22 ms·

Have iPhone cameras become too smart?

186 points by tomduncalf 5y ago

vxNsr 5y ago
I’ve noticed with my 12 pro, my wife’s 11 pro, and my mom’s S10 that shots will sometimes look distorted in weird ways. With someone’s face being unnaturally elongated, or an arm in the foreground shortened. You’ll think you captured the shot and will only notice it after.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.ph/0843H https://archive.ph/0843H
Etheryte 5y ago
While most readers probably have at least some firsthand experience with this, some examples would've gone a long way to illustrate the issues brought up.
daniel_reetz 5y ago
It's not that cameras have become too smart. It's that they're making choices for us, and these are not the choices we would make for ourselves. 11 years ago, I gave a talk about this at the Internet Archive. It seems to have held up. https://youtu.be/UMMogOoWEbI https://youtu.be/UMMogOoWEbI
- pishpash 5y ago
  Choice implies a non-processed alternative but hardware has been driven in a direction so as to make the non-processed alternative unusable (meh hardware, processing to fix).
  - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
    Pretty much this. I have a Pixel 4a and if I use an alternate camera that doesn't have Google's algos, the images look like ass.
  - simion314 5y ago
    My digital camera had Profiles for outdoors, night/dark areas, people, animals, macro. Seems to me Apple did what they do best (and credit to Gnome too) remove the Profiles options because the users are stupid and use some shit algorithm to decide what profile to use for you,
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Computational photography is much more advanced than that.
      - simion314 5y ago
        Digital cameras had shit like face detection too, but yeah they are more advanced but still too stupid to just work, I remember a picture was posted where the code made a leaf appear on top of someone's face, like fuck this photos are fabricated, object are moved around, hidden or made to appear - you can't just use a photo as evidence without first knowing all the tech details on what algorithm created the photo.
        kaba0 5y ago
        As mentioned elsewhere, that story is fake. Computational photography is more about increasing the sources of data, by e.g. reusing the shakiness of one’s hand to decompose the adjacent color channels’ input. This is a statistically correct method to increase the noise-to-signal ratio, nothing like “this is a leaf, put a leaf here”
  - azeirah 5y ago
    Delegating the issue to hardware seems off to me. Aren't hardware manufacturers also making choices for you? I get that software allows for far broader picture manipulation but there are a decent amount of similar choices on the lens and sensor level, no?
    - Scalestein 5y ago
      True but hardware makes it obvious why the image looks the way it does and is consistent. Photographers can even tell what lenses were used for a photo by looking at it. Software makes it more of a black box. The same picture taken days apart could look different due to a software update you weren't even aware of. Hardware is also a forced choice so is more deliberate which again is the opposite of the software situation of changing algos and processing.
- tencentshill 5y ago
  You can still capture RAW and edit it yourself, right?
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  >It's that they're making choices for us, and these are not the choices we would make for ourselves. Of course, you can always take off the training wheels and shoot raw. Apple even worked with Adobe to create ProRaw, which allows you to selectively turn on or off various parts of their image processing pipeline after you shoot the image. https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/
  - daniel_reetz 5y ago
    ProRaw is demosaiced and includes the computational photography stuff as well. The big picture is that cameras profoundly influence how we see and share ourselves, others, and the world. Fairly recently, cameras (and their developers) started making opinionated decisions for us about things like the color of sky, the texture of skin, and much more. Sure, any one of us can opt out and do things RAW, but the rest of the world will go on taking pictures with these decisions baked in. I don't think the answer is RAW, because the problem is not pixel data -- it is who controls image making in the first place.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      What’s your proposed way of solving the issue? HDR can be considered more natural to how our own eyes work, being pedantic the “old-school” model is much more foreign than the NN-enhanced one. Sure, one can overdo it, e.g. replacing an image of a moon with a photograph of it, but I don’t think that NN-based color balance, HDR and the like are worsening the problem.
    - _aavaa_ 5y ago
      I don't see how this is different than the film stock you shot on, the lens you used, or the format you shot it on.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - astrange 5y ago
      > Fairly recently, cameras (and their developers) started making opinionated decisions for us about things like the color of sky That's called "auto white balance" and we've been stuck with it since the advent of digital cameras. Phones don't do much more than that; if they detect the sky it's to adjust denoising to not cause banding artifacts etc.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  > It's that they're making choices for us I think that's the definition of a "smart" appliance, and you just described what my problem with "smart" appliances is: they are too smart by a half, and end up making bad choices when pushed a little.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    > they are too smart by a half, and end up making bad choices when pushed a little. That's seems like the opposite of smart—instead, it's dumb yet intrusive. Or as Kurt Vonnegut said: "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before." These devices do a lot of thinking, but have no wisdom.
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      They are smart, if you consider "smarts" to mean making lots of complex decisions. And they make good decisions a lot of the time too. But you can't encode a set of heuristics that works every time into a physical device - that is the real problem with "smart". In a small minority of cases, the situation will get so complicated that the rules you embedded will produce suboptimal behaviour. To overcome that, you'd need to embed a human-like intelligence in the device. Similarly will they fail for the minority of people who have drastically different goals (e.g. aesthetics) for the purpose of the device. Now you end up having to clone the owner wholesale. Okay, really the problem with "smart" devices is that they typically don't disclose what rules they follow, and typically don't come to the user asking for help choosing when tradeoffs enter the picture (literally in the context of this article). "Dumb" devices, meanwhile, lay all choices flat. Granted, cameras have long stopped being comletely dumb - but they often make a good job opening themselves to doubt with things like optional manual color balance, and different priority modes.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        To be honest even our very own eyes not that “smart” — they can be fooled quite easily, by eg. visual illusions, magic tricks.
- tormock 5y ago
- silisili 5y ago
  I've always especially felt this way about Pixel cameras. They are no doubt good, but there is something just off about them I cannot easily identify. I believe it both oversharpens faces and makes white skin tanner. Is there any company out there doing just HDR, and not making color choices? Or is it baked in at the SOC level now?
  - nomel 5y ago
    Apple's ProRaw can "just do HDR", assuming you don't want to demosaic yourself.
  - alephxyz 5y ago
    I've noticed the same thing with my Pixel. It adds too much contrast in areas that shouldn't. Some simple shots of my pets in uniform lighting end up looking ghoulish because it turns their fur into this streakish blob of very dark and light areas. I've also had weird instances were it tries to "restore" fine detail on zoomed in pictures by inserting gridlike patterns on objects (very similar to images generated by a GAN).
tomduncalf 5y ago
I found this interesting as I'm someone who used to travel with at least one camera most of the time, but I've recently come back from a holiday where I used my iPhone 13 Pro as my only camera. Overall I actually found it a great experience – I love having an ultra wide angle lens in my pocket and after a bit of time getting used to it, I find the 3x zoom a more useful focal length than the 2x zoom on my previous iPhone X – but I did find the over-processing (the "painterly" look) frustrating, and even more annoying is that it will often use the wide angle lens and upscale rather than using the 3x zoom (even with ProRAW enabled – see [1]). I understand why the software makes these choices for the "average" user, but it would be nice to enable a "pro" mode which reduces noise reduction and favours the zoom lens in more situations. I ended up using the stock camera app for "snapshots" (e.g. photos where I didn't care too much about the quality, or where I was just using the wide angle lens), and Lightroom Mobile's camera for shots where I wanted more control, or when I wanted to ensure that the zoom lens was being used (Halide is also good for this, but I found it convenient to have the photos in LR Mobile for processing immediately, even if Lightroom's UX is clunkier). This actually worked pretty well for me – you can trust the stock camera to take a photo which will look good at mobile screen sizes even in challenging conditions, so it's great for "capturing the moment", while if you are taking a photo where you care about the details, it's usually not an issue to take a few extra seconds to open LR... but it would be nice to be able to do this in the stock camera. The results with RAWs from Lightroom are actually pretty impressive IMO – there's more noise than the stock camera, but I prefer this to the smudged noise reduction look and I'm sure with some processing I can find a happy medium. Even the ultra wide photos are reasonably sharp. This was a long way of saying that if you're frustrated by this issue, try a third party camera app and hopefully you'll find that you can get more out of the newer iPhone's great cameras, while still having the default camera there for quick snapshots! [1] https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography/ https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  You mean you cannot manually choose the lens on iPhone 13?? :O I have an old Samsung Note 8; I was contemplating Iphone 13 Pro for my wife so we can improve the casual/random photos of our kids, but that'd be a deal breaker :-< [context - we have Nikon d800, d7200, couple of d90's, V1, etc lying around the house so we do like photos, and being able to zoom or choose a lens is something we take for granted :]
faitswulff 5y ago
Funny, I just had this problem. We got a taro-mousse cake for my daughter's birthday and I was trying to take a photo of it on my iPhone 11 Pro. I could see the brilliant purple of the taro section of the cake with my own eyes, but the iPhone would hesitate before eventually turning it into a darker, almost brown color.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Was it possible to fix this by tapping on the cake itself? Might it have been affected by the color of the lighting in the room? We had issues with that in our kitchen, which had warm yellow lights. Our 'paprika' colored plates always showed up weird in food photos.
  - faitswulff 5y ago
    Refocusing on the cake didn't help for us. This was in a fairly bright sunlit room, which I guess is technically warm lighting?
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      Can you fix it by adjusting the temperature or tint in the Photos app?
      - faitswulff 5y ago
        Maybe, I'll try it!
- astrange 5y ago
  Might have to tap on it and drag up. If it takes up too much of the picture, it won't have a neutral reference in the background to help figure out how bright the room is supposed to look. (Cameras usually just work off the picture they're taking to determine this, and yet everyone says they're too smart.) I have the same problem with a black cat that turns brown if you try to expose off it.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
Personally I'm tired of the HDR-ification of everything. House listings? It's like realtors figured out what HDR was and went NUTS. Those images are like the comic sans of photography.
- asdff 5y ago
  It's even better when they throw on HDR for one of those faux Mediterranean houses built with the fit and finish of an Olive Garden. It's like a tell to stay away, someone who worshiped Camilla Soprano's kitchen once owned this home.
- brimble 5y ago
  I've seen them add light fixtures to photos. Like, the light fixtures do not exist in the actual house. Not a lamp, something connected to the house. The way they're going, that industry's gonna get a regulatory smack-down at some point.
  - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
    UGH! Is that what virtual staging is going to next, straight up lies? It's one thing to use a fake couch, but a fake fixture is not acceptable.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    Here in New York I've seen listings use extremely bright, daylight-emulating lights to make rooms appear "sun-drenched" when their only window faces another building, and remain dim year-round. I even saw this on a video walkthrough of an apartment – they clearly had placed the lights right outside the window. Finding a place to live is challenging.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    I recently saw a listing where badly inserted trees and piles of rocks were littered around the back yard, maybe to hide crap the owner hadn't bothered to clean up? Not sure, but it was obvious.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
daggersandscars 5y ago
After watching far too many videos comparing the iPhone 13 Pro Max, Samsung S22 Ultra, and Pixel 6 Pro, I decided against the iPhone because of the automatic skin smoothing. The iPhone 13 Pro Max removed wrinkles, sun spots, moles, hair, etc to the point where the results looked like overprocessed, manually edited photos. This wasn't subtle -- the reviewers commented on it as well. While I don't do video, I was struck by a specific example: the iPhone 13 Pro Max's automatic enhancement for dark scenes decided a barely visible wall was red and recently painted. It looked like someone had drawn a box in the photo and did a red fill. I suspect it is only a matter of time before Samsung and Pixel's photos look as overprocessed. But, for now, we have some choice.
- Geonode 5y ago
  The Pixel 6 photos are quite over processed. You can shoot raw, but I just want the same normal workflow without the run around.
- AnonHP 5y ago
  Haven’t Samsung’s flagship phones favored over (or more than normal) saturated photos over the years? I think the key to liking a phone camera is to get one that takes photos you like (I know this is tautological). Or play with apps that will allow you to change from the defaults. This may not help as much on iOS since the default camera app that can be launched quickest from the Lock Screen is Apple’s camera app.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  I feel like it is inevitable that consumers gravitate towards cameras that make them look the prettiest, if that is not already where manufactures are going. Samsung absolutely does not want someone to switch, and then find out that they "look worse" on their new samsung phone. I guess its just a matter of whether or not they implement options for post-processing.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Do people really choose between Android and iOS based on the camera? They are all very close on quality, and IIRC if you don't like the stock camera apps you can get a third party app with less opinionated processing. But even so, the whole experience, including the ecosystem, matters so much more to me than the camera. I have a real camera for when it matters that much.
nkingsy 5y ago
Seems there are quite a few ways to get around this. Didn't know you could change the keyframe in a live photo, and it appears that removes the processing. https://appletoolbox.com/disable-photo-auto-enhance-iphone/ https://appletoolbox.com/disable-photo-auto-enhance-iphone/
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure the live photo frames are lower quality though, as it stores the live photo part as a compressed video rather than individual images, so you're looking at a grab of a video which could have artefacts and lower resolution.
darkwizard42 5y ago
Whole article talks about photo differences but there aren’t any concrete shown examples of the problem images. Kind of disappointing because it’s difficult to tell if the differences are huge or mild exaggeration.
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  Yeah, slightly odd decision I agree! If you scroll down to "The 75mm Telephoto Camera" section of https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography/ https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot..., there are some images demonstrating the "painted" look you get from the noise reduction.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  It's kind of the house style of the New Yorker to be picture-adverse, which is definitely to the detriment of this article.
leoff 5y ago
An article talking about photos that has no photos in it, huh.
creaghpatr 5y ago
I think the point about resulting uncanniness is valid, but can't most of these features be turned off? Portrait mode, despite the blurring issues, seems to be a popular feature. Having just traded from an iPhone 5 to a 13 Pro, I can without hesitation say the upgrade to the quality of my pictures blew my mind. Let's not overthink this.
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  > Having just traded from an iPhone 5 to a 13 Pro, I can without hesitation say the upgrade to the quality of my pictures blew my mind. Let's not overthink this. Okay, but that's what, a 6 generation leap? It had better be better because of hardware alone!
  - creaghpatr 5y ago
    Sure, and I expected as much for that reason. It's just funny to see the author talking trash about the 12 Pro featurization after trading from a 7...should still be a big upgrade in general quality.
aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
I tried to show mates how filthy I was turned over my new apartment, and what I'm assuming to be the anti shadow AI in the sensor removed so much of the dirt..
newaccount74 5y ago
It's the same thing with the webcams on the M1 Macs. Comparing my 2015 Macbook Pro and my 2021 Macbook Pro, I can say that they both have crappy webcams. The 2015 has a somewhat grainy, high contrast look. The 2021 webcam has extreme smoothing applied, to the point where my facial hair looks like it's painted on. The result is that my face always looks blurry. There are also weird movement glitches that are probably caused by temporal smoothing. From a distance, the pictures from the new webcams look better. But up close it's frustrating that my face is always blurry.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Webcams still remain an issue on laptops because the space for them is extremely limited; the iPhone 13 Pro camera has tons of z-space to work with, while the Mac has to keep it thin to continue to look like a modern laptop and not a 2003 thinkpad.
acd 5y ago
Film cameras might hip again for the same feeling as music LP. The digital version of photos become a little bit to perfect. Why do we call addictive smart phones that tracks users by selling advertisement smart?
- floren 5y ago
  I've been shooting film on and off for about a decade now, and a good film shot pretty much always looks better than a phone picture. The problem is that going from camera to digitally-shareable photo is either 1) time-consuming, or 2) quite expensive. I mostly do my own scanning, which takes a lot of time and manual labor, because getting good quality digital scans of negatives costs a lot of money and frankly I don't take enough good pictures to a roll to make it worthwhile.
- userbinator 5y ago
  What's smart are the companies doing it for their own interests ($$$), not necessarily the users buying into it.
asiachick 5y ago
I noticed this recently. I was in Lightroom editing some photos from iPhone 13 Pro and zooming in they looked like impressionist paintings, small blotches of color, instead of what I'm used to from previous phones.
Someone1234 5y ago
Controversial take: DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have largely made themselves irrelevant by ignoring computational photography advancements (computational photography is seen as "cheating"). I own several "real" cameras: FF, M43, and over a dozen lenses. Multiple camera companies. On paper many have very impressive specs. The problem is that camera companies focus primarily on raw specs with software being a secondary concern. To give one concrete example, I can press one button on a cellphone (almost any) and it will capture more dynamic range than my $2K DSLR. How can a tiny sense in a cellphone capture more dynamic range can a massive sensor? Software. It is stacking multiple rapid exposures using an eShutter and computationally merging them. You can do that with a DSLR, but it is time-consuming, outside of camera, and produces worse results (e.g. motion in the frame will ruin your stack). It is super aggravating, but it isn't actually surprising if you look at the amounts of money spent on photographic software alone compared to almost the entire camera industry. I've given up for most things, a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches.
- aspyct 5y ago
  As a sports photographer, I disagree. There's no stacking multiple frames in my world. Also, as a portrait photographer, I disagree too. Until we can use flashes properly, I'm not getting rid of my camera. Plus, dynamic range isn't everything.
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    > As a sports photographer, I disagree. You don't disagree with the post you replied to. Niches will always require specialized equipment as it said. It was a comment about general purpose photography (and its ever shrinking market share).
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Moving objects aren't a niche, they are the real life outside of of selfies and posing.
can16358p 5y ago
I think it's a welcome effect for many average people on the street. As a hobbyist photographer who likes nature and astrophotograpy with quite serious gear (5D Mark IV, Sigma 14 f1.8, Canon 50mm f/1.2 etc) I find iPhone camera really impressive and is actually the primary reason of upgrading every year. Yet, I'd love to see an "off" switch when needed. But at least we've got RAW shooting which doesn't apply much effects (but still overprocesses a little too much for "raw", agreed.)
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  Third party camera apps like Lightroom and Halide can take much “RAWer” RAWs than the ProRAW option of the stock camera
azinman2 5y ago
The whole idea that the iPhone 7 was dumb but now the 12 is too smart shows how poorly researched this article is. The aperture on all cell phone cameras are tiny, so you’re running into the limits of physics as you get very few photons per pixel imaged. The noise is just very high and uneven. So all cameras use computational photography, including way before the iPhone 7, in order to achieve the results they get. You can argue that the algorithms are getting worse, but you cannot say they weren’t smart before.
- judge2020 5y ago
  To add, the 13's cameras are even bigger now. I wouldn't be surprised if we see another 1.5x increase in the size of the sensors by the iPhone 15's launch. It turns out that giving the algorithm more to work with vastly increases how much it can do.
deanCommie 5y ago
> “Make it less smart—I’m serious,” she said. Lately she’s taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google’s line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures. And here we completely sabotage the premise of the headline, and make it clear that this whole topic is a subjective perception issue by the consumers. Pixels do FAR more ML-based post-processing than iPhones. It just so happens that I guess they do a BETTER job. Which means that iPhone cameras aren't too smart, but rather aren't smart enough.
mutagen 5y ago
Digital photos are inherently computational, I think the distinction is where you stop processing and how much human control is exercised over the final product. Even film has some carefully developed characteristics that are used by the the photographer and developer to influence the image. I love the full spectrum of it, from my DSLR to my iPhone. I'd love to see camera companies embrace the ability to capture the raw data to make deeper processing available and to open up the pipeline and let me tweak to my preference.
gumby 5y ago
I feel the opposite: I don't care about the camera. I just take snaps of people and random things and like the memory more than anything else. I wish apple made high end phones with cameras that were flush in the body. For me the extended lenses are just an annoying and user hostile design statement.* And ditto ipads: since the first ipad came out I've taken a grand total of one photo with it. The aggressive cluster of lenses is a real downer since I can't lay it flat. * Yes I know some people chose their phone by the camera and need the physics of a longer lens barrel. They are not wrong, nor am I: I'm just saying that one size doesn't fit all.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  I feel like a lot of that was just a reaction to the reality that overwhelmingly, people put their $800 smartphone in a protective case, and that that protective case typically adds 1-3mm of thickness on the back of it. It was the hardware designers saying "welp, we could really use that extra few mm of depth for the camera lens, and keeping the rest of the body thinner is a better deal than beefing up the whole thing for those handful of users who don't use a case. Maybe there's a non-case case out there for you that just sticks on the back and is thick enough to make the whole thing flush without adding any bulk around the sides? Or even just a strip of foamy tape or something that can run across the top of the device adjacent to the camera pop-out so that the device is able to sit flat on a table.
  - ProfessorLayton 5y ago
    While I agree with you on the design choices made, the camera bump has gotten to absurd levels. It's now roughly 50% the thickness of the phone body [1]. This means that unless one gets a case that's unnecessarily thick, it'll still rock on a table with even with a case on. There's also a limit to case thickness without affecting other features like wireless charging and magsafe. I'm not sure this is good design anymore. Perhaps if the bump was centered so the phone doesn't sit lopsided on a table, or maybe even a tapered design. [1] https://imgur.com/a/UVt4FyH https://imgur.com/a/UVt4FyH
    - 5y ago
fungiblecog 5y ago
like most technology today it is now being forced on us rather than being available as a tool.
andybak 5y ago
I took a fairly elderly Panasonic DMC-GX80 on holiday with me and despite the lack of HDR, AI and clever stuff with multiple exposures, I found that for most of the interesting photos I wanted to take, it did the right thing. My phone on the other hand did the blandest thing possible. Impossible to get an atmospheric color cast, a dramatic silhouette or anything that made a photo interesting to me. It was fine in most situations with "normal" lighting but they aren't usually the things I want to photograph. The problem isn't the smartness - it's that combined with the pathological desire to simplify UI and remove options. Give me the clever stuff but let me tweak it. But no - settings are bad and options are confusing to the user.
ISL 5y ago
As several here have noted, an antidote is to use both RAW and jpg formats. I have my Pixel set to dual outputs, which yields both Google's processed image and a dng I can use later. For the shifts in color (blue skies at night or colorful sunsets turned dun), that problem exists for most cameras. No matter the camera you use, if you turn off automatic white balance and pin it to 'daylight' or ~5500K, you'll find a whole world of color returns to your images. There's post-processing work (definitely work in RAW, of course) to do, but it brings back a perspective that is often lost. As for the author's lament, "Now every photo we take on our iPhones has had the salt applied generously, whether it is needed or not." , I'm less sad. People like salty snacks and fast food, but that doesn't mean a meal from a skilled chef is any less delicious. If anything, it makes the work of an artisan stand out more to those who appreciate it. An example -- check out Bianca Germain's images https://biancagermainphoto.com/ https://biancagermainphoto.com/ (@biancagermain). The composition of her environmental portraiture captures context and narrative, something an algorithm cannot do.
taylodl 5y ago
If the iPhone provided access to the RAW image then this wouldn't be a big deal. Discard the processed image if you want. Maybe Apple could make it a setting for whether to keep the RAW photo? I have an iPhone SE and you can take good photographs with that camera - if you know what you're doing. I've been doing photography as a hobby since the days of processing my own film and having my own darkroom and I can tell you the iPhone is capable of capturing great shots. But you have to know what you're doing and you can't have the camera's software interfering with what you're doing. Can an iPhone replace your DSLR (assuming you know what you're doing)? No. The DSLR simply captures more information, has more detail, especially in low-lit situations, and has better color. But for a device you always have in your pocket? It's a pro-level snapshot camera! But it's not replacing your DSLR and for most people that's just fine.
- culopatin 5y ago
  They offer ProRAW if you have a pro phone. Silly because the 12 and 12 pro have the same cameras except for telephoto afaik
russellbeattie 5y ago
Samsung has some crazy thing turned on by default which makes selfies into air-brushed portraits where you've applied blush and a sparkle to your eye. It's surreal, ridiculous and generally disturbing. Happily, since it's a non-iOS device, I can just turn it off. Apple is Apple. Bitching about the way they over-coddle their users is a pastime almost as old as I am at this point, so I won't. I'd be a devoted Apple zealot if they gave power users the ability to customize their devices. It's disappointing they don't, as they have such nice kit, but I'm not their target market and never have been, so I just use other products. Apple hasn't noticed my personal boycott, yet, but any day now, they'll notice and cave in to my demands, I'm sure.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Samsung has some crazy thing turned on by default which makes selfies into air-brushed portraits where you've applied blush and a sparkle to your eye. It's surreal, ridiculous and generally disturbing. I believe the word you are looking for is Korean. https://vitalbar.com/blog/what-is-the-korean-beauty-standard/ https://vitalbar.com/blog/what-is-the-korean-beauty-standard...
  - userbinator 5y ago
    It looks fake and unappealing to me on Asian faces, but becomes even more disturbing when applied to other ethnicities.
gerbilly 5y ago
Sun Microsystems used to have a tagline: "The network is the computer," now it's starting to look like the network is the camera. Basically photography is about Pentagram, Twatter and Faceborg more than it is about the photo itself. The medium is starting to alter the aesthetics of the images themselves¹. Joking aside, a professional photographer needs to be able to get reproducible results. Because the algorithms in the phones are mostly black box, with few parameters, they can't be used in a professional setting. Even if you have the control over the algorithm, they are still really weak. Portrait mode for example can't reliably separate the subjects hair from the background properly. Doing this optically does not suffer from these problems at all. 1: For example, vertical videos.
- astrange 5y ago
  > Even if you have the control over the algorithm, they are still really weak. Portrait mode for example can't reliably separate the subjects hair from the background properly. This is harder than it sounds with a "real" camera lens, perfectly focusing on one point isn't necessarily the right thing to do for other points even if they're the same distance away. Most people who upgrade to a dedicated camera aren't going to look this stuff up; most reviews don't even cover it. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2016/09/fun-with-field-of-focus-part-1/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2016/09/fun-with-field-of-f...
ben7799 5y ago
This is a terrible article full of outright falsehoods with no examples. It seems like they just quoted a bunch of older "get off my lawn" photographers who either don't know how to use the latest iPhones or haven't even tried them. Pretty much everything they're talking about is either outright wrong, or it's behavior that can be turned off in the settings or influenced in the camera app, or just go use an alternate app. Some of the complaints in the article are as simple as the person complaining doesn't know how to control exposure compensation or automatic exposure lock on the iPhone. Both of these are things that have not changed in a long time on the iPhone. Portrait mode is imperfect for sure, but the author doesn't seem to understand that a large aperture on a traditional camera is also liable to produce weird effects in a picture and will most certainly do things like make things in the background disappear. Using that wisely separates a good photographer from a bad one. There is a RAW mode for people who are complaining about that. Maybe it's not "RAW enough" but the same thing has happened in the DSLR/MILC world for a while too. Sony was doing processing on their RAW files a long time ago. Some of the stuff going on with DLSRs/MILC is targeted very heavily at spec sheet chasers these days and far less so artistic/working photographers. It's gotten a bit out of hand lately. I have a bunch of pro level photo gear and a lot of it has lost a lot of fun over the last 10 years.. the smartphone photography has gotten a lot more interesting. I've printed 60" wide photos on one of my cameras and it's 10 years old now. Zero reason for me to upgrade it for any realistic improvement in megapixels and the other things the camera companies are selling, for which they want $4000. Likewise ultra expensive new lenses which improve performance in the corner of the frame but weigh 2x as much as what I have already. The spec chasers love all this stuff to death but if the subject of the photo isn't in the corner no viewer cares, and not many quality compositions focus on the corners. And it's certainly not worth upgrading a $1000 lens to a $2000-3000 lens. Even MILC is in many ways a sideways move and often focuses on the same stuff smartphones are doing. The 3 lens smartphones have gotten really really compelling for anyone who really thinks about how they shoot. If you're not chasing printing big prints you can take the smartphone and get the same results as having to take an entire bag of expensive camera gear that cost you thousands. The biggest weakness of the smartphones is flash & external lighting.. but there have been hacks & add on devices to control external flashes for quite a while now too. As in years. A lot of that is the same kind of stuff you used to have to do with "Pro" photo gear. No matter what the camera is someone will always complain about the camera being the cause of their bad photography. It is almost never the camera's fault. It is almost always a problem between the floor and the shutter button. Be a maker not a taker, etc..
mgdlbp 5y ago
There's a good record of phone imaging over the years to be found in a few devoted sites still comparing phone cameras with the Lumia 1020, the 2013 flagship of Windows Phones known for their camera hardware and naturalistic processing. I find it quite remarkable that the 1020's 41 MP, 1/1.5", f/2.2 camera, relying only on oversampling, has performance that still falls within the range of the flagships of today. It even achieves comparable performance when zooming, despite modern dedicated telephotos! Nokia 808 vs 1020 vs Pixel 5 vs iPhone 12 Pro Max: http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24153_Youwantedityougotit2021PureVie.php http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24153_Youwante...
lisper 5y ago
As long as there's a photography thread... I'm going to Africa next year. I have been before, and taken a DMC-ZS60. It's OK but not great. By far the best feature is that it packs a tremendous zoom lens into a very small and light package, which is really a must for wildlife photography. I would like to step up my photography game for my next trip without having to add too much bulk and weight. Once upon a time I had a DMC-GX1 with a 300mm lens and that worked well, but I found that even that was too big for me to comfortably lug around and so I got rid of it because I never used it. That camera is also getting pretty old. Has the technology improved at all? Is there a better alternative out there for a good zoom (300mm or better) without the bulk of a regular DSLR? [UPDATE] In case anyone is interested, here are a few shots from the ZS60: https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/422.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/422.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/496.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/496.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Africa2022/Pages/303.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Africa2022/Pages/303.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/707.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/707.htm... https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/950.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/950.htm... And one from the GX1 for comparison. (Another advantage to that camera is a fast shutter!) https://flownet.com/ron/trips/NWP2015/Pages/162.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/NWP2015/Pages/162.html
- tsol 5y ago
  Are these from a safari? I'm impressed at how close up these pictures of big cats look
  - lisper 5y ago
    Yes that is what a good zoom lens does for you!
auraham 5y ago
An article about photos... with no photos.
killjoywashere 5y ago
Observation about the author's Ms. McCabe deciding to carry a Pixel: I was out this weekend with my wife and her friends and they all had iPhones. They all kept asking me to use my Pixel, because "it takes better pictures." Not sure how much more damning it can be than a bunch of 40-50 year old moms noticing the camera for it's suck. The Pixel is definitely, unabashedly, engaging in similar computational chicanery, but it's better at it's particular brand of misdirection than the iPhone is at it's brand. And this is the first time soccer moms have noticed. I have a friend who was a PM at Apple and moved to Google. He said never expect to work with Apple on a software project. It didn't make any sense for them to contract for software services, because they didn't have any data.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Sounds like a meme, or perhaps a compliment to your eye or a social media page? There’s a photographic style setting they can use if they prefer a less neutral look on their phones.
- elliottkember 5y ago
  > they all had iPhones It seems as though the camera is not important enough to drive purchasing decisions, and is more of a single-issue determinant
ksec 5y ago
One could argue iPhone 7 had computational photography as well. But let's spilt it between Apple actually mentions it, ( iPhone X ) and prior iPhone. For a long time, iPhones' Camera were the most realistic of all Smartphone Cameras. No HDR, No filters, it tries to preserve the image as real life as it can be. And that means things do look a little dull most of the time without proper lighting and adjustment. It carries on from Steve Jobs era. While Samsung, much like their TV, likes to tune their colour profile with high contrast and pop colours. It was easy for most consumer to think Samsung takes better quality pictures, but Apple stood ground. Refuse to give in, if you wanted professional edited photos alike, use a separate App. This changed with iPhone X, or more accurately with the release of Google Pixel in 2016. Where the race of computational photography began. Apple decided to show their own take on iPhone X a year later. And since then Apple went all in on eye popping colour. The direction of their Camera profile took a 180 degree change. And it is sort of strange in 2022, Google Pixel and Samsung actually has less pop colour and contrast compared to an iPhone. I cant name many things or if any thing Tim Cook's Apple has done right. But I can list many things they have changed and done wrong. Camera being one of them.

186 points by tomduncalf 5y ago

I’ve noticed with my 12 pro, my wife’s 11 pro, and my mom’s S10 that shots will sometimes look distorted in weird ways. With someone’s face being unnaturally elongated, or an arm in the foreground shortened. You’ll think you captured the shot and will only notice it after.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.ph/0843H https://archive.ph/0843H

Etheryte 5y ago

While most readers probably have at least some firsthand experience with this, some examples would've gone a long way to illustrate the issues brought up.

daniel_reetz 5y ago

It's not that cameras have become too smart. It's that they're making choices for us, and these are not the choices we would make for ourselves. 11 years ago, I gave a talk about this at the Internet Archive. It seems to have held up. https://youtu.be/UMMogOoWEbI https://youtu.be/UMMogOoWEbI

pishpash 5y ago
Choice implies a non-processed alternative but hardware has been driven in a direction so as to make the non-processed alternative unusable (meh hardware, processing to fix).
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  Pretty much this. I have a Pixel 4a and if I use an alternate camera that doesn't have Google's algos, the images look like ass.
- simion314 5y ago
  My digital camera had Profiles for outdoors, night/dark areas, people, animals, macro. Seems to me Apple did what they do best (and credit to Gnome too) remove the Profiles options because the users are stupid and use some shit algorithm to decide what profile to use for you,
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Computational photography is much more advanced than that.
    - simion314 5y ago
      Digital cameras had shit like face detection too, but yeah they are more advanced but still too stupid to just work, I remember a picture was posted where the code made a leaf appear on top of someone's face, like fuck this photos are fabricated, object are moved around, hidden or made to appear - you can't just use a photo as evidence without first knowing all the tech details on what algorithm created the photo.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        As mentioned elsewhere, that story is fake. Computational photography is more about increasing the sources of data, by e.g. reusing the shakiness of one’s hand to decompose the adjacent color channels’ input. This is a statistically correct method to increase the noise-to-signal ratio, nothing like “this is a leaf, put a leaf here”
- azeirah 5y ago
  Delegating the issue to hardware seems off to me. Aren't hardware manufacturers also making choices for you? I get that software allows for far broader picture manipulation but there are a decent amount of similar choices on the lens and sensor level, no?
  - Scalestein 5y ago
    True but hardware makes it obvious why the image looks the way it does and is consistent. Photographers can even tell what lenses were used for a photo by looking at it. Software makes it more of a black box. The same picture taken days apart could look different due to a software update you weren't even aware of. Hardware is also a forced choice so is more deliberate which again is the opposite of the software situation of changing algos and processing.
tencentshill 5y ago
You can still capture RAW and edit it yourself, right?
GeekyBear 5y ago
>It's that they're making choices for us, and these are not the choices we would make for ourselves. Of course, you can always take off the training wheels and shoot raw. Apple even worked with Adobe to create ProRaw, which allows you to selectively turn on or off various parts of their image processing pipeline after you shoot the image. https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  ProRaw is demosaiced and includes the computational photography stuff as well. The big picture is that cameras profoundly influence how we see and share ourselves, others, and the world. Fairly recently, cameras (and their developers) started making opinionated decisions for us about things like the color of sky, the texture of skin, and much more. Sure, any one of us can opt out and do things RAW, but the rest of the world will go on taking pictures with these decisions baked in. I don't think the answer is RAW, because the problem is not pixel data -- it is who controls image making in the first place.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    What’s your proposed way of solving the issue? HDR can be considered more natural to how our own eyes work, being pedantic the “old-school” model is much more foreign than the NN-enhanced one. Sure, one can overdo it, e.g. replacing an image of a moon with a photograph of it, but I don’t think that NN-based color balance, HDR and the like are worsening the problem.
  - _aavaa_ 5y ago
    I don't see how this is different than the film stock you shot on, the lens you used, or the format you shot it on.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - astrange 5y ago
    > Fairly recently, cameras (and their developers) started making opinionated decisions for us about things like the color of sky That's called "auto white balance" and we've been stuck with it since the advent of digital cameras. Phones don't do much more than that; if they detect the sky it's to adjust denoising to not cause banding artifacts etc.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
> It's that they're making choices for us I think that's the definition of a "smart" appliance, and you just described what my problem with "smart" appliances is: they are too smart by a half, and end up making bad choices when pushed a little.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > they are too smart by a half, and end up making bad choices when pushed a little. That's seems like the opposite of smart—instead, it's dumb yet intrusive. Or as Kurt Vonnegut said: "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before." These devices do a lot of thinking, but have no wisdom.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    They are smart, if you consider "smarts" to mean making lots of complex decisions. And they make good decisions a lot of the time too. But you can't encode a set of heuristics that works every time into a physical device - that is the real problem with "smart". In a small minority of cases, the situation will get so complicated that the rules you embedded will produce suboptimal behaviour. To overcome that, you'd need to embed a human-like intelligence in the device. Similarly will they fail for the minority of people who have drastically different goals (e.g. aesthetics) for the purpose of the device. Now you end up having to clone the owner wholesale. Okay, really the problem with "smart" devices is that they typically don't disclose what rules they follow, and typically don't come to the user asking for help choosing when tradeoffs enter the picture (literally in the context of this article). "Dumb" devices, meanwhile, lay all choices flat. Granted, cameras have long stopped being comletely dumb - but they often make a good job opening themselves to doubt with things like optional manual color balance, and different priority modes.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      To be honest even our very own eyes not that “smart” — they can be fooled quite easily, by eg. visual illusions, magic tricks.
tormock 5y ago
silisili 5y ago
I've always especially felt this way about Pixel cameras. They are no doubt good, but there is something just off about them I cannot easily identify. I believe it both oversharpens faces and makes white skin tanner. Is there any company out there doing just HDR, and not making color choices? Or is it baked in at the SOC level now?
- nomel 5y ago
  Apple's ProRaw can "just do HDR", assuming you don't want to demosaic yourself.
- alephxyz 5y ago
  I've noticed the same thing with my Pixel. It adds too much contrast in areas that shouldn't. Some simple shots of my pets in uniform lighting end up looking ghoulish because it turns their fur into this streakish blob of very dark and light areas. I've also had weird instances were it tries to "restore" fine detail on zoomed in pictures by inserting gridlike patterns on objects (very similar to images generated by a GAN).

tomduncalf 5y ago

I found this interesting as I'm someone who used to travel with at least one camera most of the time, but I've recently come back from a holiday where I used my iPhone 13 Pro as my only camera. Overall I actually found it a great experience – I love having an ultra wide angle lens in my pocket and after a bit of time getting used to it, I find the 3x zoom a more useful focal length than the 2x zoom on my previous iPhone X – but I did find the over-processing (the "painterly" look) frustrating, and even more annoying is that it will often use the wide angle lens and upscale rather than using the 3x zoom (even with ProRAW enabled – see [1]). I understand why the software makes these choices for the "average" user, but it would be nice to enable a "pro" mode which reduces noise reduction and favours the zoom lens in more situations. I ended up using the stock camera app for "snapshots" (e.g. photos where I didn't care too much about the quality, or where I was just using the wide angle lens), and Lightroom Mobile's camera for shots where I wanted more control, or when I wanted to ensure that the zoom lens was being used (Halide is also good for this, but I found it convenient to have the photos in LR Mobile for processing immediately, even if Lightroom's UX is clunkier). This actually worked pretty well for me – you can trust the stock camera to take a photo which will look good at mobile screen sizes even in challenging conditions, so it's great for "capturing the moment", while if you are taking a photo where you care about the details, it's usually not an issue to take a few extra seconds to open LR... but it would be nice to be able to do this in the stock camera. The results with RAWs from Lightroom are actually pretty impressive IMO – there's more noise than the stock camera, but I prefer this to the smudged noise reduction look and I'm sure with some processing I can find a happy medium. Even the ultra wide photos are reasonably sharp. This was a long way of saying that if you're frustrated by this issue, try a third party camera app and hopefully you'll find that you can get more out of the newer iPhone's great cameras, while still having the default camera there for quick snapshots! [1] https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography/ https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...

NikolaNovak 5y ago
You mean you cannot manually choose the lens on iPhone 13?? :O I have an old Samsung Note 8; I was contemplating Iphone 13 Pro for my wife so we can improve the casual/random photos of our kids, but that'd be a deal breaker :-< [context - we have Nikon d800, d7200, couple of d90's, V1, etc lying around the house so we do like photos, and being able to zoom or choose a lens is something we take for granted :]

faitswulff 5y ago

Funny, I just had this problem. We got a taro-mousse cake for my daughter's birthday and I was trying to take a photo of it on my iPhone 11 Pro. I could see the brilliant purple of the taro section of the cake with my own eyes, but the iPhone would hesitate before eventually turning it into a darker, almost brown color.

gnicholas 5y ago
Was it possible to fix this by tapping on the cake itself? Might it have been affected by the color of the lighting in the room? We had issues with that in our kitchen, which had warm yellow lights. Our 'paprika' colored plates always showed up weird in food photos.
- faitswulff 5y ago
  Refocusing on the cake didn't help for us. This was in a fairly bright sunlit room, which I guess is technically warm lighting?
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    Can you fix it by adjusting the temperature or tint in the Photos app?
    - faitswulff 5y ago
      Maybe, I'll try it!
astrange 5y ago
Might have to tap on it and drag up. If it takes up too much of the picture, it won't have a neutral reference in the background to help figure out how bright the room is supposed to look. (Cameras usually just work off the picture they're taking to determine this, and yet everyone says they're too smart.) I have the same problem with a black cat that turns brown if you try to expose off it.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

Personally I'm tired of the HDR-ification of everything. House listings? It's like realtors figured out what HDR was and went NUTS. Those images are like the comic sans of photography.

asdff 5y ago
It's even better when they throw on HDR for one of those faux Mediterranean houses built with the fit and finish of an Olive Garden. It's like a tell to stay away, someone who worshiped Camilla Soprano's kitchen once owned this home.
brimble 5y ago
I've seen them add light fixtures to photos. Like, the light fixtures do not exist in the actual house. Not a lamp, something connected to the house. The way they're going, that industry's gonna get a regulatory smack-down at some point.
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  UGH! Is that what virtual staging is going to next, straight up lies? It's one thing to use a fake couch, but a fake fixture is not acceptable.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Here in New York I've seen listings use extremely bright, daylight-emulating lights to make rooms appear "sun-drenched" when their only window faces another building, and remain dim year-round. I even saw this on a video walkthrough of an apartment – they clearly had placed the lights right outside the window. Finding a place to live is challenging.
- Arrath 5y ago
  I recently saw a listing where badly inserted trees and piles of rocks were littered around the back yard, maybe to hide crap the owner hadn't bothered to clean up? Not sure, but it was obvious.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago

daggersandscars 5y ago

After watching far too many videos comparing the iPhone 13 Pro Max, Samsung S22 Ultra, and Pixel 6 Pro, I decided against the iPhone because of the automatic skin smoothing. The iPhone 13 Pro Max removed wrinkles, sun spots, moles, hair, etc to the point where the results looked like overprocessed, manually edited photos. This wasn't subtle -- the reviewers commented on it as well. While I don't do video, I was struck by a specific example: the iPhone 13 Pro Max's automatic enhancement for dark scenes decided a barely visible wall was red and recently painted. It looked like someone had drawn a box in the photo and did a red fill. I suspect it is only a matter of time before Samsung and Pixel's photos look as overprocessed. But, for now, we have some choice.

Geonode 5y ago
The Pixel 6 photos are quite over processed. You can shoot raw, but I just want the same normal workflow without the run around.
AnonHP 5y ago
Haven’t Samsung’s flagship phones favored over (or more than normal) saturated photos over the years? I think the key to liking a phone camera is to get one that takes photos you like (I know this is tautological). Or play with apps that will allow you to change from the defaults. This may not help as much on iOS since the default camera app that can be launched quickest from the Lock Screen is Apple’s camera app.
Workaccount2 5y ago
I feel like it is inevitable that consumers gravitate towards cameras that make them look the prettiest, if that is not already where manufactures are going. Samsung absolutely does not want someone to switch, and then find out that they "look worse" on their new samsung phone. I guess its just a matter of whether or not they implement options for post-processing.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Do people really choose between Android and iOS based on the camera? They are all very close on quality, and IIRC if you don't like the stock camera apps you can get a third party app with less opinionated processing. But even so, the whole experience, including the ecosystem, matters so much more to me than the camera. I have a real camera for when it matters that much.

nkingsy 5y ago

Seems there are quite a few ways to get around this. Didn't know you could change the keyframe in a live photo, and it appears that removes the processing. https://appletoolbox.com/disable-photo-auto-enhance-iphone/ https://appletoolbox.com/disable-photo-auto-enhance-iphone/

tomduncalf 5y ago
I'm pretty sure the live photo frames are lower quality though, as it stores the live photo part as a compressed video rather than individual images, so you're looking at a grab of a video which could have artefacts and lower resolution.

darkwizard42 5y ago

Whole article talks about photo differences but there aren’t any concrete shown examples of the problem images. Kind of disappointing because it’s difficult to tell if the differences are huge or mild exaggeration.

tomduncalf 5y ago
Yeah, slightly odd decision I agree! If you scroll down to "The 75mm Telephoto Camera" section of https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography/ https://lux.camera/iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot..., there are some images demonstrating the "painted" look you get from the noise reduction.
lelandfe 5y ago
It's kind of the house style of the New Yorker to be picture-adverse, which is definitely to the detriment of this article.

leoff 5y ago

An article talking about photos that has no photos in it, huh.

creaghpatr 5y ago

I think the point about resulting uncanniness is valid, but can't most of these features be turned off? Portrait mode, despite the blurring issues, seems to be a popular feature. Having just traded from an iPhone 5 to a 13 Pro, I can without hesitation say the upgrade to the quality of my pictures blew my mind. Let's not overthink this.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago
> Having just traded from an iPhone 5 to a 13 Pro, I can without hesitation say the upgrade to the quality of my pictures blew my mind. Let's not overthink this. Okay, but that's what, a 6 generation leap? It had better be better because of hardware alone!
- creaghpatr 5y ago
  Sure, and I expected as much for that reason. It's just funny to see the author talking trash about the 12 Pro featurization after trading from a 7...should still be a big upgrade in general quality.

aaaaaaaaata 5y ago

I tried to show mates how filthy I was turned over my new apartment, and what I'm assuming to be the anti shadow AI in the sensor removed so much of the dirt..

newaccount74 5y ago

It's the same thing with the webcams on the M1 Macs. Comparing my 2015 Macbook Pro and my 2021 Macbook Pro, I can say that they both have crappy webcams. The 2015 has a somewhat grainy, high contrast look. The 2021 webcam has extreme smoothing applied, to the point where my facial hair looks like it's painted on. The result is that my face always looks blurry. There are also weird movement glitches that are probably caused by temporal smoothing. From a distance, the pictures from the new webcams look better. But up close it's frustrating that my face is always blurry.

judge2020 5y ago
Webcams still remain an issue on laptops because the space for them is extremely limited; the iPhone 13 Pro camera has tons of z-space to work with, while the Mac has to keep it thin to continue to look like a modern laptop and not a 2003 thinkpad.

acd 5y ago

Film cameras might hip again for the same feeling as music LP. The digital version of photos become a little bit to perfect. Why do we call addictive smart phones that tracks users by selling advertisement smart?

floren 5y ago
I've been shooting film on and off for about a decade now, and a good film shot pretty much always looks better than a phone picture. The problem is that going from camera to digitally-shareable photo is either 1) time-consuming, or 2) quite expensive. I mostly do my own scanning, which takes a lot of time and manual labor, because getting good quality digital scans of negatives costs a lot of money and frankly I don't take enough good pictures to a roll to make it worthwhile.
userbinator 5y ago
What's smart are the companies doing it for their own interests ($$$), not necessarily the users buying into it.

asiachick 5y ago

I noticed this recently. I was in Lightroom editing some photos from iPhone 13 Pro and zooming in they looked like impressionist paintings, small blotches of color, instead of what I'm used to from previous phones.

Someone1234 5y ago

Controversial take: DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have largely made themselves irrelevant by ignoring computational photography advancements (computational photography is seen as "cheating"). I own several "real" cameras: FF, M43, and over a dozen lenses. Multiple camera companies. On paper many have very impressive specs. The problem is that camera companies focus primarily on raw specs with software being a secondary concern. To give one concrete example, I can press one button on a cellphone (almost any) and it will capture more dynamic range than my $2K DSLR. How can a tiny sense in a cellphone capture more dynamic range can a massive sensor? Software. It is stacking multiple rapid exposures using an eShutter and computationally merging them. You can do that with a DSLR, but it is time-consuming, outside of camera, and produces worse results (e.g. motion in the frame will ruin your stack). It is super aggravating, but it isn't actually surprising if you look at the amounts of money spent on photographic software alone compared to almost the entire camera industry. I've given up for most things, a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches.

aspyct 5y ago
As a sports photographer, I disagree. There's no stacking multiple frames in my world. Also, as a portrait photographer, I disagree too. Until we can use flashes properly, I'm not getting rid of my camera. Plus, dynamic range isn't everything.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  > As a sports photographer, I disagree. You don't disagree with the post you replied to. Niches will always require specialized equipment as it said. It was a comment about general purpose photography (and its ever shrinking market share).
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Moving objects aren't a niche, they are the real life outside of of selfies and posing.

can16358p 5y ago

I think it's a welcome effect for many average people on the street. As a hobbyist photographer who likes nature and astrophotograpy with quite serious gear (5D Mark IV, Sigma 14 f1.8, Canon 50mm f/1.2 etc) I find iPhone camera really impressive and is actually the primary reason of upgrading every year. Yet, I'd love to see an "off" switch when needed. But at least we've got RAW shooting which doesn't apply much effects (but still overprocesses a little too much for "raw", agreed.)

tomduncalf 5y ago
Third party camera apps like Lightroom and Halide can take much “RAWer” RAWs than the ProRAW option of the stock camera

azinman2 5y ago

The whole idea that the iPhone 7 was dumb but now the 12 is too smart shows how poorly researched this article is. The aperture on all cell phone cameras are tiny, so you’re running into the limits of physics as you get very few photons per pixel imaged. The noise is just very high and uneven. So all cameras use computational photography, including way before the iPhone 7, in order to achieve the results they get. You can argue that the algorithms are getting worse, but you cannot say they weren’t smart before.

judge2020 5y ago
To add, the 13's cameras are even bigger now. I wouldn't be surprised if we see another 1.5x increase in the size of the sensors by the iPhone 15's launch. It turns out that giving the algorithm more to work with vastly increases how much it can do.

deanCommie 5y ago

> “Make it less smart—I’m serious,” she said. Lately she’s taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google’s line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures. And here we completely sabotage the premise of the headline, and make it clear that this whole topic is a subjective perception issue by the consumers. Pixels do FAR more ML-based post-processing than iPhones. It just so happens that I guess they do a BETTER job. Which means that iPhone cameras aren't too smart, but rather aren't smart enough.

mutagen 5y ago

Digital photos are inherently computational, I think the distinction is where you stop processing and how much human control is exercised over the final product. Even film has some carefully developed characteristics that are used by the the photographer and developer to influence the image. I love the full spectrum of it, from my DSLR to my iPhone. I'd love to see camera companies embrace the ability to capture the raw data to make deeper processing available and to open up the pipeline and let me tweak to my preference.

gumby 5y ago

I feel the opposite: I don't care about the camera. I just take snaps of people and random things and like the memory more than anything else. I wish apple made high end phones with cameras that were flush in the body. For me the extended lenses are just an annoying and user hostile design statement.* And ditto ipads: since the first ipad came out I've taken a grand total of one photo with it. The aggressive cluster of lenses is a real downer since I can't lay it flat. * Yes I know some people chose their phone by the camera and need the physics of a longer lens barrel. They are not wrong, nor am I: I'm just saying that one size doesn't fit all.

mikepurvis 5y ago
I feel like a lot of that was just a reaction to the reality that overwhelmingly, people put their $800 smartphone in a protective case, and that that protective case typically adds 1-3mm of thickness on the back of it. It was the hardware designers saying "welp, we could really use that extra few mm of depth for the camera lens, and keeping the rest of the body thinner is a better deal than beefing up the whole thing for those handful of users who don't use a case. Maybe there's a non-case case out there for you that just sticks on the back and is thick enough to make the whole thing flush without adding any bulk around the sides? Or even just a strip of foamy tape or something that can run across the top of the device adjacent to the camera pop-out so that the device is able to sit flat on a table.
- ProfessorLayton 5y ago
  While I agree with you on the design choices made, the camera bump has gotten to absurd levels. It's now roughly 50% the thickness of the phone body [1]. This means that unless one gets a case that's unnecessarily thick, it'll still rock on a table with even with a case on. There's also a limit to case thickness without affecting other features like wireless charging and magsafe. I'm not sure this is good design anymore. Perhaps if the bump was centered so the phone doesn't sit lopsided on a table, or maybe even a tapered design. [1] https://imgur.com/a/UVt4FyH https://imgur.com/a/UVt4FyH
  - 5y ago

fungiblecog 5y ago

like most technology today it is now being forced on us rather than being available as a tool.

andybak 5y ago

I took a fairly elderly Panasonic DMC-GX80 on holiday with me and despite the lack of HDR, AI and clever stuff with multiple exposures, I found that for most of the interesting photos I wanted to take, it did the right thing. My phone on the other hand did the blandest thing possible. Impossible to get an atmospheric color cast, a dramatic silhouette or anything that made a photo interesting to me. It was fine in most situations with "normal" lighting but they aren't usually the things I want to photograph. The problem isn't the smartness - it's that combined with the pathological desire to simplify UI and remove options. Give me the clever stuff but let me tweak it. But no - settings are bad and options are confusing to the user.

ISL 5y ago

As several here have noted, an antidote is to use both RAW and jpg formats. I have my Pixel set to dual outputs, which yields both Google's processed image and a dng I can use later. For the shifts in color (blue skies at night or colorful sunsets turned dun), that problem exists for most cameras. No matter the camera you use, if you turn off automatic white balance and pin it to 'daylight' or ~5500K, you'll find a whole world of color returns to your images. There's post-processing work (definitely work in RAW, of course) to do, but it brings back a perspective that is often lost. As for the author's lament, "Now every photo we take on our iPhones has had the salt applied generously, whether it is needed or not." , I'm less sad. People like salty snacks and fast food, but that doesn't mean a meal from a skilled chef is any less delicious. If anything, it makes the work of an artisan stand out more to those who appreciate it. An example -- check out Bianca Germain's images https://biancagermainphoto.com/ https://biancagermainphoto.com/ (@biancagermain). The composition of her environmental portraiture captures context and narrative, something an algorithm cannot do.

taylodl 5y ago

If the iPhone provided access to the RAW image then this wouldn't be a big deal. Discard the processed image if you want. Maybe Apple could make it a setting for whether to keep the RAW photo? I have an iPhone SE and you can take good photographs with that camera - if you know what you're doing. I've been doing photography as a hobby since the days of processing my own film and having my own darkroom and I can tell you the iPhone is capable of capturing great shots. But you have to know what you're doing and you can't have the camera's software interfering with what you're doing. Can an iPhone replace your DSLR (assuming you know what you're doing)? No. The DSLR simply captures more information, has more detail, especially in low-lit situations, and has better color. But for a device you always have in your pocket? It's a pro-level snapshot camera! But it's not replacing your DSLR and for most people that's just fine.

culopatin 5y ago
They offer ProRAW if you have a pro phone. Silly because the 12 and 12 pro have the same cameras except for telephoto afaik

russellbeattie 5y ago

Samsung has some crazy thing turned on by default which makes selfies into air-brushed portraits where you've applied blush and a sparkle to your eye. It's surreal, ridiculous and generally disturbing. Happily, since it's a non-iOS device, I can just turn it off. Apple is Apple. Bitching about the way they over-coddle their users is a pastime almost as old as I am at this point, so I won't. I'd be a devoted Apple zealot if they gave power users the ability to customize their devices. It's disappointing they don't, as they have such nice kit, but I'm not their target market and never have been, so I just use other products. Apple hasn't noticed my personal boycott, yet, but any day now, they'll notice and cave in to my demands, I'm sure.

contingencies 5y ago
Samsung has some crazy thing turned on by default which makes selfies into air-brushed portraits where you've applied blush and a sparkle to your eye. It's surreal, ridiculous and generally disturbing. I believe the word you are looking for is Korean. https://vitalbar.com/blog/what-is-the-korean-beauty-standard/ https://vitalbar.com/blog/what-is-the-korean-beauty-standard...
- userbinator 5y ago
  It looks fake and unappealing to me on Asian faces, but becomes even more disturbing when applied to other ethnicities.

gerbilly 5y ago

Sun Microsystems used to have a tagline: "The network is the computer," now it's starting to look like the network is the camera. Basically photography is about Pentagram, Twatter and Faceborg more than it is about the photo itself. The medium is starting to alter the aesthetics of the images themselves¹. Joking aside, a professional photographer needs to be able to get reproducible results. Because the algorithms in the phones are mostly black box, with few parameters, they can't be used in a professional setting. Even if you have the control over the algorithm, they are still really weak. Portrait mode for example can't reliably separate the subjects hair from the background properly. Doing this optically does not suffer from these problems at all. 1: For example, vertical videos.

astrange 5y ago
> Even if you have the control over the algorithm, they are still really weak. Portrait mode for example can't reliably separate the subjects hair from the background properly. This is harder than it sounds with a "real" camera lens, perfectly focusing on one point isn't necessarily the right thing to do for other points even if they're the same distance away. Most people who upgrade to a dedicated camera aren't going to look this stuff up; most reviews don't even cover it. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2016/09/fun-with-field-of-focus-part-1/ https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2016/09/fun-with-field-of-f...

ben7799 5y ago

This is a terrible article full of outright falsehoods with no examples. It seems like they just quoted a bunch of older "get off my lawn" photographers who either don't know how to use the latest iPhones or haven't even tried them. Pretty much everything they're talking about is either outright wrong, or it's behavior that can be turned off in the settings or influenced in the camera app, or just go use an alternate app. Some of the complaints in the article are as simple as the person complaining doesn't know how to control exposure compensation or automatic exposure lock on the iPhone. Both of these are things that have not changed in a long time on the iPhone. Portrait mode is imperfect for sure, but the author doesn't seem to understand that a large aperture on a traditional camera is also liable to produce weird effects in a picture and will most certainly do things like make things in the background disappear. Using that wisely separates a good photographer from a bad one. There is a RAW mode for people who are complaining about that. Maybe it's not "RAW enough" but the same thing has happened in the DSLR/MILC world for a while too. Sony was doing processing on their RAW files a long time ago. Some of the stuff going on with DLSRs/MILC is targeted very heavily at spec sheet chasers these days and far less so artistic/working photographers. It's gotten a bit out of hand lately. I have a bunch of pro level photo gear and a lot of it has lost a lot of fun over the last 10 years.. the smartphone photography has gotten a lot more interesting. I've printed 60" wide photos on one of my cameras and it's 10 years old now. Zero reason for me to upgrade it for any realistic improvement in megapixels and the other things the camera companies are selling, for which they want $4000. Likewise ultra expensive new lenses which improve performance in the corner of the frame but weigh 2x as much as what I have already. The spec chasers love all this stuff to death but if the subject of the photo isn't in the corner no viewer cares, and not many quality compositions focus on the corners. And it's certainly not worth upgrading a $1000 lens to a $2000-3000 lens. Even MILC is in many ways a sideways move and often focuses on the same stuff smartphones are doing. The 3 lens smartphones have gotten really really compelling for anyone who really thinks about how they shoot. If you're not chasing printing big prints you can take the smartphone and get the same results as having to take an entire bag of expensive camera gear that cost you thousands. The biggest weakness of the smartphones is flash & external lighting.. but there have been hacks & add on devices to control external flashes for quite a while now too. As in years. A lot of that is the same kind of stuff you used to have to do with "Pro" photo gear. No matter what the camera is someone will always complain about the camera being the cause of their bad photography. It is almost never the camera's fault. It is almost always a problem between the floor and the shutter button. Be a maker not a taker, etc..

mgdlbp 5y ago

There's a good record of phone imaging over the years to be found in a few devoted sites still comparing phone cameras with the Lumia 1020, the 2013 flagship of Windows Phones known for their camera hardware and naturalistic processing. I find it quite remarkable that the 1020's 41 MP, 1/1.5", f/2.2 camera, relying only on oversampling, has performance that still falls within the range of the flagships of today. It even achieves comparable performance when zooming, despite modern dedicated telephotos! Nokia 808 vs 1020 vs Pixel 5 vs iPhone 12 Pro Max: http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24153_Youwantedityougotit2021PureVie.php http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24153_Youwante...

lisper 5y ago

As long as there's a photography thread... I'm going to Africa next year. I have been before, and taken a DMC-ZS60. It's OK but not great. By far the best feature is that it packs a tremendous zoom lens into a very small and light package, which is really a must for wildlife photography. I would like to step up my photography game for my next trip without having to add too much bulk and weight. Once upon a time I had a DMC-GX1 with a 300mm lens and that worked well, but I found that even that was too big for me to comfortably lug around and so I got rid of it because I never used it. That camera is also getting pretty old. Has the technology improved at all? Is there a better alternative out there for a good zoom (300mm or better) without the bulk of a regular DSLR? [UPDATE] In case anyone is interested, here are a few shots from the ZS60: https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/422.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/422.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/496.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Seabourn2019/Pages/496.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Africa2022/Pages/303.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/Africa2022/Pages/303.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/707.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/707.htm... https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/950.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/west_africa_2015/Pages/950.htm... And one from the GX1 for comparison. (Another advantage to that camera is a fast shutter!) https://flownet.com/ron/trips/NWP2015/Pages/162.html https://flownet.com/ron/trips/NWP2015/Pages/162.html

tsol 5y ago
Are these from a safari? I'm impressed at how close up these pictures of big cats look
- lisper 5y ago
  Yes that is what a good zoom lens does for you!

auraham 5y ago

An article about photos... with no photos.

killjoywashere 5y ago

Observation about the author's Ms. McCabe deciding to carry a Pixel: I was out this weekend with my wife and her friends and they all had iPhones. They all kept asking me to use my Pixel, because "it takes better pictures." Not sure how much more damning it can be than a bunch of 40-50 year old moms noticing the camera for it's suck. The Pixel is definitely, unabashedly, engaging in similar computational chicanery, but it's better at it's particular brand of misdirection than the iPhone is at it's brand. And this is the first time soccer moms have noticed. I have a friend who was a PM at Apple and moved to Google. He said never expect to work with Apple on a software project. It didn't make any sense for them to contract for software services, because they didn't have any data.

1123581321 5y ago
Sounds like a meme, or perhaps a compliment to your eye or a social media page? There’s a photographic style setting they can use if they prefer a less neutral look on their phones.
elliottkember 5y ago
> they all had iPhones It seems as though the camera is not important enough to drive purchasing decisions, and is more of a single-issue determinant

ksec 5y ago

One could argue iPhone 7 had computational photography as well. But let's spilt it between Apple actually mentions it, ( iPhone X ) and prior iPhone. For a long time, iPhones' Camera were the most realistic of all Smartphone Cameras. No HDR, No filters, it tries to preserve the image as real life as it can be. And that means things do look a little dull most of the time without proper lighting and adjustment. It carries on from Steve Jobs era. While Samsung, much like their TV, likes to tune their colour profile with high contrast and pop colours. It was easy for most consumer to think Samsung takes better quality pictures, but Apple stood ground. Refuse to give in, if you wanted professional edited photos alike, use a separate App. This changed with iPhone X, or more accurately with the release of Google Pixel in 2016. Where the race of computational photography began. Apple decided to show their own take on iPhone X a year later. And since then Apple went all in on eye popping colour. The direction of their Camera profile took a 180 degree change. And it is sort of strange in 2022, Google Pixel and Samsung actually has less pop colour and contrast compared to an iPhone. I cant name many things or if any thing Tim Cook's Apple has done right. But I can list many things they have changed and done wrong. Camera being one of them.