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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,

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).

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).