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> There is no platonic "right" way to process a RAW into a JPG, This. So much this. RAW to JPEG conversion is an opinionated act. Just look at the different wa

• eru 5y ago
  Google explicitly does a lot of computational photography. That what makes Pixel phones produce pretty decent images out of relatively humble hardware.
  • paulmd 5y ago
    Yes, this has gotten even wackier in the era of "neural image enhancement". A phone pic isn't a picture, it's a "DLSS of a picture", or "deep dream of a picture". And to agree with grandparent - developing a photo has never been a neutral act, whether it's digital or film. The choice of developer and processing has enormous impact on an image. It can increase or reduce contrast, grain, sharpness, etc which can completely change the feel of an image. And that's not just developer choice and times/temps, but things like selenium/chromium/mercury intensification, staining developers (that modulate image contrast/etc) like pyrocat, etc. All of modern photoshopping evolved from analog techniques - they call it an "unsharp mask" because photographers would actually make a mask using a blurred copy of the image, which cancels out some of the signal and increases the sharpness of the remaining edges. And even before the negative is developed, you can do all kinds of things to control the feel of the image. In fact for about the first 1/3 of photography's existence it was practically necessary to do intensification - you will find tons of references to it in older guides.