearly - can produce very accurate photographs. The more worrying trend is that of pervasive post-processing, where we depart from reality and entertain aesthetics.
mynameisash 5y ago
Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There must have been some filter on by default because our faces looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that -- it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us. I similarly have mixed feelings about what I've seen lately of the deep learning that 'restores' very old images to incredible quality. But that quality is fake. I'm sure there's a tug at the heartstrings to see a crisp image of your deceased father from his high school days, but to me that seems a bit revisionist. I don't know. I guess I'm just uneasy with the idea of us editing our lives so readily.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  First we have the uncanny effect from trying to imitate real life too much. It will be interesting if the effect shows up on the other side of modifying away from real life imagery as well.
- tobyjsullivan 5y ago
  This brings new meaning to the old quote, "history is written by victors." Today, the victors are Apple, Google, etc., and they are writing their own version of history as its recorded...
  - mc32 5y ago
    They are the means, but the "victors" are people's vanity. If people didn't want blemish free pictures, they wouldn't be offered --but airbrushing was a thing and old fashioned paintings also tended to skip the blemishes --unlike mirrors. So, today, this continues albeit more perfect and automated for our consumption.
    - noizejoy 5y ago
      Bad vision airbrushes even mirrors. :-)
  - 5y ago
mgraczyk 5y ago
On Android you can enable a "raw" mode that will capture a dng file with much less processing. You can then adjust that raw file and render it to a jpeg according to your taste. The dng will still have things like stabilization and multi-frame merging, but without those the image will almost always look horrible as others have explained.
- pmontra 5y ago
  How can we enable raw mode? I'll looked into the settings of Camera but I found only a way to disable the scent optimizer.
  - bigyikes 5y ago
    I use a (paid) app called Halide, but there are others out there too. I'm personally not aware of a way to do it with the native Camera app, but it would be cool if it exists.
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    The Samsung photo app offers to store RAW files (when shooting in Pro mode) as a setting. YMMV on others.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/ You need to change API to Camera2 and then you will be able to enable RAW.
- justusthane 5y ago
  Newer iPhones can also shoot in raw.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  RAW is not quite what they want (I think). It's HDR+ that they need to disable. The latter takes multiple frames at different exposures and smartly merged them into a single photo, then applies extra color corrections on top. Taking RAW skips the last step, but you still get a merging of multiple frames. Disabling HDR+ will, I believe, take a single frame. Of course on a small phone sensor, the quality will be quite bad.
severine 5y ago
I don't know if digital camera emulation is a thing, but this thread is making me thirsty for a way to emulate my old 2MP Olympus.
- cfn 5y ago
  I have some software that has "digital film" emulations (DXO FP), I suppose that is what they mean, emulating old cameras.
tomasyany 5y ago
Very much agree. I took RAW pictures with my Nikon on a christmas party, and even took the time to properly develop and adjust them. Still, people complained on how "old and bad" their faces looked (in pretty normal pics, nothing fancy). I attribute this to the fact that everybody is now used to phones completely editing faces and smoothing skin and adding saturation, etc., which makes us more "instagramable" although less human.
- ryandvm 5y ago
  Just wait until the phones are automatically giving people cartoon character eyes...
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    It's already happening. I saw an extreme eye enlarging filter accidentally applied to a video by Matt Risinger (YouTube videos about construction and homebuilding).
  - Zak 5y ago
    This is a feature of Snapchat, to give one example. https://www.google.com/search?q=snapchat+cartoon+eyes&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=snapchat+cartoon+eyes&tbm=is...
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    They already have been giving them a dog tongue and whatnot.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    I think the iPhone is doing this with the portrait mode. It may just be the smoothing or a bit of lens fish eye creating the illusion, but I swear that all the portrait photos of me and my family have slightly larger eyes than reality.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    You mean the cartoon filter that has been around since forever? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRNiyjVpEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRNiyjVpEM
SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
As recently as last night, I was considering selling my DSLR and lenses since the quality of my phone camera is just so good, but this has changed my mind. There is something nice about it taking a shot verbatim and letting me decide how to postprocess the RAW. Plus I'd only get a few hundred bucks for it, and the tactile pleasure of a big, heavy ka-chink when the shutter button is pressed is worth more than that for me :)
barrkel 5y ago
I'm finding it increasingly hard to take photographs of unusual light in the sky, because the phone camera keeps trying to normalize it to something it's seen before (i.e. something which matches its tuning and machine learning models), whether it's auto white balance or other computational trickery.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Sony used to have that problem with their real cameras a few years ago. Earned them the nickname Stareater iirc.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    The stareater feature was just noise reduction taken too far. A star looks just like a noisy pixel.
mc32 5y ago
Reality isn’t good enough in the time of Instagram. People want perfect pictures to reflect their mind’s eye. In a way this is the way in for a metaverse. Reality isn’t what they seek. They seek an alternate state that is a mix of reality and fantasy.
- ShroudedNight 5y ago
  Hypermediocrity in the flesh. I expect the depressing outcome for most is to discover that despite having traded our flawed execution for that of a computer, most of us can't even conceive of an existence masterful enough to be worthy of accumulating the abnormally high social status we seem wired to crave.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> how the sky looks clearer than it really did See also: https://www.axios.com/san-francisco-orange-sky-smartphone-4008ba2d-c586-4fe2-9ce6-28cdc1aa57d6.html https://www.axios.com/san-francisco-orange-sky-smartphone-40... You should be allowed to photograph what reality looks like if you want to.
Zak 5y ago
For most phones, there's the possibility of using a third-party camera app with less automation, and even capturing in a raw format (almost always dng). Open Camera for Android is an open source option. Of course getting good results with this approach requires the user to have more knowledge of and practice at photography. https://opencamera.org.uk/index.html https://opencamera.org.uk/index.html
davidcollantes 5y ago
Altering photographic images has always existed. 35 years ago I developed my own films, and took artistic liberty on each photo I printed on photographic paper. I also used a sepia process, and my sister would colour the photos afterwards (we didn’t have colour film, but black and white).
pcurve 5y ago
Half the time it's the camera, the other half, it's the display setting. Samsung phone has different modes for their AMOLED screens.
Jackson__ 5y ago
And furthermore, how it manages to make it all look like a painting when zoomed in. No matter if Android or iPhone, old or new, they all seem to have this really annoying effect.
m-p-3 5y ago
I'd hate to see a photo altered to the point where it could have a significant outcome in a trial. Imagine if the ML improvement lead to a photo where something shows up that wasn't there or vice-versa. How can you trust the picture taken if it might not reflect reality?
shp0ngle 5y ago
It's market unfortunately. People want it, and they want their faces to look better than in reality, to post on Instagrams. The phone that has better pictures got better sales.
Derbasti 5y ago
A while ago I was trying to compare a few of my cameras. It was a cloudy day in early fall. All three cameras and my eyes agreed that the sky was dull-grey and the leaves on the trees drab-brown. To the iPhone, however, the sky was more blue than grey, and the leaves had an autumn-orange hue instead of brown. It wasn't a complete fake, and if I had only had the iPhone picture I wouldn't have noticed. But it was just a little bit better-than-real, and in direct comparison obviously incorrect. This, more than anything, discounted the iPhone camera for my uses.
- gwillen 5y ago
  This kind of white-balance fuckery became very apparent last year, when the skies in the bay area turned orange and red from smoke. On many phone cameras, the photos were automatically color "corrected" to be completely wrong, with no option to avoid this.
  - sethammons 5y ago
    I have yet to capture the oranges, pinks, and violets of our amazing sunsets on a phone camera. It is always more mundane and the vibrance gone.
rimliu 5y ago
What is "real"? Do you count infrared? Ultraviolet? What if you are color blind? For me photo is how I see it, not some "representation of reality" whatever that reality may be.

akomtu 5y ago

Big tech has this uni-modal aporoach to users: they find what maximizes a metric, and works for 75% of the users, but roll it out to 100%. Dealing with the remaining 25% would have low ROI.

hetspookjee 5y ago
I never understood this one size fits all approach of a lot of companies. Controlled opposition would often result in higher market penetration and more net happiness
- dylan604 5y ago
  Mr Smarty Pants has the solution for all cameras to be 100% accurate 100% of the time pleasing 100% of the users. How humble of you to chat with us here on HN. /s You sound like you have not dealt with humans at the scale of the number of smart phone users. I've never dealt with the numbers of something like an iPhone, but over the course of my career have had multiple SKUs totaling over 1 million units. No matter what, there are always "people on the internet" that are dissatisfied enough to go online to voice their opinions. That's the only 100% is that there will always be someone unhappy for whatever reason(s).
amelius 5y ago
Not only tech. Try finding shoes or pants when your size is 1.5 times sigma away from the mean.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  As a 5’5 dude buying clothes from American brands is often hilarious. I bought an xs nike trail running tshirt and it’s a good 5 inches too long in the body.
  - Skunkleton 5y ago
    I'm a 6'6" dude and I feel your pain. Every time I get company swag, the best they can offer me is a super wide belly shirt :(
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Small people can use child size, which is usually much cheaper for the same thing. Large people are out of luck. But your point still holds, it is just that if you include children, small sizes don't follow a normal distribution, large sizes do.

annexrichmond 5y ago

Yeah I find that the front facing camera on the iPhone is notoriously bad. The pictures it takes don’t look like me because it alters the skin tone and does aggressive smoothing. I hate it.

naz 5y ago

This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
Gimmicks? Something that a company needs to invent to keep selling new versions of their product.
Gigachad 5y ago
For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing. You can even see some of this going on when you open the photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder and the final image.
bcrosby95 5y ago
It's common in pretty much anything targeted towards the masses. It's probably best to think about it in terms of food. Your average person has an "unrefined" palate. Be it for food, drink, art, etc. I think everyone has one of these in some areas of life. You can't be a connoisseur in every field - it takes too much energy.
laumars 5y ago
I’ve never owned Bose nor Beats specifically but more generally I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers. With room sized speakers it’s not a problem because you’ll have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some subs too. Thus it’s easy to have a rich low end without sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with headphones that’s much harder to pull off. So you either have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still still producing a rich and deep low end is very much desirable.
- Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
  > I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality. Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for my mood/taste. Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You can do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening. However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?) reason is a bit unusual.

mrtksn 5y ago

It simply means that we no longer have measuring instruments who are used to draw accurate representation of the scene but seed samplers who are used to generate a representation of the scene, not necessarily accurately but artistically. Accuracy used to be the metric but someone figured out that most people are not after accuracy. IMHO it's not fundamentally evil, it's just that it's not the thing we are used to. Wouldn't have caused a confusion if they used some other word instead of photograph.

user-the-name 5y ago
Cameras have never, ever been "accurate". It is not technologically possible to create a photograph that is "accurate". Cameras have always made big tradeoffs to output something that actually looks good to humans.
- bigyikes 5y ago
  Sure, but there is a major difference between color correction and, say, replacing a head with a leaf. Historically cameras have merely altered the style of images. These days smartphone cameras are altering the content of images.
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    Most modern cameras have noise reduction, stabilisation, the ability to combine multiple exposures and track moving targets. They might not push the envelope as much as a cellphone, but they’re only a few years behind.
- ixfo 5y ago
  Well, no, it's not perfectly possible to recreate a singular human vision system and capture and reproduce imagery to match that. But actually, we have lots of excellent, well-researched and proven standards for accuracy in imaging. Cameras generally target those standards, certainly professional ones. Many cameras - quite clearly - can produce very accurate photographs. The more worrying trend is that of pervasive post-processing, where we depart from reality and entertain aesthetics.

mynameisash 5y ago

Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There must have been some filter on by default because our faces looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that -- it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us. I similarly have mixed feelings about what I've seen lately of the deep learning that 'restores' very old images to incredible quality. But that quality is fake. I'm sure there's a tug at the heartstrings to see a crisp image of your deceased father from his high school days, but to me that seems a bit revisionist. I don't know. I guess I'm just uneasy with the idea of us editing our lives so readily.

travisgriggs 5y ago
First we have the uncanny effect from trying to imitate real life too much. It will be interesting if the effect shows up on the other side of modifying away from real life imagery as well.
tobyjsullivan 5y ago
This brings new meaning to the old quote, "history is written by victors." Today, the victors are Apple, Google, etc., and they are writing their own version of history as its recorded...
- mc32 5y ago
  They are the means, but the "victors" are people's vanity. If people didn't want blemish free pictures, they wouldn't be offered --but airbrushing was a thing and old fashioned paintings also tended to skip the blemishes --unlike mirrors. So, today, this continues albeit more perfect and automated for our consumption.
  - noizejoy 5y ago
    Bad vision airbrushes even mirrors. :-)
- 5y ago

mgraczyk 5y ago

On Android you can enable a "raw" mode that will capture a dng file with much less processing. You can then adjust that raw file and render it to a jpeg according to your taste. The dng will still have things like stabilization and multi-frame merging, but without those the image will almost always look horrible as others have explained.

pmontra 5y ago
How can we enable raw mode? I'll looked into the settings of Camera but I found only a way to disable the scent optimizer.
- bigyikes 5y ago
  I use a (paid) app called Halide, but there are others out there too. I'm personally not aware of a way to do it with the native Camera app, but it would be cool if it exists.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  The Samsung photo app offers to store RAW files (when shooting in Pro mode) as a setting. YMMV on others.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/ You need to change API to Camera2 and then you will be able to enable RAW.
justusthane 5y ago
Newer iPhones can also shoot in raw.
ehsankia 5y ago
RAW is not quite what they want (I think). It's HDR+ that they need to disable. The latter takes multiple frames at different exposures and smartly merged them into a single photo, then applies extra color corrections on top. Taking RAW skips the last step, but you still get a merging of multiple frames. Disabling HDR+ will, I believe, take a single frame. Of course on a small phone sensor, the quality will be quite bad.

severine 5y ago

I don't know if digital camera emulation is a thing, but this thread is making me thirsty for a way to emulate my old 2MP Olympus.

cfn 5y ago
I have some software that has "digital film" emulations (DXO FP), I suppose that is what they mean, emulating old cameras.

tomasyany 5y ago

Very much agree. I took RAW pictures with my Nikon on a christmas party, and even took the time to properly develop and adjust them. Still, people complained on how "old and bad" their faces looked (in pretty normal pics, nothing fancy). I attribute this to the fact that everybody is now used to phones completely editing faces and smoothing skin and adding saturation, etc., which makes us more "instagramable" although less human.

ryandvm 5y ago
Just wait until the phones are automatically giving people cartoon character eyes...
- nitrogen 5y ago
  It's already happening. I saw an extreme eye enlarging filter accidentally applied to a video by Matt Risinger (YouTube videos about construction and homebuilding).
- Zak 5y ago
  This is a feature of Snapchat, to give one example. https://www.google.com/search?q=snapchat+cartoon+eyes&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=snapchat+cartoon+eyes&tbm=is...
- johnisgood 5y ago
  They already have been giving them a dog tongue and whatnot.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I think the iPhone is doing this with the portrait mode. It may just be the smoothing or a bit of lens fish eye creating the illusion, but I swear that all the portrait photos of me and my family have slightly larger eyes than reality.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  You mean the cartoon filter that has been around since forever? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRNiyjVpEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuRNiyjVpEM

SturgeonsLaw 5y ago

As recently as last night, I was considering selling my DSLR and lenses since the quality of my phone camera is just so good, but this has changed my mind. There is something nice about it taking a shot verbatim and letting me decide how to postprocess the RAW. Plus I'd only get a few hundred bucks for it, and the tactile pleasure of a big, heavy ka-chink when the shutter button is pressed is worth more than that for me :)

barrkel 5y ago

I'm finding it increasingly hard to take photographs of unusual light in the sky, because the phone camera keeps trying to normalize it to something it's seen before (i.e. something which matches its tuning and machine learning models), whether it's auto white balance or other computational trickery.

formerly_proven 5y ago
Sony used to have that problem with their real cameras a few years ago. Earned them the nickname Stareater iirc.
- mark-r 5y ago
  The stareater feature was just noise reduction taken too far. A star looks just like a noisy pixel.

mc32 5y ago

Reality isn’t good enough in the time of Instagram. People want perfect pictures to reflect their mind’s eye. In a way this is the way in for a metaverse. Reality isn’t what they seek. They seek an alternate state that is a mix of reality and fantasy.

ShroudedNight 5y ago
Hypermediocrity in the flesh. I expect the depressing outcome for most is to discover that despite having traded our flawed execution for that of a computer, most of us can't even conceive of an existence masterful enough to be worthy of accumulating the abnormally high social status we seem wired to crave.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> how the sky looks clearer than it really did See also: https://www.axios.com/san-francisco-orange-sky-smartphone-4008ba2d-c586-4fe2-9ce6-28cdc1aa57d6.html https://www.axios.com/san-francisco-orange-sky-smartphone-40... You should be allowed to photograph what reality looks like if you want to.

Zak 5y ago

For most phones, there's the possibility of using a third-party camera app with less automation, and even capturing in a raw format (almost always dng). Open Camera for Android is an open source option. Of course getting good results with this approach requires the user to have more knowledge of and practice at photography. https://opencamera.org.uk/index.html https://opencamera.org.uk/index.html

davidcollantes 5y ago

Altering photographic images has always existed. 35 years ago I developed my own films, and took artistic liberty on each photo I printed on photographic paper. I also used a sepia process, and my sister would colour the photos afterwards (we didn’t have colour film, but black and white).

pcurve 5y ago

Half the time it's the camera, the other half, it's the display setting. Samsung phone has different modes for their AMOLED screens.

Jackson__ 5y ago

And furthermore, how it manages to make it all look like a painting when zoomed in. No matter if Android or iPhone, old or new, they all seem to have this really annoying effect.

m-p-3 5y ago

I'd hate to see a photo altered to the point where it could have a significant outcome in a trial. Imagine if the ML improvement lead to a photo where something shows up that wasn't there or vice-versa. How can you trust the picture taken if it might not reflect reality?

shp0ngle 5y ago

It's market unfortunately. People want it, and they want their faces to look better than in reality, to post on Instagrams. The phone that has better pictures got better sales.

Derbasti 5y ago

A while ago I was trying to compare a few of my cameras. It was a cloudy day in early fall. All three cameras and my eyes agreed that the sky was dull-grey and the leaves on the trees drab-brown. To the iPhone, however, the sky was more blue than grey, and the leaves had an autumn-orange hue instead of brown. It wasn't a complete fake, and if I had only had the iPhone picture I wouldn't have noticed. But it was just a little bit better-than-real, and in direct comparison obviously incorrect. This, more than anything, discounted the iPhone camera for my uses.

gwillen 5y ago
This kind of white-balance fuckery became very apparent last year, when the skies in the bay area turned orange and red from smoke. On many phone cameras, the photos were automatically color "corrected" to be completely wrong, with no option to avoid this.
- sethammons 5y ago
  I have yet to capture the oranges, pinks, and violets of our amazing sunsets on a phone camera. It is always more mundane and the vibrance gone.

rimliu 5y ago

What is "real"? Do you count infrared? Ultraviolet? What if you are color blind? For me photo is how I see it, not some "representation of reality" whatever that reality may be.