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Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compare

Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration. If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face detection then it’s probably not something you can (or would want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a tiny sensor in something other than great light (even a heavy overcast is often not enough) will require a lot of software processing. I’m not sure exactly what happened here but I’m pretty sure everyone asking for “unmodified raw photos” to be produced don’t understand what they are asking for. Those “unmodified” photos would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions.

Gigachad 5y ago
No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch. The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable. And the times it messes up are so rare that it becomes a talking point worthy of hundreds of comments.
- GenerocUsername 5y ago
  You guys are conflating 'adjusting light levels and sharness' with 'replacing whole objects in one area of scene with other objects from the scene' I think this particular big demonstrates a massive gap in what people think photoprocessing is, and what it has very recently become
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Simply adjusting light levels and sharpness wouldn't produce this good/clear of a photo in the conditions presented - AI/ML image post-processing is a hard requirement for sensors like these.
    - creato 5y ago
      The "hard requirement" is just multi-frame noise reduction, which has been around for a lot longer than the AI/ML hype wave, and has always had a risk of producing similar artifacts to this one.
      - jjeaff 5y ago
        Ya, I don't think anyone has been using ml/ai in camera phones up until the last 5 years maybe. But it does seem like they have quite a few high tech algorithms at play. More than just multi-frame noise reduction.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Multi-frame noise reduction only gets you so far. Rotating objects for example present huge issues and result in their own artifacts. In the end there isn’t a free lunch, any system that improves resulting images is making trade offs.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      But it’s also just weird. That’s not my daughter’s skin in the photo, it’s 1000 other people’s skin blended together and textured in.
      - laurent92 5y ago
        It’s what you desire your skin to be.
        spoonjim 5y ago
        That might be good for myself, or if I’m honest even my wife, but my daughter looks perfect to me and I only want to see her in reality.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        No imaging system reproduces reality. You're always getting a compromised result.
        wholinator2 5y ago
        Yeah, even your eyes don't reproduce reality perfectly but at that point it's just semantics. He means he wants to see his daughter the same way through the camera that he sees her through his eyes, in real life, otherwise known to him as "reality". I don't think it's unreasonable to allow context of the statement to allow us to disregard "reality" as it pertains to quantum wave functions, in favor of something more human. There's a large difference in something that's goal is to capture what the eye sees and something that's goal isn't. It feels like Apple thinks they know what's better for us than we do, which I admit it's perfectly capable of doing in certain scenarios. But, when Apples thoughts do not align or go directly against our wishes it's uncomfortable, it feels like your "reality" is being ripped from your hands in favor of what some giant corporation thinks your reality should be, for any large number of opaque or intentionally obscured reasons.
        5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - aaron695 5y ago
  - dheera 5y ago
    It probably all goes into a black box ML model nowadays, so the model will conflate it if we don't.
  - 1-more 5y ago
    the photographer replied later that it's due to a leaf hanging down from a branch in the foreground. There was a leaf in between the woman's head and the camera lens. Nothing weird happened.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Indeed. I wish I had a list of everyone parroting the wisdom that "it's all about the size of the lens, a smartphone can never be as good as a DSLR" so as to ignore their future opinions. Camera phones now beat cameras worth thousands of dollars with better software and larger R&D budgets, at least in low light performance and color gamut. Closely related: "It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable. Lost information ist lost". This was big due to some US TV show at the time, I guess. Here, the error was in the assumption that the information was lost: as it turns out, there's a wide space of possibilities for image quality to be too low for us to easily read some letters, but good enough to contain the clues allowing a smart algorithm to reconstruct them.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    In theory what prevents me from using a huge lens and sensor on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and then using the same advanced software but now running on a desktop computer or a server that is many times more powerful than a smartphone to do advanced post processing?
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      Nothing at all. It’s honestly surprising that it’s not a bigger thing. Guessing what stops you is that the Apple team that makes camera software has a budget that makes the Nikon pc app team look quite small.
      - mynameisvlad 5y ago
        Cameras don't have DoF sensors which I believe the phone uses in its processing to know if there's a subject in frame.
        emkoemko 5y ago
        they have that dof sensor so they can emulate dof, we get real dof.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch As in, "Incredibly-cheap-but-sometimes-there's-rat-poop-in-it" lunch?
  - evanextreme 5y ago
    no as in, "computational photography has been a staple of every modern smartphone sold globally for the past 4 years, and this is one of the only examples of problems ever happening for anyone" lunch
    - jhgb 5y ago
      > one of the only examples of problems ever happening for anyone Assuming you don't have a sampling error here, of course.
    - Schroedingersat 5y ago
      Problems of changing skin texture or text or body shape or background details abound, but are normally of a form where it's easier to dismiss or gaslight anyone pointing them out.
- TedShiller 5y ago
  No free lunch is right. iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen. Instagram kids don't know this, but that's ok, because we don't need them to, and neither do they.
  - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
    Increasingly these photo"graphs" have nothing to do with reality either. I may be part of a weird minority but when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong. Some Chinese manufacturers have taken this to a ridiculous extreme, they make normal friendly faces look outright scary. Pictures shouldn't be edited by default, the user should be given the option if they want to. And lets not even get started on the fact that we have all these face recognition algos and such in a device constantly connected to the internet, with people taking pictures of themselves and everyone around them. What could go wrong...
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      > when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong > Pictures shouldn't be edited by default I don’t think you can have both of these things. In general, if you want to closely reproduce what your eye sees, you’re going to have to do some editing.
    - aembleton 5y ago
      With a lot of phones you can have it save the raw image file so that you can convert it to jpeg yourself.
    - Zak 5y ago
      > Pictures shouldn't be edited by default This statement requires more precision. A camera sensor usually has more dynamic range than the display can represent. Lenses often introduce distortions. Sensors capture noise. The tint and color temperature of light sources vary greatly. Here's a set of seven images taken at steps along the path starting from as close as a JPEG can represent to the raw sensor data to a finished image that reasonably represents how my eyes saw the scene: https://imgur.com/a/4paCKaL https://imgur.com/a/4paCKaL When using a dedicated camera and generating a JPEG in the camera, a similar set of steps is applied automatically. There's no such thing as "no filter" in digital photography; even the "unprocessed RAW" is one program's opinion of how 12 bits per channel should be rendered at 8 bits per channel to display on your screen (as well as downsampled and compressed, in this case). There are often user-selectable profiles that each have a bit of a different look, much as different film stocks produce different looks (Fuji cameras actually call their profiles "film simulations" and name them after the company's film stocks). So I think what you really mean is that you want the camera to produce an image that appears on a screen as much like what you saw with your eyes as it can.
- max48 5y ago
  >The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable It's more than that, it's completely mind blowing when you compare it to a DSLR. In "good" lightning condition, your iphone will give you a picture 75% as good as what you could get with a 4k$ fullframe DSLR kit that's 10" long and weight a few pounds. the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that doesn't know much about photography. And if you need to edit your pictures, you don't get those extra stops of exposure up or down because the iphone already needed all the dynamic range of the sensor to create the picture you got. It would be very interesting to see a colab between apple and a DSLR company to get the best of both world. A large FF senor and lens ecosystem like Canon combined with whatever dark magic Apple is doing on their tiny sensor would have massive potential.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that doesn't know much about photography. I think the opposite is true, from my (amateur) experience. It's much harder to get a good photo in poor light with a dedicated camera if you don't know what you're doing than it is to get a good photo with a smartphone. In good light, the better sensors shine through, but in poor light (e.g. and overcast day, not talking about some limit of darkness condition) the superior processing and auto-adjustment of a top-end phone will make for much better photos. Again, talking exclusively about amateur photography, not what a master can do.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      Yes and no - even latest iphone 13 pro / nexus 6 cameras will produce shots that are blurry in shadows due to aggressive noise reduction or let some fugly color noise pass through the alghoritms. You just need to open any night photo on bigger computer screen instead of just phone. You have much much better starting point with a full frame. Of course if you compare a clueless FF user with clueless phone user, phone can win but thats an unfair comparison. You don't invest often 5k into photo equipment and then be oblivious of what options it gives you. And even if you don't actively try to improve yourself, just using the camera will get you there (somewhere) eventually. Its not a rocket science, just keep doing it. That's not a "master" level, more like experienced beginner. And even in the case of ignorant users, all cameras these days have auto setting which is actually pretty good and you can take final jpegs from it, ignoring the power of raw edit completely. Counter-intuitively, holding a bigger camera system steady for a good shot is easier commpared to lightweight, awkwardly-shaped phone. That all being said, I will invest into some top-end phone next year mainly due to its camera power these days and convenience of always having it with you, and sharing kids photos with family instantly. No more always lugging around 2.5 kg of Nikon D750 with 24-120 lens and good bag. I will not make technically better pictures with it, but in my case other aspects outweight this.
- elif 5y ago
  That depends entirely on what you consider "messing up" if it had put that leaf over some other leaves in the background that weren't captured well, would we have noticed? would it be a better photo? What if it was meant to be a beautiful leaf photo? If you want an accurate representation of reality, the moment, etc, the majority of cellphone photos would be considered "messed up" imo
avrionov 5y ago
There is a big difference between color correction or exposure compensation and adding non existing objects by ML algorithm.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Modern phones take long exposures and try to make sense of it by analyzing it. Basically, a one second really dark video can be summed up into one very blurry but bright enough photo. But if you carefully move each frame to compensate for camera movement when summing it up - you might also get a sharp picture. But then the subject moves, or a leaf moves, and the algorithm has to decide which parts of the photo should be a priority for not being blurry. And that would be faces, usually. So the camera now needs to decide what is a face and what isn’t. Just to take one single telephoto picture. Only doing “in camera processing” like a 2015 digital camera with some sharpening, color curves etc doesn’t cut it anymore. If your phone does that, it’ll be laughed at. Phones these days need to do clever long exposure stacking with image recognition and all.
  - flemhans 5y ago
    Does anything like that exist as a computer-attachable cam, e.g. for Linux? Or are we stuck with <2015 cameras unless they come as part of a smartphone?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      There is software to do that, yes. Many cameras are able to do smart multiframe stacking, even fairly old ones. It's just that photographers would rather not have to rely on this, because it has a lot of issues.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Wouldn't they even move different parts of the scene differently for summing up? And the summing is for denoising, not for rising levels out of darkness, so it would be perfectly fine to sum only the parts where there is plenty of confidence about the movement, leaving others noisy (or, if more noisy than one would like to admit, de-noise spatially instead of temporally in those places, which brings us back to blurry. Add an "unsharp mask" step to compensate and you get that watercolors look we all know). Back to moving different parts differently: this seems very similar to the motion prediction parts of video encoding. I wonder if and how much the stacking algorithms make direct use of elements of the video encoding implementations those cameras also have?
caslon 5y ago
You can set Apple's devices to shoot RAW, and it's usually pretty great, without the painting-like qualities of its default image processing.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  How raw is “raw”? If you take a long exposure in a dark room with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than it should. Would a “raw” version of that photo be a traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a short video sequence? (that would actually make the most sense) I have an iPhone11 but not sure that has the raw option.
  - wrboyce 5y ago
    It wouldn’t make any difference in this instance, all the computational stuff still happens. I just took a long exposure on my 12 Pro and purposely moved the camera around a bit and my phone produced a sharp RAW image.
    - nullifidian 5y ago
      That's the definition of a non-RAW image.
  - Zak 5y ago
    Recent iPhones (and many Android phones) have optical image stabilization; an element in the lens moves to compensate if the phone shakes during the exposure. Very new iPhones (and some Android devices) also have sensor-shift image stabilization, which moves the image sensor. These features are also available on many dedicated cameras and interchangeable camera lenses.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    If you use a third-party app like Camera+ to shoot RAW, then it is the raw, completely unprocessed sensor data as a DNG file, like any DSLR. Shooting RAW on the ultra-wide camera in a dark environment results in a completely unusable image. If you use the iOS camera on an iPhone 12 or newer and enable the "ProRAW" option (which is shown as just "RAW" in the camera), you get a processed image, but with the data used as a base for the processing intact for re-processing when you edit it.
mc32 5y ago
Apple possibly caught a break here. It could have been worse and people would probably have accused Apple of being bigoted or something else.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Or, maybe, knowing that releasing software that turns out to deliver markedly lower quality results for people already weary from centuries of marginalization would open them up to such accusations, they didn't get lucky so much as their are enjoying the benefit of having listened to such criticism, testing their software across a set of data as diverse as their customers, instead of just that set of photos from D'Brickshaw Ferguson's and Abigail Cumberbatch's wedding.
  - mc32 5y ago
    They still caught a break. Here people are like “lol Apple” and understand it’s the fault of the software and there isn’t incipient malice intended. Whereas on the other hand people are apt to make it into something it isn’t.
    - d3ad1ysp0rk 5y ago
      Yes I'm more likely to let Apple off for not training enough "people with a leafy backdrop" than "people with different colored skin" into their ML.
      - mc32 5y ago
        Zoom showed lots of glitches for all kinds of people -when using "backgrounds", but "Twitter people" latched on to certain outcomes --and Zoom is heavily developed overseas.
formerly_proven 5y ago
> Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration. Can't replace sensor area with anything other than more sensor area. Week ago I got the perfect demo of that when I filmed a happening at around 10pm with only some dim garden lights off the scene for light. Some other people had their iPhones, I had an f2 lens on my Z6 - while the videos from the iPhones looked like crap even on the phone screens, basically just blobs of dark noise, the Nikon produced a remarkably clean 4K video - at ISO 16000 or so - that made it look like the scene was lit by floodlights.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  With video you can’t “cheat”. You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo. That’s what phones to quite well. You only have 1/24s (say) to get the shot before you need to get the next one. I bet an Iphone12 would have made better stills than my aging canon 60D which I try to keep at 1600 or lower. And that’s pretty remarkable to be honest.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Oh yeah you definitely can. Multiframe mode on my old A7ii gets me all the way to 1/2 of a second handheld. You have a 60D, which is very old, and it would still do much better than an iPhone 12 with a fast lens on top.
  - Zak 5y ago
    > You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo. Oh, but you can. A full second would make for a very choppy video of course so you don't have as long in which to do it as you might for a still, but there are benefits to be gained and the Pixel 6 series does exactly that. https://9to5google.com/2021/08/02/google-pixel-6-video-hdr-teaser/ https://9to5google.com/2021/08/02/google-pixel-6-video-hdr-t...
  - usui 5y ago
    I don't understand, why is this ruled out? Assuming that phones reach a point where this is computationally cheap, what would be so hard about having a sliding window for each frame in the video?
johnisgood 5y ago
I am not sure what you are trying to say here. They definitely did not ask for their face to be replaced by leaves either. Is it either unmodified, or leaves? Is not there a middle ground?
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  This is the "smart HDR" option on an iPhone, described as "In difficult lighting, the best parts of multiple exposures are combined into a single image". So there is the middle ground of disabling this. Or, alternatively, just not caring about such an error once in a million shots. (as an aside, I'm pretty sure the structure of the leaves is responsible for this error, as it's an area with usually many strong edges in a somewhat repetitive pattern. That invites misalignments.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    Yeah. If I tap "Selfie" on my stock Android 11, I can see my face being smoothed out. I can tell that it is modified. If I have an issue with it, I can disable it. :)
- alkonaut 5y ago
  They asked for their phone to make a best effort to stack many pictures into one, cleverly aligning objects as well as possible. And the camera failed. The alternatives would have been an extremely dark picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an extremely blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    > The alternatives would have been an extremely dark picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an extremely blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face. If that truly is the case, then.. woah. It definitely failed.
andrewflnr 5y ago
But it would be nice to be able to re-run that software processing later if you can see it has done something silly, right? That at least seems like a valid use for "unmodified" image data.
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  I believe the Google Camera does this. Not sure if it preserves the original photo before any color corrections, but it allows me to go back and added, remove or change any blur.
1123581321 5y ago
Short-lived joy, sadly. :( It turns out the leaf was actually in the foreground and correctly captured. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749950
- alkonaut 5y ago
  I liked the original story arc better! “It’s amazing how well these work if just one screwup makes headlines” Also true for zero screwups I suppose
boogies 5y ago
> everyone asking for “unmodified raw photos” to be produced don’t understand what they are asking for. Those “unmodified” photos would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions. I’m asking for unmodified raw photos and modified ones. Or I would be if Megapixels didn’t already give me both on my GNU/Linux smartphone. The processed versions of the photo’s I’ve taken look great IMO, but I don’t see the harm in keeping the raws around, they’d probably be quite useable for producing even better edited versions if I were to import them into a full desktop image manipulaton program and let it process them with desktop power and more than a couple seconds of time to do it. And I’d think Apple would be be happy to sell bigger overpriced emmcs and iCloud subscriptions to SD-slotless iPhone users with raw image filled phones, and/or pop up a notification to delete them all with a tap when space was low.

Gigachad 5y ago

No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch. The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable. And the times it messes up are so rare that it becomes a talking point worthy of hundreds of comments.

GenerocUsername 5y ago
You guys are conflating 'adjusting light levels and sharness' with 'replacing whole objects in one area of scene with other objects from the scene' I think this particular big demonstrates a massive gap in what people think photoprocessing is, and what it has very recently become
- judge2020 5y ago
  Simply adjusting light levels and sharpness wouldn't produce this good/clear of a photo in the conditions presented - AI/ML image post-processing is a hard requirement for sensors like these.
  - creato 5y ago
    The "hard requirement" is just multi-frame noise reduction, which has been around for a lot longer than the AI/ML hype wave, and has always had a risk of producing similar artifacts to this one.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      Ya, I don't think anyone has been using ml/ai in camera phones up until the last 5 years maybe. But it does seem like they have quite a few high tech algorithms at play. More than just multi-frame noise reduction.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Multi-frame noise reduction only gets you so far. Rotating objects for example present huge issues and result in their own artifacts. In the end there isn’t a free lunch, any system that improves resulting images is making trade offs.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    But it’s also just weird. That’s not my daughter’s skin in the photo, it’s 1000 other people’s skin blended together and textured in.
    - laurent92 5y ago
      It’s what you desire your skin to be.
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        That might be good for myself, or if I’m honest even my wife, but my daughter looks perfect to me and I only want to see her in reality.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        No imaging system reproduces reality. You're always getting a compromised result.
        wholinator2 5y ago
        Yeah, even your eyes don't reproduce reality perfectly but at that point it's just semantics. He means he wants to see his daughter the same way through the camera that he sees her through his eyes, in real life, otherwise known to him as "reality". I don't think it's unreasonable to allow context of the statement to allow us to disregard "reality" as it pertains to quantum wave functions, in favor of something more human. There's a large difference in something that's goal is to capture what the eye sees and something that's goal isn't. It feels like Apple thinks they know what's better for us than we do, which I admit it's perfectly capable of doing in certain scenarios. But, when Apples thoughts do not align or go directly against our wishes it's uncomfortable, it feels like your "reality" is being ripped from your hands in favor of what some giant corporation thinks your reality should be, for any large number of opaque or intentionally obscured reasons.
        5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron695 5y ago
- dheera 5y ago
  It probably all goes into a black box ML model nowadays, so the model will conflate it if we don't.
- 1-more 5y ago
  the photographer replied later that it's due to a leaf hanging down from a branch in the foreground. There was a leaf in between the woman's head and the camera lens. Nothing weird happened.
KarlKemp 5y ago
Indeed. I wish I had a list of everyone parroting the wisdom that "it's all about the size of the lens, a smartphone can never be as good as a DSLR" so as to ignore their future opinions. Camera phones now beat cameras worth thousands of dollars with better software and larger R&D budgets, at least in low light performance and color gamut. Closely related: "It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable. Lost information ist lost". This was big due to some US TV show at the time, I guess. Here, the error was in the assumption that the information was lost: as it turns out, there's a wide space of possibilities for image quality to be too low for us to easily read some letters, but good enough to contain the clues allowing a smart algorithm to reconstruct them.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  In theory what prevents me from using a huge lens and sensor on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and then using the same advanced software but now running on a desktop computer or a server that is many times more powerful than a smartphone to do advanced post processing?
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    Nothing at all. It’s honestly surprising that it’s not a bigger thing. Guessing what stops you is that the Apple team that makes camera software has a budget that makes the Nikon pc app team look quite small.
    - mynameisvlad 5y ago
      Cameras don't have DoF sensors which I believe the phone uses in its processing to know if there's a subject in frame.
      - emkoemko 5y ago
        they have that dof sensor so they can emulate dof, we get real dof.
jhgb 5y ago
> No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch As in, "Incredibly-cheap-but-sometimes-there's-rat-poop-in-it" lunch?
- evanextreme 5y ago
  no as in, "computational photography has been a staple of every modern smartphone sold globally for the past 4 years, and this is one of the only examples of problems ever happening for anyone" lunch
  - jhgb 5y ago
    > one of the only examples of problems ever happening for anyone Assuming you don't have a sampling error here, of course.
  - Schroedingersat 5y ago
    Problems of changing skin texture or text or body shape or background details abound, but are normally of a form where it's easier to dismiss or gaslight anyone pointing them out.
TedShiller 5y ago
No free lunch is right. iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen. Instagram kids don't know this, but that's ok, because we don't need them to, and neither do they.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  Increasingly these photo"graphs" have nothing to do with reality either. I may be part of a weird minority but when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong. Some Chinese manufacturers have taken this to a ridiculous extreme, they make normal friendly faces look outright scary. Pictures shouldn't be edited by default, the user should be given the option if they want to. And lets not even get started on the fact that we have all these face recognition algos and such in a device constantly connected to the internet, with people taking pictures of themselves and everyone around them. What could go wrong...
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    > when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong > Pictures shouldn't be edited by default I don’t think you can have both of these things. In general, if you want to closely reproduce what your eye sees, you’re going to have to do some editing.
  - aembleton 5y ago
    With a lot of phones you can have it save the raw image file so that you can convert it to jpeg yourself.
  - Zak 5y ago
    > Pictures shouldn't be edited by default This statement requires more precision. A camera sensor usually has more dynamic range than the display can represent. Lenses often introduce distortions. Sensors capture noise. The tint and color temperature of light sources vary greatly. Here's a set of seven images taken at steps along the path starting from as close as a JPEG can represent to the raw sensor data to a finished image that reasonably represents how my eyes saw the scene: https://imgur.com/a/4paCKaL https://imgur.com/a/4paCKaL When using a dedicated camera and generating a JPEG in the camera, a similar set of steps is applied automatically. There's no such thing as "no filter" in digital photography; even the "unprocessed RAW" is one program's opinion of how 12 bits per channel should be rendered at 8 bits per channel to display on your screen (as well as downsampled and compressed, in this case). There are often user-selectable profiles that each have a bit of a different look, much as different film stocks produce different looks (Fuji cameras actually call their profiles "film simulations" and name them after the company's film stocks). So I think what you really mean is that you want the camera to produce an image that appears on a screen as much like what you saw with your eyes as it can.
max48 5y ago
>The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable It's more than that, it's completely mind blowing when you compare it to a DSLR. In "good" lightning condition, your iphone will give you a picture 75% as good as what you could get with a 4k$ fullframe DSLR kit that's 10" long and weight a few pounds. the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that doesn't know much about photography. And if you need to edit your pictures, you don't get those extra stops of exposure up or down because the iphone already needed all the dynamic range of the sensor to create the picture you got. It would be very interesting to see a colab between apple and a DSLR company to get the best of both world. A large FF senor and lens ecosystem like Canon combined with whatever dark magic Apple is doing on their tiny sensor would have massive potential.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that doesn't know much about photography. I think the opposite is true, from my (amateur) experience. It's much harder to get a good photo in poor light with a dedicated camera if you don't know what you're doing than it is to get a good photo with a smartphone. In good light, the better sensors shine through, but in poor light (e.g. and overcast day, not talking about some limit of darkness condition) the superior processing and auto-adjustment of a top-end phone will make for much better photos. Again, talking exclusively about amateur photography, not what a master can do.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Yes and no - even latest iphone 13 pro / nexus 6 cameras will produce shots that are blurry in shadows due to aggressive noise reduction or let some fugly color noise pass through the alghoritms. You just need to open any night photo on bigger computer screen instead of just phone. You have much much better starting point with a full frame. Of course if you compare a clueless FF user with clueless phone user, phone can win but thats an unfair comparison. You don't invest often 5k into photo equipment and then be oblivious of what options it gives you. And even if you don't actively try to improve yourself, just using the camera will get you there (somewhere) eventually. Its not a rocket science, just keep doing it. That's not a "master" level, more like experienced beginner. And even in the case of ignorant users, all cameras these days have auto setting which is actually pretty good and you can take final jpegs from it, ignoring the power of raw edit completely. Counter-intuitively, holding a bigger camera system steady for a good shot is easier commpared to lightweight, awkwardly-shaped phone. That all being said, I will invest into some top-end phone next year mainly due to its camera power these days and convenience of always having it with you, and sharing kids photos with family instantly. No more always lugging around 2.5 kg of Nikon D750 with 24-120 lens and good bag. I will not make technically better pictures with it, but in my case other aspects outweight this.
elif 5y ago
That depends entirely on what you consider "messing up" if it had put that leaf over some other leaves in the background that weren't captured well, would we have noticed? would it be a better photo? What if it was meant to be a beautiful leaf photo? If you want an accurate representation of reality, the moment, etc, the majority of cellphone photos would be considered "messed up" imo

avrionov 5y ago

There is a big difference between color correction or exposure compensation and adding non existing objects by ML algorithm.

alkonaut 5y ago
Modern phones take long exposures and try to make sense of it by analyzing it. Basically, a one second really dark video can be summed up into one very blurry but bright enough photo. But if you carefully move each frame to compensate for camera movement when summing it up - you might also get a sharp picture. But then the subject moves, or a leaf moves, and the algorithm has to decide which parts of the photo should be a priority for not being blurry. And that would be faces, usually. So the camera now needs to decide what is a face and what isn’t. Just to take one single telephoto picture. Only doing “in camera processing” like a 2015 digital camera with some sharpening, color curves etc doesn’t cut it anymore. If your phone does that, it’ll be laughed at. Phones these days need to do clever long exposure stacking with image recognition and all.
- flemhans 5y ago
  Does anything like that exist as a computer-attachable cam, e.g. for Linux? Or are we stuck with <2015 cameras unless they come as part of a smartphone?
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    There is software to do that, yes. Many cameras are able to do smart multiframe stacking, even fairly old ones. It's just that photographers would rather not have to rely on this, because it has a lot of issues.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Wouldn't they even move different parts of the scene differently for summing up? And the summing is for denoising, not for rising levels out of darkness, so it would be perfectly fine to sum only the parts where there is plenty of confidence about the movement, leaving others noisy (or, if more noisy than one would like to admit, de-noise spatially instead of temporally in those places, which brings us back to blurry. Add an "unsharp mask" step to compensate and you get that watercolors look we all know). Back to moving different parts differently: this seems very similar to the motion prediction parts of video encoding. I wonder if and how much the stacking algorithms make direct use of elements of the video encoding implementations those cameras also have?

caslon 5y ago

You can set Apple's devices to shoot RAW, and it's usually pretty great, without the painting-like qualities of its default image processing.

alkonaut 5y ago
How raw is “raw”? If you take a long exposure in a dark room with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than it should. Would a “raw” version of that photo be a traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a short video sequence? (that would actually make the most sense) I have an iPhone11 but not sure that has the raw option.
- wrboyce 5y ago
  It wouldn’t make any difference in this instance, all the computational stuff still happens. I just took a long exposure on my 12 Pro and purposely moved the camera around a bit and my phone produced a sharp RAW image.
  - nullifidian 5y ago
    That's the definition of a non-RAW image.
- Zak 5y ago
  Recent iPhones (and many Android phones) have optical image stabilization; an element in the lens moves to compensate if the phone shakes during the exposure. Very new iPhones (and some Android devices) also have sensor-shift image stabilization, which moves the image sensor. These features are also available on many dedicated cameras and interchangeable camera lenses.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  If you use a third-party app like Camera+ to shoot RAW, then it is the raw, completely unprocessed sensor data as a DNG file, like any DSLR. Shooting RAW on the ultra-wide camera in a dark environment results in a completely unusable image. If you use the iOS camera on an iPhone 12 or newer and enable the "ProRAW" option (which is shown as just "RAW" in the camera), you get a processed image, but with the data used as a base for the processing intact for re-processing when you edit it.

mc32 5y ago

Apple possibly caught a break here. It could have been worse and people would probably have accused Apple of being bigoted or something else.

KarlKemp 5y ago
Or, maybe, knowing that releasing software that turns out to deliver markedly lower quality results for people already weary from centuries of marginalization would open them up to such accusations, they didn't get lucky so much as their are enjoying the benefit of having listened to such criticism, testing their software across a set of data as diverse as their customers, instead of just that set of photos from D'Brickshaw Ferguson's and Abigail Cumberbatch's wedding.
- mc32 5y ago
  They still caught a break. Here people are like “lol Apple” and understand it’s the fault of the software and there isn’t incipient malice intended. Whereas on the other hand people are apt to make it into something it isn’t.
  - d3ad1ysp0rk 5y ago
    Yes I'm more likely to let Apple off for not training enough "people with a leafy backdrop" than "people with different colored skin" into their ML.
    - mc32 5y ago
      Zoom showed lots of glitches for all kinds of people -when using "backgrounds", but "Twitter people" latched on to certain outcomes --and Zoom is heavily developed overseas.

formerly_proven 5y ago

> Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration. Can't replace sensor area with anything other than more sensor area. Week ago I got the perfect demo of that when I filmed a happening at around 10pm with only some dim garden lights off the scene for light. Some other people had their iPhones, I had an f2 lens on my Z6 - while the videos from the iPhones looked like crap even on the phone screens, basically just blobs of dark noise, the Nikon produced a remarkably clean 4K video - at ISO 16000 or so - that made it look like the scene was lit by floodlights.

alkonaut 5y ago
With video you can’t “cheat”. You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo. That’s what phones to quite well. You only have 1/24s (say) to get the shot before you need to get the next one. I bet an Iphone12 would have made better stills than my aging canon 60D which I try to keep at 1600 or lower. And that’s pretty remarkable to be honest.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Oh yeah you definitely can. Multiframe mode on my old A7ii gets me all the way to 1/2 of a second handheld. You have a 60D, which is very old, and it would still do much better than an iPhone 12 with a fast lens on top.
- Zak 5y ago
  > You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo. Oh, but you can. A full second would make for a very choppy video of course so you don't have as long in which to do it as you might for a still, but there are benefits to be gained and the Pixel 6 series does exactly that. https://9to5google.com/2021/08/02/google-pixel-6-video-hdr-teaser/ https://9to5google.com/2021/08/02/google-pixel-6-video-hdr-t...
- usui 5y ago
  I don't understand, why is this ruled out? Assuming that phones reach a point where this is computationally cheap, what would be so hard about having a sliding window for each frame in the video?

johnisgood 5y ago

I am not sure what you are trying to say here. They definitely did not ask for their face to be replaced by leaves either. Is it either unmodified, or leaves? Is not there a middle ground?

KarlKemp 5y ago
This is the "smart HDR" option on an iPhone, described as "In difficult lighting, the best parts of multiple exposures are combined into a single image". So there is the middle ground of disabling this. Or, alternatively, just not caring about such an error once in a million shots. (as an aside, I'm pretty sure the structure of the leaves is responsible for this error, as it's an area with usually many strong edges in a somewhat repetitive pattern. That invites misalignments.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  Yeah. If I tap "Selfie" on my stock Android 11, I can see my face being smoothed out. I can tell that it is modified. If I have an issue with it, I can disable it. :)
alkonaut 5y ago
They asked for their phone to make a best effort to stack many pictures into one, cleverly aligning objects as well as possible. And the camera failed. The alternatives would have been an extremely dark picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an extremely blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  > The alternatives would have been an extremely dark picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an extremely blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face. If that truly is the case, then.. woah. It definitely failed.

andrewflnr 5y ago

But it would be nice to be able to re-run that software processing later if you can see it has done something silly, right? That at least seems like a valid use for "unmodified" image data.

Bilal_io 5y ago
I believe the Google Camera does this. Not sure if it preserves the original photo before any color corrections, but it allows me to go back and added, remove or change any blur.

1123581321 5y ago

Short-lived joy, sadly. :( It turns out the leaf was actually in the foreground and correctly captured. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749950

alkonaut 5y ago
I liked the original story arc better! “It’s amazing how well these work if just one screwup makes headlines” Also true for zero screwups I suppose

boogies 5y ago

> everyone asking for “unmodified raw photos” to be produced don’t understand what they are asking for. Those “unmodified” photos would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions. I’m asking for unmodified raw photos and modified ones. Or I would be if Megapixels didn’t already give me both on my GNU/Linux smartphone. The processed versions of the photo’s I’ve taken look great IMO, but I don’t see the harm in keeping the raws around, they’d probably be quite useable for producing even better edited versions if I were to import them into a full desktop image manipulaton program and let it process them with desktop power and more than a couple seconds of time to do it. And I’d think Apple would be be happy to sell bigger overpriced emmcs and iCloud subscriptions to SD-slotless iPhone users with raw image filled phones, and/or pop up a notification to delete them all with a tap when space was low.