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When I stop to think about it I feel like photography these days in such a weird state. We started with analogue photography that literally captured the incomin

When I stop to think about it I feel like photography these days in such a weird state. We started with analogue photography that literally captured the incoming light, today we’re taking multiple photos and merging the results together… before long we’re going to be at the point where your camera software recognises you’re stood in front of, say, the White House, goes online, grabs stock photography of the White House and merges it into the shot you took. I don’t know at what point it stops being a photo any more. In many ways I suppose it doesn’t really matter but I wonder if I’ll be looking at my kids graduation photos and seeing a smile an AI has approximated my child probably had in the moment based on previous photos and stock photography of graduations.

hackernewds 4y ago
[flagged]
- ambicapter 4y ago
  The "making up leaves" story was incorrect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750660
- tough 4y ago
  Samsung moon debacle was a thing using AI for upscaling shots
  - MBCook 4y ago
    No it wasn’t. It recognized the moon and replaced the real moon taken by the camera with a stored stock photo pasted over it. There was no “upscaling” involved.
    - tough 4y ago
      Well sorry this is what I meant with AI upscaling vs old regular upscaling which doesn't make stuff up. It's like when Ryan Gosling faces started being hallucinated into generated images because of overfitting of his image in the training data set
- overjoyed4298 4y ago
  Ok maybe I'm naive here but I always thought they found a way to let the camera sensor take in more light over a period of time and render that way. I didn't think they just added a faint milky way. Do you have a source for this?
  - melagonster 4y ago
    this almost the advertising said. apple always said that new iPhone have better camera. did them lie to us? :(
  - alephxyz 4y ago
    You're right and OC is wrong. My Nexus 5 from 2013 could take decent single exposure night sky photos (after post processing the RAW images). The Google camera now just automates most of the manual work (adjusting exposure/sensitivity, stabilizing, aligning and stacking multiple images, post processing) see https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/11/astrophotography-with-night-sight-on.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/11/astrophotography-with-nigh... I'm sure the iPhone is just as capable
- burkaman 4y ago
  > The iphone will add a faint milky way for long exposure shots that are clearly fake. Where have you seen this? I can't find anything about it online, and I imagine it would be even more egregious than the Samsung fake moon, probably putting it in the wrong place or orientation in the sky sometimes.
- sgerenser 4y ago
  There’s no iPhone that adds a fake Milky Way to night sky shots. Did you just make that up or did you read it somewhere?
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence. I’m not familiar with Google here, but Apple is quite loquacious in its descriptions of how it approaches computational photography, with extensive use of bracketing and sensor fusion – and nothing at all about generative embellishments. Not even saying it’s impossible, but I would be absolutely shocked if Apple were actually using anything outside a lot of bracketed exposures and optically-modeled diffs between multiple sensors. More than anything, it would be distinctly off-brand.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    This is the Apple that automatically corrects what you're looking at in FaceTime calls so it looks like you're looking at the camera instead of what you're actually looking at? It's that Apple that you think it would be off brand if they were to change your nighttime photos to look better, even if what they're depicting isn't actually real? That Apple? I don't they're doing a fake milky way, but I don't think that they'd be above it if they could come up with a reason to. https://www.fastcompany.com/90372724/welcome-to-post-reality-apple-will-now-fake-your-eye-contact-in-facetime https://www.fastcompany.com/90372724/welcome-to-post-reality...
    - happytoexplain 4y ago
      This is the worst, most insidious poison of them all. The very foundation of all propaganda. "X did Y" And when it turns out they didn't: "It doesn't matter because they WOULD" (Disclaimer: I have no idea if Apple does or doesn't do the milky way thing)
      - zamnos 4y ago
        Mortenjorck went back and softened their wording but when I originally responded, they claimed that Apple could never do anything remotely approaching that. I haven't edited my response, but this isn't a case of me claiming X did Y! but it turns out they didn't, and then me saying but they would have! I'm saying X did Y, which they did, and it means that Z is at least on the table, where X = Apple, Y = FaceTime Eye Contact feature, Z = Milky Way enhancement.
Aaron2222 4y ago
> I don’t know at what point it stops being a photo any more. Personally, I think it's at the point that you start using AI/ML for anything other than the parameters involved in capturing the raw image (focus, shutter speed, aperture, etc) and the parameters of RAW processing/the sorts of editing that's allowed in a typical photography competition (so things like exposure, white balance, colour adjustment, etc).
- weaksauce 4y ago
  I'll even allow it to change the exposure/balance/adjustment in parts of the picture separately and it's still a photo. Once you cross that Rubicon though I think it's a different thing.
- epgui 4y ago
  I think the analysis can get a bit more blurry if you think about the types of *local* adjustments that are typically applied to great taste by professionals… Things like sky/foreground/background adjustments, spot adjustments, dodge and burn, etc.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    I feel like it’s a pretty good definition to start with but I’d extend it a little further to encompass the techniques you mentioned and also add things like HDR bracketing, and astrophotographer techniques like dark frames and photo stacking. Essentially I think as long as the photo is built up from data captured by the camera sensor(s) and no additional data is “added” to the photo, no upscaling, no substitution, no textural or morphological manipulation of objects in the frame, then it’s still a photo even with sophisticated AI processing. But the moment you upscale, airbrush, or morph anything… not a photograph.
- lmm 4y ago
  That's an arbitrary path-dependent place to put the line. Realistically if you spend infinite time and effort doing the kind of dodge/burn that every photography competition allows then you can make the photo look like anything you want.
grishka 4y ago
> I don’t know at what point it stops being a photo any more. When any form of object recognition is involved.
- Aaron2222 4y ago
  Wouldn't that preclude using facial recognition for setting focus and exposure though (which has been a thing for years)?
  - grishka 4y ago
    Using facial recognition for focus is ok since the camera still faithfully captures the light entering the lens, but recognizing things in the frame to treat different parts of the image differently in post-processing is a big no-no.
    - astrange 4y ago
      If you don't let it do that, the picture will often be annoyingly dark in the foreground / blown out in the background, because cameras' dynamic range isn't anywhere near your eyes. This is called local tone mapping/dynamic range optimizer. Sharpening also benefits from object segmentation because you don't want the effects to bleed over into different areas, you get halos that way.
      - grishka 4y ago
        Local tone mapping works just wine without object recognition. It's a dumb algorithm that goes over the image and normalizes pixel values relative to their surroundings to cram the higher dynamic range of the image into the lower dynamic range of the screen. Phone camera apps had it for at least 10 years, and people did it manually with exposure bracketing ever since digital cameras became mainstream.
        astrange 4y ago
        Yes, but any local area algorithm benefits from segmentation because it automatically becomes "smarter". Upscaling is the most obvious one - the upscaled version of a blue object on a red background is not the average of the two colors - but it applies all over the place. I don't know of any implementations of this, but an interesting one would be auto white balance. It's typically done as a global slider, but if the image has multiple light sources this doesn't always look good. And actual straight-up "knowing what's in the scene" AI can help too; people shouldn't look sickly in your photos just because they're under a low-CRI yellow light. You probably want to know what color skin tones actually are.
scrollaway 4y ago
> before long we’re going to be at the point where your camera software recognises you’re stood in front of, say, the White House, goes online, grabs stock photography of the White House and merges it into the shot you took. We’re there. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds-fake-detail-to-moon-photos-via-reference-photos/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds...
tho2i34u23oi434 4y ago
> before long we’re going to be at the point where your camera software recognises you’re stood in front of, say, the White House, goes online, grabs stock photography of the White House and merges it into the shot you took. You realize this is not too different from what the SuperResolution networks are doing, right ?
xwdv 4y ago
When you are no longer graphing the impacts of photons on a sensor, you are no longer doing photography.
rodgerd 4y ago
> I don’t know at what point it stops being a photo any more. Considering that Ansell Adams would spend weeks reworking his negatives to get the perfect print I think that you'll find that horse bolted a very long time ago.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Difference being, he worked in his negatives, he did add some shit to them he found on the internet or some database.
stevekemp 4y ago
Even when people were using analog cameras they would edit their negatives before making prints. It was slower and harder to do than with digital editing, but it was absolutely common-place and normal. Here's a good overview of some of the old processes and timelines: https://fixthephoto.com/blog/retouch-tips/history-of-photo-retouching.html https://fixthephoto.com/blog/retouch-tips/history-of-photo-r...
- userbinator 4y ago
  but it was absolutely common-place and normal. It was slower and harder to do than with digital editing, but it was absolutely common-place and normal. As someone who grew up in that era, I can say all the family photos have not been edited, nor would the majority of people who owned a camera back then spend the time or money to do so. Yes, commercial photo editing services have always existed, and of course you'd expect things like magazine covers and other prominent, publicly published photography to be heavily edited, but they didn't automatically do it to everyone's photos for free; and that's the huge difference between then and now.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > As someone who grew up in that era, I can say all the family photos have not been edited, nor would the majority of people who owned a camera back then spend the time or money to do so. Whoever developed your photos would've adjusted the brightness and white balance based on what looked right to them if nothing else. Send the same negatives into two shops and you'd get different-looking pictures back.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Editing -> retouching.
      - lmm 4y ago
        What's the difference?
pdntspa 4y ago
It's just stupid that we gum up relatively simple pipelines of input -> output in favor of these longer and more complicated bullshit... and for what? So unpracticed and uneducated stupi...er, laypeople can feel better about themselves? So companies can cheap out on hardware or optics investments? So some advertising jackass can sell a few more smartphones by manipulating peoples' emotions? There is so little desire to capture the world as it is. We humans have to insert our bullshit desires and artifice into everything. And winner-takes-all capitalism means the majority market of morons is literally the only market that can be serviced cost-effectively (meaning... at all) God I hate people so much. So much potential... wasted.
- astrange 4y ago
  Well I don't think your approach of telling everyone they're stupid is going to sell them a camera…
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    Who said that I am trying to sell cameras? I want more investment in better optics and hardware. Not AI hallucinations. Do you think some random internet comment is going to change anything? Even if it is worded in the best, most persuasive manner possible? "Hmm, that pdntspa guy on Hacker News is right goshdarnit!", says the Megabux CEO as he jumps out of his chair. "Sheila, get me the engineering director on the line. Tell him to cancel all our AI products!" Yeah.... not going to happen. Hence, a rant.
lizard 4y ago
On one hand, I'm not a photographer, I don't want to be a photographer, and I don't want to spend 30 minutes trying to get everything lined up and everyone looking in the right direction and not blinking or sneezing or whatever. I just want a decent picture that captures people being happy doing a thing. On the other hand, maybe the world needs more reminders that most people are pretty mundane, hardly able to get more than 2 people looking in the same direction for long enough to snap a shutter, just trying to get through life.
- KeplerBoy 4y ago
  do you really need perfect photos? Does it add anything to the memory? imho there's value in capturing that someone had a weird expression on their face or blinked.
  - corgihamlet 4y ago
    Yes, for my personal photos. But you have to remember that people aren't taking photos for their own collection, they are taking photos to shine on social media. Just look on Instagram. How could you compete with all those fit, beautiful and healthy people, if you don't heavily edit your photos. (To be totally honest, I think that some beauty filters aren't as bad, because most people don't know how to hold their camera and tend to distort their face with closeup lenses.)
  - lizard 4y ago
    Yes, it does add something. To be vain about it, there's enough drama and messiness in day-to-day life. I don't want to be reminded of that when I look back; I want to see the good parts, that it was all worthwhile. But, more practically even, photographs capture history. You may not be thinking about it when you're just taking a personal photo, but a fair bit of history does come from personal collections. Especially less significant figures or events where those personal artifacts are the only things that even exist. Its difficult to gain much useful information when the images are blurry, distorted, or covered in shadow. You may appreciate the funny face, but can a historian or a great-great-grandchild confirm the person in the photo when they are covering half their face in a sneeze? That said, the pendulum definitely swings in the other direction, too. Despite all the information we gather these days, there may be less meaningful history for the next several decades because you simply can't trust any of it is actually genuine.
midoridensha 4y ago
I think the line can be drawn at adding information that wasn't originally available to the camera at that time. So HDR photography (taking multiple photos milliseconds apart and merging them) is fine, because it's just using information that was available while you were standing there taking the shot. I don't see how this is really any different from a long-exposure shot in fact. Using a polarizing filter to enhance the sky color and see the fish underwater is fine, because it's just using information available that time (and in fact, selectively ignoring some information, namely light polarized the "wrong" way). Editing light levels differently in different parts of the frame is OK too because that light is still coming to the camera, you're just processing it differently. Going online to grab ultra high-res stock photography of the Moon to enhance your shaky-cam photo is not OK, because that's adding information that the camera didn't have available to it (and worse, it's quite possible the downloaded information is inaccurate). Going back to your White House example, what happens if someone takes a photo of the White House lawn because they want a photo showing the new trees or flowers that were planted or just bloomed. But Samsung downloads some stock photo to "enhance" the photo, and of course this stock photo was taken before the plantings, or at some other time of the year when the flowers weren't blooming. Now this poor sucker has a completely invalid photo showing something that didn't exist when he took his trip to DC to photograph the White House lawn, and probably won't notice until he looks through his vacation photos on a large monitor.

hackernewds 4y ago

[flagged]

ambicapter 4y ago
The "making up leaves" story was incorrect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750660
tough 4y ago
Samsung moon debacle was a thing using AI for upscaling shots
- MBCook 4y ago
  No it wasn’t. It recognized the moon and replaced the real moon taken by the camera with a stored stock photo pasted over it. There was no “upscaling” involved.
  - tough 4y ago
    Well sorry this is what I meant with AI upscaling vs old regular upscaling which doesn't make stuff up. It's like when Ryan Gosling faces started being hallucinated into generated images because of overfitting of his image in the training data set
overjoyed4298 4y ago
Ok maybe I'm naive here but I always thought they found a way to let the camera sensor take in more light over a period of time and render that way. I didn't think they just added a faint milky way. Do you have a source for this?
- melagonster 4y ago
  this almost the advertising said. apple always said that new iPhone have better camera. did them lie to us? :(
- alephxyz 4y ago
  You're right and OC is wrong. My Nexus 5 from 2013 could take decent single exposure night sky photos (after post processing the RAW images). The Google camera now just automates most of the manual work (adjusting exposure/sensitivity, stabilizing, aligning and stacking multiple images, post processing) see https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/11/astrophotography-with-night-sight-on.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/11/astrophotography-with-nigh... I'm sure the iPhone is just as capable
burkaman 4y ago
> The iphone will add a faint milky way for long exposure shots that are clearly fake. Where have you seen this? I can't find anything about it online, and I imagine it would be even more egregious than the Samsung fake moon, probably putting it in the wrong place or orientation in the sky sometimes.
sgerenser 4y ago
There’s no iPhone that adds a fake Milky Way to night sky shots. Did you just make that up or did you read it somewhere?
mortenjorck 4y ago
Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence. I’m not familiar with Google here, but Apple is quite loquacious in its descriptions of how it approaches computational photography, with extensive use of bracketing and sensor fusion – and nothing at all about generative embellishments. Not even saying it’s impossible, but I would be absolutely shocked if Apple were actually using anything outside a lot of bracketed exposures and optically-modeled diffs between multiple sensors. More than anything, it would be distinctly off-brand.
- zamnos 4y ago
  This is the Apple that automatically corrects what you're looking at in FaceTime calls so it looks like you're looking at the camera instead of what you're actually looking at? It's that Apple that you think it would be off brand if they were to change your nighttime photos to look better, even if what they're depicting isn't actually real? That Apple? I don't they're doing a fake milky way, but I don't think that they'd be above it if they could come up with a reason to. https://www.fastcompany.com/90372724/welcome-to-post-reality-apple-will-now-fake-your-eye-contact-in-facetime https://www.fastcompany.com/90372724/welcome-to-post-reality...
  - happytoexplain 4y ago
    This is the worst, most insidious poison of them all. The very foundation of all propaganda. "X did Y" And when it turns out they didn't: "It doesn't matter because they WOULD" (Disclaimer: I have no idea if Apple does or doesn't do the milky way thing)
    - zamnos 4y ago
      Mortenjorck went back and softened their wording but when I originally responded, they claimed that Apple could never do anything remotely approaching that. I haven't edited my response, but this isn't a case of me claiming X did Y! but it turns out they didn't, and then me saying but they would have! I'm saying X did Y, which they did, and it means that Z is at least on the table, where X = Apple, Y = FaceTime Eye Contact feature, Z = Milky Way enhancement.

Aaron2222 4y ago

> I don’t know at what point it stops being a photo any more. Personally, I think it's at the point that you start using AI/ML for anything other than the parameters involved in capturing the raw image (focus, shutter speed, aperture, etc) and the parameters of RAW processing/the sorts of editing that's allowed in a typical photography competition (so things like exposure, white balance, colour adjustment, etc).

weaksauce 4y ago
I'll even allow it to change the exposure/balance/adjustment in parts of the picture separately and it's still a photo. Once you cross that Rubicon though I think it's a different thing.
epgui 4y ago
I think the analysis can get a bit more blurry if you think about the types of *local* adjustments that are typically applied to great taste by professionals… Things like sky/foreground/background adjustments, spot adjustments, dodge and burn, etc.
- techdragon 4y ago
  I feel like it’s a pretty good definition to start with but I’d extend it a little further to encompass the techniques you mentioned and also add things like HDR bracketing, and astrophotographer techniques like dark frames and photo stacking. Essentially I think as long as the photo is built up from data captured by the camera sensor(s) and no additional data is “added” to the photo, no upscaling, no substitution, no textural or morphological manipulation of objects in the frame, then it’s still a photo even with sophisticated AI processing. But the moment you upscale, airbrush, or morph anything… not a photograph.
lmm 4y ago
That's an arbitrary path-dependent place to put the line. Realistically if you spend infinite time and effort doing the kind of dodge/burn that every photography competition allows then you can make the photo look like anything you want.

grishka 4y ago

> I don’t know at what point it stops being a photo any more. When any form of object recognition is involved.

Aaron2222 4y ago
Wouldn't that preclude using facial recognition for setting focus and exposure though (which has been a thing for years)?
- grishka 4y ago
  Using facial recognition for focus is ok since the camera still faithfully captures the light entering the lens, but recognizing things in the frame to treat different parts of the image differently in post-processing is a big no-no.
  - astrange 4y ago
    If you don't let it do that, the picture will often be annoyingly dark in the foreground / blown out in the background, because cameras' dynamic range isn't anywhere near your eyes. This is called local tone mapping/dynamic range optimizer. Sharpening also benefits from object segmentation because you don't want the effects to bleed over into different areas, you get halos that way.
    - grishka 4y ago
      Local tone mapping works just wine without object recognition. It's a dumb algorithm that goes over the image and normalizes pixel values relative to their surroundings to cram the higher dynamic range of the image into the lower dynamic range of the screen. Phone camera apps had it for at least 10 years, and people did it manually with exposure bracketing ever since digital cameras became mainstream.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Yes, but any local area algorithm benefits from segmentation because it automatically becomes "smarter". Upscaling is the most obvious one - the upscaled version of a blue object on a red background is not the average of the two colors - but it applies all over the place. I don't know of any implementations of this, but an interesting one would be auto white balance. It's typically done as a global slider, but if the image has multiple light sources this doesn't always look good. And actual straight-up "knowing what's in the scene" AI can help too; people shouldn't look sickly in your photos just because they're under a low-CRI yellow light. You probably want to know what color skin tones actually are.

scrollaway 4y ago

> before long we’re going to be at the point where your camera software recognises you’re stood in front of, say, the White House, goes online, grabs stock photography of the White House and merges it into the shot you took. We’re there. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds-fake-detail-to-moon-photos-via-reference-photos/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds...

tho2i34u23oi434 4y ago

> before long we’re going to be at the point where your camera software recognises you’re stood in front of, say, the White House, goes online, grabs stock photography of the White House and merges it into the shot you took. You realize this is not too different from what the SuperResolution networks are doing, right ?

xwdv 4y ago

When you are no longer graphing the impacts of photons on a sensor, you are no longer doing photography.

rodgerd 4y ago

> I don’t know at what point it stops being a photo any more. Considering that Ansell Adams would spend weeks reworking his negatives to get the perfect print I think that you'll find that horse bolted a very long time ago.

hef19898 4y ago
Difference being, he worked in his negatives, he did add some shit to them he found on the internet or some database.

stevekemp 4y ago

Even when people were using analog cameras they would edit their negatives before making prints. It was slower and harder to do than with digital editing, but it was absolutely common-place and normal. Here's a good overview of some of the old processes and timelines: https://fixthephoto.com/blog/retouch-tips/history-of-photo-retouching.html https://fixthephoto.com/blog/retouch-tips/history-of-photo-r...

userbinator 4y ago
but it was absolutely common-place and normal. It was slower and harder to do than with digital editing, but it was absolutely common-place and normal. As someone who grew up in that era, I can say all the family photos have not been edited, nor would the majority of people who owned a camera back then spend the time or money to do so. Yes, commercial photo editing services have always existed, and of course you'd expect things like magazine covers and other prominent, publicly published photography to be heavily edited, but they didn't automatically do it to everyone's photos for free; and that's the huge difference between then and now.
- lmm 4y ago
  > As someone who grew up in that era, I can say all the family photos have not been edited, nor would the majority of people who owned a camera back then spend the time or money to do so. Whoever developed your photos would've adjusted the brightness and white balance based on what looked right to them if nothing else. Send the same negatives into two shops and you'd get different-looking pictures back.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Editing -> retouching.
    - lmm 4y ago
      What's the difference?

pdntspa 4y ago

It's just stupid that we gum up relatively simple pipelines of input -> output in favor of these longer and more complicated bullshit... and for what? So unpracticed and uneducated stupi...er, laypeople can feel better about themselves? So companies can cheap out on hardware or optics investments? So some advertising jackass can sell a few more smartphones by manipulating peoples' emotions? There is so little desire to capture the world as it is. We humans have to insert our bullshit desires and artifice into everything. And winner-takes-all capitalism means the majority market of morons is literally the only market that can be serviced cost-effectively (meaning... at all) God I hate people so much. So much potential... wasted.

astrange 4y ago
Well I don't think your approach of telling everyone they're stupid is going to sell them a camera…
- pdntspa 4y ago
  Who said that I am trying to sell cameras? I want more investment in better optics and hardware. Not AI hallucinations. Do you think some random internet comment is going to change anything? Even if it is worded in the best, most persuasive manner possible? "Hmm, that pdntspa guy on Hacker News is right goshdarnit!", says the Megabux CEO as he jumps out of his chair. "Sheila, get me the engineering director on the line. Tell him to cancel all our AI products!" Yeah.... not going to happen. Hence, a rant.

lizard 4y ago

On one hand, I'm not a photographer, I don't want to be a photographer, and I don't want to spend 30 minutes trying to get everything lined up and everyone looking in the right direction and not blinking or sneezing or whatever. I just want a decent picture that captures people being happy doing a thing. On the other hand, maybe the world needs more reminders that most people are pretty mundane, hardly able to get more than 2 people looking in the same direction for long enough to snap a shutter, just trying to get through life.

KeplerBoy 4y ago
do you really need perfect photos? Does it add anything to the memory? imho there's value in capturing that someone had a weird expression on their face or blinked.
- corgihamlet 4y ago
  Yes, for my personal photos. But you have to remember that people aren't taking photos for their own collection, they are taking photos to shine on social media. Just look on Instagram. How could you compete with all those fit, beautiful and healthy people, if you don't heavily edit your photos. (To be totally honest, I think that some beauty filters aren't as bad, because most people don't know how to hold their camera and tend to distort their face with closeup lenses.)
- lizard 4y ago
  Yes, it does add something. To be vain about it, there's enough drama and messiness in day-to-day life. I don't want to be reminded of that when I look back; I want to see the good parts, that it was all worthwhile. But, more practically even, photographs capture history. You may not be thinking about it when you're just taking a personal photo, but a fair bit of history does come from personal collections. Especially less significant figures or events where those personal artifacts are the only things that even exist. Its difficult to gain much useful information when the images are blurry, distorted, or covered in shadow. You may appreciate the funny face, but can a historian or a great-great-grandchild confirm the person in the photo when they are covering half their face in a sneeze? That said, the pendulum definitely swings in the other direction, too. Despite all the information we gather these days, there may be less meaningful history for the next several decades because you simply can't trust any of it is actually genuine.

midoridensha 4y ago

I think the line can be drawn at adding information that wasn't originally available to the camera at that time. So HDR photography (taking multiple photos milliseconds apart and merging them) is fine, because it's just using information that was available while you were standing there taking the shot. I don't see how this is really any different from a long-exposure shot in fact. Using a polarizing filter to enhance the sky color and see the fish underwater is fine, because it's just using information available that time (and in fact, selectively ignoring some information, namely light polarized the "wrong" way). Editing light levels differently in different parts of the frame is OK too because that light is still coming to the camera, you're just processing it differently. Going online to grab ultra high-res stock photography of the Moon to enhance your shaky-cam photo is not OK, because that's adding information that the camera didn't have available to it (and worse, it's quite possible the downloaded information is inaccurate). Going back to your White House example, what happens if someone takes a photo of the White House lawn because they want a photo showing the new trees or flowers that were planted or just bloomed. But Samsung downloads some stock photo to "enhance" the photo, and of course this stock photo was taken before the plantings, or at some other time of the year when the flowers weren't blooming. Now this poor sucker has a completely invalid photo showing something that didn't exist when he took his trip to DC to photograph the White House lawn, and probably won't notice until he looks through his vacation photos on a large monitor.