13 ms·

Post-processing is ruining iPhone photos

310 points by retskrad 4y ago

cs702 4y ago
This is an accurate assessment IMHO. And the problem goes beyond contrast and shadow adjustments. On a few occasions, I've had recent iPhones blend the bodies of two people in a group photo into single, weirdly fused 'body blob'. Which is a shame, because iPhones have such amazingly good hardware. Apple, please fix this!
- projektfu 4y ago
  It really seems like machine learning is moving us into Nutri-matic territory. Avoid: big tech drink machine.
- grugagag 4y ago
  I wish this could be turned off altogether.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    There are/were apps which could turn it off.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    It can be disabled in camera settings under "Smart HDR"
    - OGWhales 4y ago
      It seems you are not able to turn this off for the newer models, as I don’t see this settings on the iPhone 13 but I do see it on an iPhone 11.
    - tillinghast 4y ago
      I know that there is already a reply to this effect, but to repeat YOU CANNOT TURN OFF SMART HDR ON NEW IPHONES. Astonishingly stupid.
giuliomagnifico 4y ago
You can’t not post-process a photo, because you can’t use/view the RAW file captured by the sensor, or better, only the company who build the RAW/DAC conversion can issue the “codec” to open the RAW file. The issue is “how many interpolations/adjustments are these companies making when converting the RAW to an image file?” Too much according to the article.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  I think it's important to distinguish between signal processing techniques like debayering, auto-leveling etc and "we're using machine learning to identify humans in a picture and adjust their contrast". We can have the former without the latter, they're not all just "post-processing".
- happytoexplain 4y ago
  It seems like an oversimplification to imply all processing exists on a gradient with no significant lines we can draw between one type and another. E.g. content identification has a pretty clear qualitative difference from whatever "dumb" mappings do to get from RAW to values in some color space. One isn't just "more processing" and the other "less processing", colloquially.
- ArtWomb 4y ago
  Android Camera2 APIs allow RAW capture. But images still require a bit of magic to "de-bayerize" added color filters and noise ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing
- shock-value 4y ago
  It’s not just a matter of degree or quantity of post processing. Some techniques are qualitatively different than others.
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  This is the type of pedantry which is technically correct, but contributes nothing to the discussion.
KingLancelot 4y ago
[dead]
kevingadd 4y ago
I'm a little shocked that you can't turn "Smart HDR" and these other enhancements off. I would have assumed it was a toggle, so getting to the end of the article and seeing "Apple should let us turn it off" in reference to photo-ruining enhancements is wild to me - I've always considered Apple the brand you go to if you want a phone with a good camera but it sounds like that may not be true anymore if they stick to this?
- Qluxzz 4y ago
  For the smart HDR you can. It's under: Settings -> Camera -> Smart HDR There is also the ”Scene Detection”setting which I have turned off.
  - mahmoudhossam 4y ago
    This is probably a "Pro" feature because I can't find it on my iPhone 13.
    - shock-value 4y ago
      I’m on a 14 Pro and cannot find these settings either.
      - codetrotter 4y ago
        I'm on 14 Pro also and I found the settings where they are supposed to be. Are you running iOS 14.3 or greater? Go to Settings, scroll to Camera, choose Format. There you can turn on Apple ProRAW. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
        alistairSH 4y ago
        ProRAW still does some post-processing. And doesn’t enable the scene and smart HDR settings mentioned above.
    - Qluxzz 4y ago
goalieca 4y ago
I realize all sensors need some sort of filtering to clean the raw data up.. but ios goes way beyond acceptable.
retskrad 4y ago
Why is Apple, the worlds richest and most valuable company, so bad at A.I? Everything, from awful keyboard predictions/autocorrect to poor computational photography. Is it because Tim Cook doesn’t provide enough funding to empower the A.I. divisions?
- haswell 4y ago
  I would challenge the assertion that they’re so bad at computational photography, over processing notwithstanding. They’ve been at the forefront of computational photography for some time, and issues notwithstanding, the iPhone cameras do spit out some excellent results at times. I just want more control of that processing pipeline. As for the overarching reasons for poor AI implementations in their other product lines, my pet theory is that Apple’s pace of progress is what you get when constrained by their stated privacy goals. I have little doubt that they’d be at the top of this game if they leveraged user data the way Google/Meta do.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    > I just want more control Then Apple is not the product for you.
    - haswell 4y ago
      Setting aside that Apple is not a product, tradeoffs are the name of the game regardless of vendor. I use apps like Halide to fill in the gaps in the stock camera app, and shoot with a standalone camera when I want full creative control. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a wishlist. The funny part is that the primary theme of my comment is about the control Apple gives you over your data - control you do not have when picking other products - and arguable a more important thing to allow me to control.
      - counttheforks 4y ago
        Sorry for not being born in an English speaking country. Would you prefer if I'd said "Then Apple's products are not for you"?
cardamomo 4y ago
I recently visited an art gallery, where during a tour of the facility the owner shared that he has art appraisal clients worldwide, with whom he works remotely. I asked, "So do you send a photographer to capture high quality images of the artwork?" He simply took out his phone and shared that smartphone images have gotten so good that it's the only equipment they need for the appraisal. Secretly, I was aghast that the professional appraisal of works worth tens of thousands of dollars might rely on a device that opaquely alters raw images. I didn't say anything, but I left hoping that not all art appraisal rested on post-processed smartphone images.
- photoGrant 4y ago
  Every camera and software pipeline for a photograph alters the raw images. You're just more aware of it. The iPhone can shoot raw and avoid these issues, it's how I use mine. The complaints people would have if the iPhone didn't post-process for the average consumer... Every camera phone I've ever used has horrible defaults for JPG processing -- avoid it by shooting raw and using something like Darkroom to finesse.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    > Every camera and software pipeline for a photograph alters the raw images. You're just more aware of it. No, you use a half decent professional camera and you can even opt for RAW format, the only processing your getting is the averaging algorithm for your exposure and ISO settings. Even without that all you are getting is some JPG compression, not half baked ML trying to move people's faces around, that's bonkers. Also pretty sure you are not getting RAW on any phone unless you are running some very custom OS/software, even then seems pretty pointless considering how noisy it's going to be.
    - photoGrant 4y ago
      Sorry, your no is a little confident -- and you're entirely wrong. A camera generating a RAW file for you is doing much more than just sending you the data from the binned pixels. Where you want to step in on that line determines how much control you have. It's the reason some still pick RED vs Alexa. Your RAW File & Colour Science aren't just up to you, they're carefully mastered with an ODT -- On Device Transform. Also, let's see how Nikon go in the near future with Snapdragon. These images are 90% shot on iPhone -- raw and edited in Darkroom on iOS. https://instagram.com/grant.pal https://instagram.com/grant.pal
ndneighbor 4y ago
Anecdotally, this seems to line up with the migration from iPhone 11 -> 12. I notice that in photos of anything including the sun, it would throw off the sensor/software stack. The even funnier/frustrating thing is that, because the HDR post-processing is done after when the photo is taken usually the end result is much different than what you see in the viewfinder.
cardamomo 4y ago
Related: "The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34290375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34290375
fastball 4y ago
That's not what MKBHD said in the video at all. He said that Apple has recently bumped the megapixels of their camera system, and that probably they haven't adjusted their post-processing pipeline to account for that. e.g. they need to tone it down a bit because now they actually do have more details/photons to work with. It seems like the author of this article is trying to use MKBHD's cachet to help champion his own point ("I don't like this AI post-processing much at all") which I doubt is one Marques would agree with, given that the phone which won his blind test is one that does just as much (if not more) post-processing than the iPhone, the Pixel 6A.
- tqi 4y ago
  Totally agree, nothing in the video supports the assertion that "Apple should give users the option to take natural photos." I would go as far as to say the video essentially says the idea that there is such thing as "natural photos" is not an objective thing, that ultimately every company has to make choices on lighting/contrast/wb/sharpness/etc, and "natural" is a matter of taste.
- twoodfin 4y ago
  Indeed. If you read between the lines, there are some hints that internal design / engineering issues + supply chain snafus left Apple with a mismatch between their new camera system and the SoC that supports it. To me, the clearest signal of this is what Halide can and can’t do with the new Pro sensor. In ideal lighting, the Halide-processed 48MP JPEG shots look insanely good, with strand-of-hair-level detail. It’s hard to imagine Apple wouldn’t have wanted to show off the ability for ordinary users to take these shots. But capture speed is several seconds, and if conditions aren’t ideal, even that isn’t enough to get a clean shot. Like MKBHD said about Google & the Pixel: Apple needs a generation or two for computation to be optimized for the capabilities of their new sensor.
karencarits 4y ago
I have the same problem with the Google pixel phone, my photos are post-processed to such a degree that I don't find them pleasing, especially portraits. Fortunately, I can choose to get the RAW files
- jnnnik 4y ago
  True - however I have found that even the RAW files aren't quite as raw as I'd like them to be, especially in terms of dynamic range. Best bet so far has been too use Open Camera if I feel like I'll want to be doing manual edits. Guess I'm a bit spoiled coming from a Sony Xperia with a camera that's great at being rather true to life, but the processing GCam does has ruined a whole bunch of photos for me.
ajsharp 4y ago
Yep. It auto-sharpens everything. Looks like trash.
humaniania 4y ago
If you care so much use ProRAW and process them yourself https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
- samjmck 4y ago
  It’s not because RAW exists that people aren’t allowed to criticise post-processing
- adzm 4y ago
  The article says ProRAW also does post processing though. Is that incorrect?
  - traspler 4y ago
    Afaik it „just“ debayers the raw sensor image because of the unusual pattern Apple uses. Related: https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/
  - foldr 4y ago
    It blends multiple shots for better dynamic range, but doesn’t do any heavy processing. If you want a pure single exposure RAW file you can get that using third party apps such as Halide.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  It used to be that iPhones made great, tasteful photos by default. That was why people bought them. If I wanted to spend time processing every snapshot I take with my phone, I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T and get pictures that are much better than anything the phone can do.
  - flobosg 4y ago
    > I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T That’s what I’m actually doing. My Pixel 3 died suddenly in November 2021. Since it was an emergency, I bought a cheap phone with a horrible camera, intending to upgrade it quickly and taking photos with my X100T in the meantime. A year later and I’m still using that setup. The camera is portable enough to take it everywhere, the processing presets are good enough for me, and I have the RAW files available just in case. I’m probably in the minority of people who would do something like this, but I’m pretty happy so far.
croes 4y ago
Simple rule: Every "smart" feature needs an off switch
svnpenn 4y ago
I work in IT. I manage our mobile devices, and I was shocked to recently find out that iPads (and I assume iPhones), have no option to choose the resolution of the resulting pictures. Why is Apple like this? I dont always need a 9 MB or whatever photo size, it would be nice to be able to take lower res images to save space.
- egman_ekki 4y ago
  But how would you run out of iCloud space, then?
tpmx 4y ago
Yes. I've been annoyed by this (Iphone 13 Pro Max, iOS 16). Way too much AI/machine learning/guessing.
nayroclade 4y ago
I discovered this issue just last month trying to take a good photo of my partner sat next to our Christmas tree. No matter what I did, the iPhone kept brightening the image and losing the darkened look I was going for. Even after disabling every "smart" feature I could, it still uniformly brightened everything and reduced the contrast. What was perhaps the most infuriating thing was that what I was seeing in the viewfinder preview looked great. I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.
- corobo 4y ago
  I had a right laugh with this one. Taking sweet shots in the moonlight, that sort of ethereal white blue glow over everything. Phone took 5 seconds or so to take each picture and it came out looking like it was just daylight. The only way you could tell I took it at night was the creation time of the file. The photo had things visible that I couldn't even see with my naked eye! Technologically impressive, sure. What I was taking a picture of? Not at all.
  - foldr 4y ago
    You can turn night mode off and drag the exposure slider down if you want a more atmospheric look.
    - corobo 4y ago
      Aye when I got back I googled why the hell the camera was doing superman night vision mode but the moment was lost. I'll know for future reference but there's been no more combos of frosty and full moon so far. Ah well. Wasn't an important picture or anything, just seemed neat. My phone encouraged me to enjoy the moment instead :)
  - volker48 4y ago
    I would assume you would turn it off if you knew so you could take the type of night photo you wanted, but this feature can be disabled https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211306 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211306.
muglug 4y ago
Apple are trying to please two separate groups: - people who use “proper” cameras and thus have expectations about what a photo should look like - people who want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene. The iPhone camera app is configured for the second group, as it probably should be, but as a member of the first group I’d love an opt out button (without having to shoot in raw).
- Espressosaurus 4y ago
  I don't think they're trying to please the first group at all. Iphone pictures come fried to hell, but since that's what people want, that's what we get.
- bredren 4y ago
  Apple provides some customization of the default photo processing via “photographic styles.” There are several presets which can be further tweaked but only using two controls: warmth and contrast. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph939c00e95/ios https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph939c00e95/io... That’s not too bad for the oob default camera app. I think it shows some awareness that how Apple is processing in the “standard” style may not match what everyone wants. IIUC, Halide and other 3rd party camera apps can largely deliver on further post processing customization of non-raw photos. Presumably these apps start with a RAW image in capture though and only pipeline it down to some save as some smaller, processed image.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  >want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene. // It seems more about how people wish they perceived the scene. Like, over-saturated and with "beautification" filters; there's a recognition that this is not how the image maker [the person] actually perceives things. It's a dream of reality, a fairy tale. Honestly, some Facebook photos ... all people on my Facebook are people I know in person, the filters some use are frankly ridiculous; like, I know what you actually look like and it's not a manga cartoon with massive eyes and completely smooth skin. /rant
- lamontcg 4y ago
  There's actually three separate categories of people: - People who just don't care and use the default photo app - People who are looking for more professional results and use an app like Halide - People who enjoy being angry on the internet more than taking pictures
CharlesW 4y ago
Note that on iPhone models XS, XR, 11, SE (2nd gen), and 12, you can turn off Smart HDR (the specific post-processing being criticized here). https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/adjust-hdr-camera-settings-iph2cafe2ebc/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/adjust-hdr-camera-set... Personally, I've never regretted just always shooting RAW.
- einichi 4y ago
  I always prefer shooting in highest bitrate and/or lossless, but I'd love to have the option to easily compress the files in-place later in Photos, without having to do some weird export and re-import dance.
  - non-nil 4y ago
    This may help: https://sangsara.net/2020/01/27/heifer-ios-shortcut-for-batch-converting-photos-to-heif-heic/ https://sangsara.net/2020/01/27/heifer-ios-shortcut-for-batc...
speeder 4y ago
Personally I don't care for phone photos, they always suck for me. I use my phone camera to do stuff like send photo of a document when needed, or take a photo of a package as proof it arrived intact or something like that. The reason is that phones for years been screwing the photos no matter what you do, at one point both me and my dad bought a Motorola phone where they promised it would have an "eco-system" of accessories, with existing ones including more advanced cameras, game controllers and so on. We went to a place full of beautiful animals, took a ton of photos, but when we checked his photos, all of them were horribly screwed, like everything was pink, or even literally sheared, I found out the reason is that when you use the viewfinder, the phone skips some processing, as soon you take the photo, it mandatorily does some processing, in Motorola's case with a very buggy chip that would inevitably ruin your photos. Poking in the photo files it looked like the algorithm was managing to misalign the file in memory before doing the calculations. Something similar to mixing endianess.
- grishka 4y ago
  This feels like it should be fixable with a firmware update, except this probably was at the time when firmware updates on phones required proprietary equipment and software more often than not.
- Tanoc 4y ago
  I learned a long time ago that software cannot overcome the faults of hardware when it comes to image capture. Only try to obscure those faults. Many phones have apertures that are too wide, sensors that are too small, and barrels that are far too shallow. The result is that without extremely long exposures, the image is too dark due to the aperture. Or that without a denoising algorithm like OptiX the image has so much noise that it's like looking at something made in Deluxe Paint on an Apple II. Or that due to the small sensor size a "4K" image is actually eight separate 2K images stitched together and downscaled to obscure artifacting and blurry edges. The truth is that you cannot put the necessary hardware into a smartphone to take DSLR quality pictures. Not with the current form factor, and especially not if you're trying to be cost effective. They've tried getting around this by selling add-ons that socket into the body, or using three, four, even five cameras, more than one light sensor, and all of this damaging software. But manufacturers are trying to polish a dirt floor. There will always be imperfections simply because the materials weren't made for that level of quality.
hnarayanan 4y ago
As someone who (so very excitedly) upgraded from an iPhone X to an iPhone 14 Pro, I was and still am so disappointed sometimes by how artificial the photos on the new phone looks. I thought it was just me, now I see why it's a more general thing.
- shwoopdiwoop 4y ago
  I’m in the same boat, also upgraded from the X to 14 Pro just like you. It’s infuriating the amount of alterations it performs without my asking. Also equally infuriating is how buggy the whole camera app has become. Changing lenses uncontrollably, weird glitchy artefacts outside of the main canvas, live photos stutter, the additional “step” it does when showing a photo after it loads which ruins the whole looks. It’s a fall from grace and I don’t understand how Apple thinks it’s acceptable to ship this.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > Changing lenses uncontrollably Settings > Camera > Macro Control There are some other cases (like if you have your finger over one camera it might switch) but that’s the really noticeable one. You’ll usually regret changing it though.
  - tjfl 4y ago
    I recently found and bought https://camerapixels.app/ https://camerapixels.app/ which I love and it seems (to a hobbyist photographer) to give me a lot of control. The exposure and focus bracketing is really neat and pairs up with Affinity Photo 2 (and I'm sure many others). It has replaced the default camera app for me.
  - hnarayanan 4y ago
    This f’n additional step it does kills me every time. Like the first iteration looks really good and then a fraction of a second later I know it’s going to change it and make it look much worse. :( (God those washed our blown out backgrounds.)
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
suddenexample 4y ago
I think it's kind of hilarious that tech "journalism" now encompasses a summary of someone else's YouTube video.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Political journalism does it with Twitter, so...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
magic_hamster 4y ago
We circled back from replacing everything with our smartphone to realizing that phone cameras don't perform as well as purpose built photography gear. This was always going to be the case because no matter how good your software is, phone cameras will never have the optics, and probably not the sensors too, of a DSLR camera. To cover this, manufacturers employ all sorts of clever post processing, which in turn make it so that your final image is different from the preview you're seeing (which is also heavily altered from what the sensor is seeing, probably). With new tools such as AI introduced into post processing, we are just seeing more artifacts in what has been a fairly extensive process already. You can only push the tiny sensors and lenses so far but every manufacturer still wants the public to perceive their latest release as if a lot of progress has been made. Perhaps people expect too much from their phone.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Ultimately it comes down to physics. Tiny sensors and lenses can only do so much.
  - snapetom 4y ago
    My argument to people that ask was always that there were things I do (specifically for fast action) that a phone will never be able to do due to physics. This article is just more ammo for me - you can't trust phone manufacturers not to manipulate. Today, Apple, but tomorrow Google, Samsung, etc. Even if you shoot RAW on a camera, there's no guarantee manufacturers won't mess with them somehow in the future.
    - azinman2 4y ago
      I don’t know what you meant by messing with a RAW image. At that point it’s baked, and the only that would change is the algorithms that handle the raw file, but everything this article is referring to is already done. Raw camera sensors in phones are terrible and extremely noisy because there are few photons actually making it inside - what’s largely improved over time is the processing of these files. Every company that ships a phone post processes the images otherwise they’d be unusable. I also guarantee that while this make quite things where one manufacturer is worse than another in a specific situation, there will be situations where the opposite is true as well. I wouldn’t call this “manipulation” however. It suggests some nefarious deed when instead it’s just about balancing color, skin tone, denoising, etc.
SoftTalker 4y ago
95% of phone users will never notice this stuff. They are the same people who were happy with point-n-shoot cameras 20 years ago. They just want focused, clear photos, and image-stabilized video that will maybe be shared on social media and then forgotten.
- dorkwood 4y ago
  In my experience, regular users not only notice, but they want more of this sort of thing. They don’t want their photos to be a reflection of reality. They want them to be better. I was at a family gathering a year or so ago, and my mother was taking pictures with her phone. I noticed that one she took of me and my two siblings was applying a heavy skin smoothing algorithm. I asked for her phone, and discovered that she had “skin smoothing” turned up to 100 on her Android. I took some comparison photos with it on and off and put it to the group. Everyone but me agreed that the heavily skin-smoothed photos were better. Even the men.
  - foldr 4y ago
    I don’t like the look of excessive skin smoothing either. At the same time, I do think that skin imperfections stand out much more in photos than they do when you’re looking at someone’s face in real life. So a tasteful about of smoothing can actually help to bring the experience of looking at a portrait a bit closer to the real experience of looking at someone’s face (where you are most likely not focusing on the zit on their nose, and the zit is not in sharp focus due to your eye’s small zone of high resolution vision).
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      At the same time, I do think that skin imperfections stand out much more in photos than they do when you’re looking at someone’s face in real life. So a tasteful about of smoothing can actually help to bring the experience of looking at a portrait a bit closer to the real experience of looking at someone’s face That's such a dangerous argument, though, because where does it end? Some audiophiles will tell you that they prefer the 'warm' harmonic distortion imparted by single-ended vacuum tube amplifiers. Psychoacoustic studies back that up to some extent. Does that mean that all first-party music players should apply a DSP transform that makes the output sound like it came through an 80-year-old Western Electric telephone repeater, without the option to allow the listener to turn it off unless they install a third-party app? Or even worse, and more to the point, does it mean that all first-party recording apps should work that way?
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Per the old is new again trend, anyone remember does disposable Fuji film cameras you used to take on vacation? Only had like 35 frames. You wouldn't dare take a photo every 5 minutes and run out of film on day one.
almog 4y ago
Not quite that issue and not specifically on iPhone but for me the uncanny valley of photos taken with modern smartphone is the fake bokeh feature.
eurekin 4y ago
To play devils advocate... How people imagine one can faithfully squeeze dynamic range of ~10 to 120k nits onto a typical 250 nit screen? How about a printed medium that reflects at most 100 nits in typical viewing conditions? I love the expression that professionals use, simply "tones are good". That's it, zero insight on to how it's done. Our eyes (or eye-brain combination) has also been found to do quite a lot of processing on it's own. For example white balancing (famous blue/gold dress story). Relative colour perception. Illusion of depth based on "cues", etc.
bsaul 4y ago
of course.. my iphone 12 pro takes worst pictures than my se2... post processing has been a disaster for years on iphone..
vouaobrasil 4y ago
This is what I hate about phone photography. It's not the fact that some processing has to be used to make up for the tiny sensor. It's not the fact that phones only have a limited set of focal lengths. It's that the development of the processing engine of phones is geared towards garnering likes on social media, and therefore, it is being taken in very grotesque directions.
CobaltFire 4y ago
Reposting my comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258744 as I think it's relevant to the sentiments here. I've addressed the technical side of this argument before, but I want to address a side that bother's me quite a bit but I don't see addressed often. Adding computational aspects into photography means that the images taken on these platforms will all have the same artistic interpretation at the level that that computation works. This is fine for snapshots, etc. Where it hurts is in artistic expression. It's almost as if all photos will go through an artistic AI after being taken. This process can, and likely will, increase the acceptability of those pictures that we use those cameras for most often. I truly think that computational photography will hurt the artistic expression and the feel of images taken outside of those situations. Right now, with a "real" camera shooting RAW, you keep as much detail of the image as possible and the photographer (artist) edits it to present what their mind's eye told them was there from that RAW data. With anything using computational photography the computer algorithm has already modified that data permanently, pushing and shaping it towards what that algorithm has determined is most pleasing for the largest number of people. I feel like this is a major win for most people who don't care about the art side of photography, but a major loss we aren't yet acknowledging for those who want to explore the artistic expression of the medium.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > It's almost as if all photos will go through an artistic AI after being taken. With all due respect, this is so far from the truth that it really takes away everything from the argument. How is computational photography any different than simply using other statistical methods to improve the signal-to-noise ratio? Is ISO and changing shutter speed any different? That also changes the actual thing.
  - l33tbro 4y ago
    You can't control the parameters of computational photography. Shutter and ISO are subtle and predictable variants that you know exactly what tweaking them will do. Computational photography is a black box.
h1fra 4y ago
On tiktok you will find various tutorial of how gen z is actually aware of this (without knowing it) and actively fighting the post processing. Especially the low-light picture post processing, where they show how they take a picture, quickly open the preview and screenshot the photo before the post processing is done. It is actually stagering how bad the photo looks after compared to without.
natemcintosh 4y ago
Having watched the MKBHD video in question (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88kd9tVwkH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88kd9tVwkH8), I believe he's actually saying that iPhones light people's faces up uniformly, even when light is coming distinctly from one side. Most of the time, it's a pleasing look, but sometimes it doesn't look all that great. Apple went for "it looks better on average". And I think that's exactly what most people want out of the default camera app on their iPhone. If you want more control, there are some really great full manual control apps out there, e.g. Halide
rgmerk 4y ago
It occurs to me that the future of smartphone photography, particularly on low-end phones, is likely to use the image as a prompt to run through a generative AI trained on professionally-taken photographs. So the end result of your smartphone photograph is an AI’s hallucination of what a pro photographer with pro equipment would have taken of the same scene. Manufacturers and some consumers will love it because it gets photos that look amazing from any old crappy sensor and from any terrible photographer.
- messe 4y ago
  > It occurs to me that the future of smartphone photography, particularly on low-end phones, is likely to use the image as a prompt to run through a generative AI trained on professionally-taken photographs. I really hate this idea, but at the same time, I kinda wanna try building it.
rubatuga 4y ago
I've been saying this for a while now. iPhone 8 seems to be one of the last of the iPhones without horrible post-processing. My iPhone 13 will regularly change the colour of my face to a deep orange in difficult lighting conditions, for that "HDR" look.
gfxgirl 4y ago
as others have pointed out, the defualt photos app is designed to do the best for the average user. If you want control of every feature and no post processing then download a different photo app like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/halide-mark-ii-pro-camera/id885697368 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/halide-mark-ii-pro-camera/id88... This to me is no different than the popular digital cameras vs the pro cameras. The built in app is targeting the masses. it can never make every choice perfectly and further it doesn't need to please everyone. That's the entire point of having apps
bilsbie 4y ago
I saw an amazing sunset a few weeks ago. The sky was deep blue with bright orange clouds. I wanted a picture but the iPhone blended the two colors :-(
ComputerGuru 4y ago
We’re at the point where if you want your pictures to come out the way you want, you need to use a regular “manual” camera just like if you want your car to drive the way you want you need to use stick-shift manual.
partiallypro 4y ago
They use the Pixel as a "good" example here, but as a Pixel 7 Pro owner, it also sometimes looks over processed.
acchow 4y ago
> The iPhone also exaggerates the sharpness of the photos compared to other smartphones I can't let this claim go. Every Android photo when taken next to an iPhone looks over-sharpened compared to the iPhone. Why is this article claiming the opposite?
bayouborne 4y ago
It's the Holga effect all over again. https://www.lomography.com/magazine/39913-holga-120gn-imperfection-is-beauty https://www.lomography.com/magazine/39913-holga-120gn-imperf...
aimor 4y ago
I took pictures the other day with my birthday cake in the dark with lit candles using an iPhone 13. All the otherwise nice pictures have ghostly green upside down candle flames floating in the middle of the shot. This isn't a new problem (I've since learned), and there's been attempted fixes (I guess they didn't work for me). But it's a great example of just one of the image quality problems that affect iPhone (and other phone) cameras. Phone cameras can't make it, for various reasons for various scenarios, so they fake it. Faking it has problems too, and now we're stuck between two bad options. I'm glad people are talking about the frustration here, hopefully we'll see powerful options for wielding post-processing tech. When I looked up my problem there were a lot of people saying "this happens on every camera/phone, it's a law of physics and there's no solution". https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252134950 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252134950 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/apple-may-finally-fix-the-green-flare-issue-on-iphone-photos-with-ios-15-1837827-2021-08-06 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/apple-may-fi...
- bcraven 4y ago
  To remove that 'lens flare' (technically an internal reflection) you'll actually need _more_ processing done to the photo. The only way to remove it fully would be with more expensive lens coatings and probably the removal of the outer lens cover.
  - aimor 4y ago
    Yes, that's what I meant but I think I wasn't clear about it. Phone's need all this processing to overcome limitations of phone cameras (such as the iPhone green reflections).

310 points by retskrad 4y ago

This is an accurate assessment IMHO. And the problem goes beyond contrast and shadow adjustments. On a few occasions, I've had recent iPhones blend the bodies of two people in a group photo into single, weirdly fused 'body blob'. Which is a shame, because iPhones have such amazingly good hardware. Apple, please fix this!

projektfu 4y ago
It really seems like machine learning is moving us into Nutri-matic territory. Avoid: big tech drink machine.
grugagag 4y ago
I wish this could be turned off altogether.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  There are/were apps which could turn it off.
- lucideer 4y ago
  It can be disabled in camera settings under "Smart HDR"
  - OGWhales 4y ago
    It seems you are not able to turn this off for the newer models, as I don’t see this settings on the iPhone 13 but I do see it on an iPhone 11.
  - tillinghast 4y ago
    I know that there is already a reply to this effect, but to repeat YOU CANNOT TURN OFF SMART HDR ON NEW IPHONES. Astonishingly stupid.

giuliomagnifico 4y ago

You can’t not post-process a photo, because you can’t use/view the RAW file captured by the sensor, or better, only the company who build the RAW/DAC conversion can issue the “codec” to open the RAW file. The issue is “how many interpolations/adjustments are these companies making when converting the RAW to an image file?” Too much according to the article.

kevingadd 4y ago
I think it's important to distinguish between signal processing techniques like debayering, auto-leveling etc and "we're using machine learning to identify humans in a picture and adjust their contrast". We can have the former without the latter, they're not all just "post-processing".
happytoexplain 4y ago
It seems like an oversimplification to imply all processing exists on a gradient with no significant lines we can draw between one type and another. E.g. content identification has a pretty clear qualitative difference from whatever "dumb" mappings do to get from RAW to values in some color space. One isn't just "more processing" and the other "less processing", colloquially.
ArtWomb 4y ago
Android Camera2 APIs allow RAW capture. But images still require a bit of magic to "de-bayerize" added color filters and noise ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing
shock-value 4y ago
It’s not just a matter of degree or quantity of post processing. Some techniques are qualitatively different than others.
The_Colonel 4y ago
This is the type of pedantry which is technically correct, but contributes nothing to the discussion.

KingLancelot 4y ago

[dead]

kevingadd 4y ago

I'm a little shocked that you can't turn "Smart HDR" and these other enhancements off. I would have assumed it was a toggle, so getting to the end of the article and seeing "Apple should let us turn it off" in reference to photo-ruining enhancements is wild to me - I've always considered Apple the brand you go to if you want a phone with a good camera but it sounds like that may not be true anymore if they stick to this?

Qluxzz 4y ago
For the smart HDR you can. It's under: Settings -> Camera -> Smart HDR There is also the ”Scene Detection”setting which I have turned off.
- mahmoudhossam 4y ago
  This is probably a "Pro" feature because I can't find it on my iPhone 13.
  - shock-value 4y ago
    I’m on a 14 Pro and cannot find these settings either.
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      I'm on 14 Pro also and I found the settings where they are supposed to be. Are you running iOS 14.3 or greater? Go to Settings, scroll to Camera, choose Format. There you can turn on Apple ProRAW. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
      - alistairSH 4y ago
        ProRAW still does some post-processing. And doesn’t enable the scene and smart HDR settings mentioned above.
  - Qluxzz 4y ago

goalieca 4y ago

I realize all sensors need some sort of filtering to clean the raw data up.. but ios goes way beyond acceptable.

retskrad 4y ago

Why is Apple, the worlds richest and most valuable company, so bad at A.I? Everything, from awful keyboard predictions/autocorrect to poor computational photography. Is it because Tim Cook doesn’t provide enough funding to empower the A.I. divisions?

haswell 4y ago
I would challenge the assertion that they’re so bad at computational photography, over processing notwithstanding. They’ve been at the forefront of computational photography for some time, and issues notwithstanding, the iPhone cameras do spit out some excellent results at times. I just want more control of that processing pipeline. As for the overarching reasons for poor AI implementations in their other product lines, my pet theory is that Apple’s pace of progress is what you get when constrained by their stated privacy goals. I have little doubt that they’d be at the top of this game if they leveraged user data the way Google/Meta do.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  > I just want more control Then Apple is not the product for you.
  - haswell 4y ago
    Setting aside that Apple is not a product, tradeoffs are the name of the game regardless of vendor. I use apps like Halide to fill in the gaps in the stock camera app, and shoot with a standalone camera when I want full creative control. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a wishlist. The funny part is that the primary theme of my comment is about the control Apple gives you over your data - control you do not have when picking other products - and arguable a more important thing to allow me to control.
    - counttheforks 4y ago
      Sorry for not being born in an English speaking country. Would you prefer if I'd said "Then Apple's products are not for you"?

cardamomo 4y ago

I recently visited an art gallery, where during a tour of the facility the owner shared that he has art appraisal clients worldwide, with whom he works remotely. I asked, "So do you send a photographer to capture high quality images of the artwork?" He simply took out his phone and shared that smartphone images have gotten so good that it's the only equipment they need for the appraisal. Secretly, I was aghast that the professional appraisal of works worth tens of thousands of dollars might rely on a device that opaquely alters raw images. I didn't say anything, but I left hoping that not all art appraisal rested on post-processed smartphone images.

photoGrant 4y ago
Every camera and software pipeline for a photograph alters the raw images. You're just more aware of it. The iPhone can shoot raw and avoid these issues, it's how I use mine. The complaints people would have if the iPhone didn't post-process for the average consumer... Every camera phone I've ever used has horrible defaults for JPG processing -- avoid it by shooting raw and using something like Darkroom to finesse.
- tomxor 4y ago
  > Every camera and software pipeline for a photograph alters the raw images. You're just more aware of it. No, you use a half decent professional camera and you can even opt for RAW format, the only processing your getting is the averaging algorithm for your exposure and ISO settings. Even without that all you are getting is some JPG compression, not half baked ML trying to move people's faces around, that's bonkers. Also pretty sure you are not getting RAW on any phone unless you are running some very custom OS/software, even then seems pretty pointless considering how noisy it's going to be.
  - photoGrant 4y ago
    Sorry, your no is a little confident -- and you're entirely wrong. A camera generating a RAW file for you is doing much more than just sending you the data from the binned pixels. Where you want to step in on that line determines how much control you have. It's the reason some still pick RED vs Alexa. Your RAW File & Colour Science aren't just up to you, they're carefully mastered with an ODT -- On Device Transform. Also, let's see how Nikon go in the near future with Snapdragon. These images are 90% shot on iPhone -- raw and edited in Darkroom on iOS. https://instagram.com/grant.pal https://instagram.com/grant.pal

ndneighbor 4y ago

Anecdotally, this seems to line up with the migration from iPhone 11 -> 12. I notice that in photos of anything including the sun, it would throw off the sensor/software stack. The even funnier/frustrating thing is that, because the HDR post-processing is done after when the photo is taken usually the end result is much different than what you see in the viewfinder.

cardamomo 4y ago

Related: "The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34290375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34290375

fastball 4y ago

That's not what MKBHD said in the video at all. He said that Apple has recently bumped the megapixels of their camera system, and that probably they haven't adjusted their post-processing pipeline to account for that. e.g. they need to tone it down a bit because now they actually do have more details/photons to work with. It seems like the author of this article is trying to use MKBHD's cachet to help champion his own point ("I don't like this AI post-processing much at all") which I doubt is one Marques would agree with, given that the phone which won his blind test is one that does just as much (if not more) post-processing than the iPhone, the Pixel 6A.

tqi 4y ago
Totally agree, nothing in the video supports the assertion that "Apple should give users the option to take natural photos." I would go as far as to say the video essentially says the idea that there is such thing as "natural photos" is not an objective thing, that ultimately every company has to make choices on lighting/contrast/wb/sharpness/etc, and "natural" is a matter of taste.
twoodfin 4y ago
Indeed. If you read between the lines, there are some hints that internal design / engineering issues + supply chain snafus left Apple with a mismatch between their new camera system and the SoC that supports it. To me, the clearest signal of this is what Halide can and can’t do with the new Pro sensor. In ideal lighting, the Halide-processed 48MP JPEG shots look insanely good, with strand-of-hair-level detail. It’s hard to imagine Apple wouldn’t have wanted to show off the ability for ordinary users to take these shots. But capture speed is several seconds, and if conditions aren’t ideal, even that isn’t enough to get a clean shot. Like MKBHD said about Google & the Pixel: Apple needs a generation or two for computation to be optimized for the capabilities of their new sensor.

karencarits 4y ago

I have the same problem with the Google pixel phone, my photos are post-processed to such a degree that I don't find them pleasing, especially portraits. Fortunately, I can choose to get the RAW files

jnnnik 4y ago
True - however I have found that even the RAW files aren't quite as raw as I'd like them to be, especially in terms of dynamic range. Best bet so far has been too use Open Camera if I feel like I'll want to be doing manual edits. Guess I'm a bit spoiled coming from a Sony Xperia with a camera that's great at being rather true to life, but the processing GCam does has ruined a whole bunch of photos for me.

ajsharp 4y ago

Yep. It auto-sharpens everything. Looks like trash.

humaniania 4y ago

If you care so much use ProRAW and process them yourself https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965

samjmck 4y ago
It’s not because RAW exists that people aren’t allowed to criticise post-processing
adzm 4y ago
The article says ProRAW also does post processing though. Is that incorrect?
- traspler 4y ago
  Afaik it „just“ debayers the raw sensor image because of the unusual pattern Apple uses. Related: https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/
- foldr 4y ago
  It blends multiple shots for better dynamic range, but doesn’t do any heavy processing. If you want a pure single exposure RAW file you can get that using third party apps such as Halide.
newaccount74 4y ago
It used to be that iPhones made great, tasteful photos by default. That was why people bought them. If I wanted to spend time processing every snapshot I take with my phone, I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T and get pictures that are much better than anything the phone can do.
- flobosg 4y ago
  > I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T That’s what I’m actually doing. My Pixel 3 died suddenly in November 2021. Since it was an emergency, I bought a cheap phone with a horrible camera, intending to upgrade it quickly and taking photos with my X100T in the meantime. A year later and I’m still using that setup. The camera is portable enough to take it everywhere, the processing presets are good enough for me, and I have the RAW files available just in case. I’m probably in the minority of people who would do something like this, but I’m pretty happy so far.

croes 4y ago

Simple rule: Every "smart" feature needs an off switch

svnpenn 4y ago

I work in IT. I manage our mobile devices, and I was shocked to recently find out that iPads (and I assume iPhones), have no option to choose the resolution of the resulting pictures. Why is Apple like this? I dont always need a 9 MB or whatever photo size, it would be nice to be able to take lower res images to save space.

egman_ekki 4y ago
But how would you run out of iCloud space, then?

tpmx 4y ago

Yes. I've been annoyed by this (Iphone 13 Pro Max, iOS 16). Way too much AI/machine learning/guessing.

nayroclade 4y ago

I discovered this issue just last month trying to take a good photo of my partner sat next to our Christmas tree. No matter what I did, the iPhone kept brightening the image and losing the darkened look I was going for. Even after disabling every "smart" feature I could, it still uniformly brightened everything and reduced the contrast. What was perhaps the most infuriating thing was that what I was seeing in the viewfinder preview looked great. I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.

corobo 4y ago
I had a right laugh with this one. Taking sweet shots in the moonlight, that sort of ethereal white blue glow over everything. Phone took 5 seconds or so to take each picture and it came out looking like it was just daylight. The only way you could tell I took it at night was the creation time of the file. The photo had things visible that I couldn't even see with my naked eye! Technologically impressive, sure. What I was taking a picture of? Not at all.
- foldr 4y ago
  You can turn night mode off and drag the exposure slider down if you want a more atmospheric look.
  - corobo 4y ago
    Aye when I got back I googled why the hell the camera was doing superman night vision mode but the moment was lost. I'll know for future reference but there's been no more combos of frosty and full moon so far. Ah well. Wasn't an important picture or anything, just seemed neat. My phone encouraged me to enjoy the moment instead :)
- volker48 4y ago
  I would assume you would turn it off if you knew so you could take the type of night photo you wanted, but this feature can be disabled https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211306 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211306.

muglug 4y ago

Apple are trying to please two separate groups: - people who use “proper” cameras and thus have expectations about what a photo should look like - people who want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene. The iPhone camera app is configured for the second group, as it probably should be, but as a member of the first group I’d love an opt out button (without having to shoot in raw).

Espressosaurus 4y ago
I don't think they're trying to please the first group at all. Iphone pictures come fried to hell, but since that's what people want, that's what we get.
bredren 4y ago
Apple provides some customization of the default photo processing via “photographic styles.” There are several presets which can be further tweaked but only using two controls: warmth and contrast. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph939c00e95/ios https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph939c00e95/io... That’s not too bad for the oob default camera app. I think it shows some awareness that how Apple is processing in the “standard” style may not match what everyone wants. IIUC, Halide and other 3rd party camera apps can largely deliver on further post processing customization of non-raw photos. Presumably these apps start with a RAW image in capture though and only pipeline it down to some save as some smaller, processed image.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
>want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene. // It seems more about how people wish they perceived the scene. Like, over-saturated and with "beautification" filters; there's a recognition that this is not how the image maker [the person] actually perceives things. It's a dream of reality, a fairy tale. Honestly, some Facebook photos ... all people on my Facebook are people I know in person, the filters some use are frankly ridiculous; like, I know what you actually look like and it's not a manga cartoon with massive eyes and completely smooth skin. /rant
lamontcg 4y ago
There's actually three separate categories of people: - People who just don't care and use the default photo app - People who are looking for more professional results and use an app like Halide - People who enjoy being angry on the internet more than taking pictures

CharlesW 4y ago

Note that on iPhone models XS, XR, 11, SE (2nd gen), and 12, you can turn off Smart HDR (the specific post-processing being criticized here). https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/adjust-hdr-camera-settings-iph2cafe2ebc/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/adjust-hdr-camera-set... Personally, I've never regretted just always shooting RAW.

einichi 4y ago
I always prefer shooting in highest bitrate and/or lossless, but I'd love to have the option to easily compress the files in-place later in Photos, without having to do some weird export and re-import dance.
- non-nil 4y ago
  This may help: https://sangsara.net/2020/01/27/heifer-ios-shortcut-for-batch-converting-photos-to-heif-heic/ https://sangsara.net/2020/01/27/heifer-ios-shortcut-for-batc...

speeder 4y ago

Personally I don't care for phone photos, they always suck for me. I use my phone camera to do stuff like send photo of a document when needed, or take a photo of a package as proof it arrived intact or something like that. The reason is that phones for years been screwing the photos no matter what you do, at one point both me and my dad bought a Motorola phone where they promised it would have an "eco-system" of accessories, with existing ones including more advanced cameras, game controllers and so on. We went to a place full of beautiful animals, took a ton of photos, but when we checked his photos, all of them were horribly screwed, like everything was pink, or even literally sheared, I found out the reason is that when you use the viewfinder, the phone skips some processing, as soon you take the photo, it mandatorily does some processing, in Motorola's case with a very buggy chip that would inevitably ruin your photos. Poking in the photo files it looked like the algorithm was managing to misalign the file in memory before doing the calculations. Something similar to mixing endianess.

grishka 4y ago
This feels like it should be fixable with a firmware update, except this probably was at the time when firmware updates on phones required proprietary equipment and software more often than not.
Tanoc 4y ago
I learned a long time ago that software cannot overcome the faults of hardware when it comes to image capture. Only try to obscure those faults. Many phones have apertures that are too wide, sensors that are too small, and barrels that are far too shallow. The result is that without extremely long exposures, the image is too dark due to the aperture. Or that without a denoising algorithm like OptiX the image has so much noise that it's like looking at something made in Deluxe Paint on an Apple II. Or that due to the small sensor size a "4K" image is actually eight separate 2K images stitched together and downscaled to obscure artifacting and blurry edges. The truth is that you cannot put the necessary hardware into a smartphone to take DSLR quality pictures. Not with the current form factor, and especially not if you're trying to be cost effective. They've tried getting around this by selling add-ons that socket into the body, or using three, four, even five cameras, more than one light sensor, and all of this damaging software. But manufacturers are trying to polish a dirt floor. There will always be imperfections simply because the materials weren't made for that level of quality.

hnarayanan 4y ago

As someone who (so very excitedly) upgraded from an iPhone X to an iPhone 14 Pro, I was and still am so disappointed sometimes by how artificial the photos on the new phone looks. I thought it was just me, now I see why it's a more general thing.

shwoopdiwoop 4y ago
I’m in the same boat, also upgraded from the X to 14 Pro just like you. It’s infuriating the amount of alterations it performs without my asking. Also equally infuriating is how buggy the whole camera app has become. Changing lenses uncontrollably, weird glitchy artefacts outside of the main canvas, live photos stutter, the additional “step” it does when showing a photo after it loads which ruins the whole looks. It’s a fall from grace and I don’t understand how Apple thinks it’s acceptable to ship this.
- astrange 4y ago
  > Changing lenses uncontrollably Settings > Camera > Macro Control There are some other cases (like if you have your finger over one camera it might switch) but that’s the really noticeable one. You’ll usually regret changing it though.
- tjfl 4y ago
  I recently found and bought https://camerapixels.app/ https://camerapixels.app/ which I love and it seems (to a hobbyist photographer) to give me a lot of control. The exposure and focus bracketing is really neat and pairs up with Affinity Photo 2 (and I'm sure many others). It has replaced the default camera app for me.
- hnarayanan 4y ago
  This f’n additional step it does kills me every time. Like the first iteration looks really good and then a fraction of a second later I know it’s going to change it and make it look much worse. :( (God those washed our blown out backgrounds.)
mustacheemperor 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

suddenexample 4y ago

I think it's kind of hilarious that tech "journalism" now encompasses a summary of someone else's YouTube video.

hef19898 4y ago
Political journalism does it with Twitter, so...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

magic_hamster 4y ago

We circled back from replacing everything with our smartphone to realizing that phone cameras don't perform as well as purpose built photography gear. This was always going to be the case because no matter how good your software is, phone cameras will never have the optics, and probably not the sensors too, of a DSLR camera. To cover this, manufacturers employ all sorts of clever post processing, which in turn make it so that your final image is different from the preview you're seeing (which is also heavily altered from what the sensor is seeing, probably). With new tools such as AI introduced into post processing, we are just seeing more artifacts in what has been a fairly extensive process already. You can only push the tiny sensors and lenses so far but every manufacturer still wants the public to perceive their latest release as if a lot of progress has been made. Perhaps people expect too much from their phone.

azinman2 4y ago
Ultimately it comes down to physics. Tiny sensors and lenses can only do so much.
- snapetom 4y ago
  My argument to people that ask was always that there were things I do (specifically for fast action) that a phone will never be able to do due to physics. This article is just more ammo for me - you can't trust phone manufacturers not to manipulate. Today, Apple, but tomorrow Google, Samsung, etc. Even if you shoot RAW on a camera, there's no guarantee manufacturers won't mess with them somehow in the future.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    I don’t know what you meant by messing with a RAW image. At that point it’s baked, and the only that would change is the algorithms that handle the raw file, but everything this article is referring to is already done. Raw camera sensors in phones are terrible and extremely noisy because there are few photons actually making it inside - what’s largely improved over time is the processing of these files. Every company that ships a phone post processes the images otherwise they’d be unusable. I also guarantee that while this make quite things where one manufacturer is worse than another in a specific situation, there will be situations where the opposite is true as well. I wouldn’t call this “manipulation” however. It suggests some nefarious deed when instead it’s just about balancing color, skin tone, denoising, etc.

SoftTalker 4y ago

95% of phone users will never notice this stuff. They are the same people who were happy with point-n-shoot cameras 20 years ago. They just want focused, clear photos, and image-stabilized video that will maybe be shared on social media and then forgotten.

dorkwood 4y ago
In my experience, regular users not only notice, but they want more of this sort of thing. They don’t want their photos to be a reflection of reality. They want them to be better. I was at a family gathering a year or so ago, and my mother was taking pictures with her phone. I noticed that one she took of me and my two siblings was applying a heavy skin smoothing algorithm. I asked for her phone, and discovered that she had “skin smoothing” turned up to 100 on her Android. I took some comparison photos with it on and off and put it to the group. Everyone but me agreed that the heavily skin-smoothed photos were better. Even the men.
- foldr 4y ago
  I don’t like the look of excessive skin smoothing either. At the same time, I do think that skin imperfections stand out much more in photos than they do when you’re looking at someone’s face in real life. So a tasteful about of smoothing can actually help to bring the experience of looking at a portrait a bit closer to the real experience of looking at someone’s face (where you are most likely not focusing on the zit on their nose, and the zit is not in sharp focus due to your eye’s small zone of high resolution vision).
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    At the same time, I do think that skin imperfections stand out much more in photos than they do when you’re looking at someone’s face in real life. So a tasteful about of smoothing can actually help to bring the experience of looking at a portrait a bit closer to the real experience of looking at someone’s face That's such a dangerous argument, though, because where does it end? Some audiophiles will tell you that they prefer the 'warm' harmonic distortion imparted by single-ended vacuum tube amplifiers. Psychoacoustic studies back that up to some extent. Does that mean that all first-party music players should apply a DSP transform that makes the output sound like it came through an 80-year-old Western Electric telephone repeater, without the option to allow the listener to turn it off unless they install a third-party app? Or even worse, and more to the point, does it mean that all first-party recording apps should work that way?

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

Per the old is new again trend, anyone remember does disposable Fuji film cameras you used to take on vacation? Only had like 35 frames. You wouldn't dare take a photo every 5 minutes and run out of film on day one.

almog 4y ago

Not quite that issue and not specifically on iPhone but for me the uncanny valley of photos taken with modern smartphone is the fake bokeh feature.

eurekin 4y ago

To play devils advocate... How people imagine one can faithfully squeeze dynamic range of ~10 to 120k nits onto a typical 250 nit screen? How about a printed medium that reflects at most 100 nits in typical viewing conditions? I love the expression that professionals use, simply "tones are good". That's it, zero insight on to how it's done. Our eyes (or eye-brain combination) has also been found to do quite a lot of processing on it's own. For example white balancing (famous blue/gold dress story). Relative colour perception. Illusion of depth based on "cues", etc.

bsaul 4y ago

of course.. my iphone 12 pro takes worst pictures than my se2... post processing has been a disaster for years on iphone..

vouaobrasil 4y ago

This is what I hate about phone photography. It's not the fact that some processing has to be used to make up for the tiny sensor. It's not the fact that phones only have a limited set of focal lengths. It's that the development of the processing engine of phones is geared towards garnering likes on social media, and therefore, it is being taken in very grotesque directions.

CobaltFire 4y ago

Reposting my comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258744 as I think it's relevant to the sentiments here. I've addressed the technical side of this argument before, but I want to address a side that bother's me quite a bit but I don't see addressed often. Adding computational aspects into photography means that the images taken on these platforms will all have the same artistic interpretation at the level that that computation works. This is fine for snapshots, etc. Where it hurts is in artistic expression. It's almost as if all photos will go through an artistic AI after being taken. This process can, and likely will, increase the acceptability of those pictures that we use those cameras for most often. I truly think that computational photography will hurt the artistic expression and the feel of images taken outside of those situations. Right now, with a "real" camera shooting RAW, you keep as much detail of the image as possible and the photographer (artist) edits it to present what their mind's eye told them was there from that RAW data. With anything using computational photography the computer algorithm has already modified that data permanently, pushing and shaping it towards what that algorithm has determined is most pleasing for the largest number of people. I feel like this is a major win for most people who don't care about the art side of photography, but a major loss we aren't yet acknowledging for those who want to explore the artistic expression of the medium.

kaba0 4y ago
> It's almost as if all photos will go through an artistic AI after being taken. With all due respect, this is so far from the truth that it really takes away everything from the argument. How is computational photography any different than simply using other statistical methods to improve the signal-to-noise ratio? Is ISO and changing shutter speed any different? That also changes the actual thing.
- l33tbro 4y ago
  You can't control the parameters of computational photography. Shutter and ISO are subtle and predictable variants that you know exactly what tweaking them will do. Computational photography is a black box.

h1fra 4y ago

On tiktok you will find various tutorial of how gen z is actually aware of this (without knowing it) and actively fighting the post processing. Especially the low-light picture post processing, where they show how they take a picture, quickly open the preview and screenshot the photo before the post processing is done. It is actually stagering how bad the photo looks after compared to without.

natemcintosh 4y ago

Having watched the MKBHD video in question (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88kd9tVwkH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88kd9tVwkH8), I believe he's actually saying that iPhones light people's faces up uniformly, even when light is coming distinctly from one side. Most of the time, it's a pleasing look, but sometimes it doesn't look all that great. Apple went for "it looks better on average". And I think that's exactly what most people want out of the default camera app on their iPhone. If you want more control, there are some really great full manual control apps out there, e.g. Halide

rgmerk 4y ago

It occurs to me that the future of smartphone photography, particularly on low-end phones, is likely to use the image as a prompt to run through a generative AI trained on professionally-taken photographs. So the end result of your smartphone photograph is an AI’s hallucination of what a pro photographer with pro equipment would have taken of the same scene. Manufacturers and some consumers will love it because it gets photos that look amazing from any old crappy sensor and from any terrible photographer.

messe 4y ago
> It occurs to me that the future of smartphone photography, particularly on low-end phones, is likely to use the image as a prompt to run through a generative AI trained on professionally-taken photographs. I really hate this idea, but at the same time, I kinda wanna try building it.

rubatuga 4y ago

I've been saying this for a while now. iPhone 8 seems to be one of the last of the iPhones without horrible post-processing. My iPhone 13 will regularly change the colour of my face to a deep orange in difficult lighting conditions, for that "HDR" look.

gfxgirl 4y ago

as others have pointed out, the defualt photos app is designed to do the best for the average user. If you want control of every feature and no post processing then download a different photo app like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/halide-mark-ii-pro-camera/id885697368 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/halide-mark-ii-pro-camera/id88... This to me is no different than the popular digital cameras vs the pro cameras. The built in app is targeting the masses. it can never make every choice perfectly and further it doesn't need to please everyone. That's the entire point of having apps

bilsbie 4y ago

I saw an amazing sunset a few weeks ago. The sky was deep blue with bright orange clouds. I wanted a picture but the iPhone blended the two colors :-(

ComputerGuru 4y ago

We’re at the point where if you want your pictures to come out the way you want, you need to use a regular “manual” camera just like if you want your car to drive the way you want you need to use stick-shift manual.

partiallypro 4y ago

They use the Pixel as a "good" example here, but as a Pixel 7 Pro owner, it also sometimes looks over processed.

acchow 4y ago

> The iPhone also exaggerates the sharpness of the photos compared to other smartphones I can't let this claim go. Every Android photo when taken next to an iPhone looks over-sharpened compared to the iPhone. Why is this article claiming the opposite?

bayouborne 4y ago

It's the Holga effect all over again. https://www.lomography.com/magazine/39913-holga-120gn-imperfection-is-beauty https://www.lomography.com/magazine/39913-holga-120gn-imperf...

aimor 4y ago

I took pictures the other day with my birthday cake in the dark with lit candles using an iPhone 13. All the otherwise nice pictures have ghostly green upside down candle flames floating in the middle of the shot. This isn't a new problem (I've since learned), and there's been attempted fixes (I guess they didn't work for me). But it's a great example of just one of the image quality problems that affect iPhone (and other phone) cameras. Phone cameras can't make it, for various reasons for various scenarios, so they fake it. Faking it has problems too, and now we're stuck between two bad options. I'm glad people are talking about the frustration here, hopefully we'll see powerful options for wielding post-processing tech. When I looked up my problem there were a lot of people saying "this happens on every camera/phone, it's a law of physics and there's no solution". https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252134950 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252134950 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/apple-may-finally-fix-the-green-flare-issue-on-iphone-photos-with-ios-15-1837827-2021-08-06 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/apple-may-fi...

bcraven 4y ago
To remove that 'lens flare' (technically an internal reflection) you'll actually need _more_ processing done to the photo. The only way to remove it fully would be with more expensive lens coatings and probably the removal of the outer lens cover.
- aimor 4y ago
  Yes, that's what I meant but I think I wasn't clear about it. Phone's need all this processing to overcome limitations of phone cameras (such as the iPhone green reflections).