10 ms·

I've never owned an Apple device. I don't take photographs or video with my phone very often. But this video presentation was captivating. It was clear, conc

by ta8645 3y ago

I've never owned an Apple device. I don't take photographs or video with my phone very often. But this video presentation was captivating. It was clear, concise, without any nonsense, and thoroughly interesting.

dclowd9901 3y ago
I don’t know if it’s the same thing, but capture on my Nikon D7100 always felt more “manipulable” than capture on an iPhone or the like, I suspected as a downstream effect of using RAW format with a larger image sensor. Interpreting log through this understanding, it felt pretty intuitive reading through this post. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it feels accurate…
- matsemann 3y ago
  One reason is also that phone cameras have many limitations, so to get good images they have to "cheat" to work around those limitations. Additionally they often apply filters to the images so it looks good "out of the box", like contrast, smoothing, sharpening. Those choices done for you mean you lose information to do better yourself.
  - olivermuty 3y ago
    Which is a great if you consider that 99.98% of iphone owners wont know how to do it better themselves. It will be fascinating for anthropologists a few hundred years from now to see the increase in quality in «every day photography» that came with the increasing quality of smartphone camera software.
    - cdogl 3y ago
      I can’t help but nitpick that this isn’t really an anthropologists’ domain.
      - jb1991 3y ago
        Why not? Studying a culture from hundreds of years ago and measuring its advances in various ways, technological and societal.. seems fitting for the National Geographic's definition of anthropology as "study of the development of human societies and cultures".
        guappa 3y ago
        The point is moot. Apple and google cloud won't exist and all the photos will be gone.
        gambiting 3y ago
        You do know that people still print photos, right? Some of them will definitely survive. And unless the human civilization collapses I don't see why some digital media wouldn't survive either.
        DonHopkins 3y ago
        Speaking of photography and the progression of technology (and not spoiling the amazing final scene of the story) I highly recommend reading this poignant prescient classic: "The Wedding Album" short story by David Marusek >"Wait a minute!" shouted Benjamin, waving his arms above his head. "I get it now. we're the sims!" The guests laughed, and he laughed too. "I guess my sims always say that, don't they?" The other Benjamin nodded yes and sipped his champagne. "I just never expected to be a sim," Benjamin went on. This brought another round of laughter, and he said sheepishly, "I guess my sims all say that, too." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_Album_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_Album_(short_story... >"The Wedding Album" is a science fiction short story by David Marusek. It was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction in June 1999. >Synopsis: After their wedding, Anne and Ben realize that they are merely recordings of the real Anne and Ben, destined to relive the hours surrounding the wedding for all eternity. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13576562 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13576562 >With wedding photos and videos and mementos of all kinds, newlyweds attempt to hold on to their special day and to cherish it forever. Someday technology may enable us to record not only our appearance and voices but everything we know, feel, fear, and love at the moment the shutter clicks. Then our wedding mementos, like Anne and Ben’s in this story, take on a life of their own in a world where love may be eternal, but the world is not. Till deletion do us part . . .
    - matsemann 3y ago
      Yes, nothing really wrong with this. Just pointing out that what hits the sensor is far off from what's being saved. However, some phones now even apply AI filters to fill in detail it didn't capture. Like adding craters to the moon. And the thing about contrast, sharpness etc is that "more always looks better" at a quick glance. So when people are doing comparisons between phones etc, the one destroying the picture the most might be declared the winner.
    - plastic3169 3y ago
      I think just the fact that people started practicing every day photography and seeing hundreds of shots done by peers everyday will be a huge factor in raising quality as well.
    - soultrees 3y ago
      I actually think what’s happening is that it’s averaging out photography with such amazing tools in everyone’s hands, however we are seeing an outlier explosion of creative photography that we haven’t seen before. That said, the dopamine hit comes from taking your own shots and seeing the visual perfectness Apple creates, rarely if ever will those shots give the same effect to a viewer. So they don’t need to be photography-perfect, they just need to appeal enough to our monkey brains and monkey eyes to get that shot of dopamine to want us to take more pictures, therefore using the phone and resulting cloud storage more.
      - baz00 3y ago
        The magic of phone cameras disappears in a moment when you get hold of a mirrorless for 5 minutes. Even a bottom end one is orders of magnitude better than the best phone camera even if it’s got a lot less megapixels.
        cooper_ganglia 3y ago
        The magic of phone cameras lies in their convenience.
        ClikeX 3y ago
        My mirrorless definitely beats my iPhone. But I have to put in more time, it’s not with me at all times and I need to transfer the images. In the end, the best camera is the one I have with me. And if I can take a pretty good portrait shot of my kid while I’m at a diner then I’m happy. To me, the memory/moment is more important than the “quality”.
        kajecounterhack 3y ago
        I love my mirrorless, but it certainly wasn't 5 minutes. The first two lenses I tried (cheap ones obviously) were pretty underwhelming. Once I got a large aperture lens, I started to really get it. Even then, so many of my photos came out dark or blurry because I hadn't learned how to pick settings or focus for different lighting conditions and subject movement speeds. Autofocus on consumer cameras is pretty trash compared to iPhone/Pixel. EyeAF my ass. These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      You remind me of a comment I heard from a user, "I like the magic wand button in Photos. Why doesn't it just automatically magic wand every photo?" Ha ha, I have no idea. Almost a decade ago I worked on the Photos team for a stint, I should have asked.
      - jameshart 3y ago
        Maybe similar to the (alleged) reason cakemixes require you to add an egg: it makes it feel more like you baked it yourself if you have to do more than just add water and put it in the oven. Maybe users feel like they ‘touched up’ their photo if they tap the magic wand button.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deepGem 3y ago
    I wonder if there is a big enough market for a middle ground device. A good SLR like camera which has a great sensor and a lens but a good control compromise on the software. Not fully managed PaaS but the VM equivalent, if you consider Nikon D7100 as the bare metal Linux box of the 90s.
    - internetter 3y ago
      Honestly the iPhone with an app like Halide is this. In some cases, iphone processed photos and videos get almost indistinguishable from thousands of dollars worth of camera, but sometimes they go overboard with processing. Halide lets you dial that back a bit.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chefandy 3y ago
  It's not my primary job, but I do some pro and fine art captures as well as video compositing and photo editing– the pro phones definitely have their uses just as my little micro 4/3 and full frame DSLR do, both with still and video work. With glass and a sensor that small they aren't for everything, but the days of mandatory compression, limited color depth, mandatory "enhancements" and all of that stuff are over. If I'm shooting a handheld gimbal video, of something like a person talking outdoors not in direct sunlight, I'm grabbing that iPhone Pro without thinking twice.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Well, except that log (as well as almost every other format : "gamma" refers to the exponent of a power function !) is the opposite of raw : raw is focused on fidelity to the number of photons, log and others on fidelity to how the (human) eye reacts to these photons : https://prolost.com/blog/rawvslog/ https://prolost.com/blog/rawvslog/
- jsjohnst 3y ago
  This is almost entirely due to sensor size. The sensor on the iPhone is smaller than your pinky nail with pixels between 1µm and 2µm in size (depending on which camera is used), the Nikon on the other hand has pixels over twice the largest size on an iPhone.
pen2l 3y ago
The guy in the video is Stu, not only does he have an impressive resume (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0556179/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0556179/ known for originality, e.g. he did Sin City's look), he is also the original author of MagicBullet, which is one of the most used software by people in the industry to do easy color work. If there's one person who knows about color work, LUTs in creative work, color encoding systems, etc., it's him so naturally he knows how to present relevant subject matter without nonsense.
- toofy 3y ago
  oh thx for sharing his background. this highlights something that i repeatedly find so frustrating. this guy knows what he’s talking about. he has authority in his field. he has proven both theoretically and materially that his wisdom is high quality. yet, videos from people with far less expertise on the subject matter will likely drown his out. over and over again i’ve seen the top videos on so many subjects repeating just plain wrong information but the “creator” says it with confidence so people just eat it up. even worse, so many times i’ve seen people in the comments try to nicely point out where the “creator” went wrong, and people go after the commenter for daring to imply this person on the magic screen might be misinformed. it’s such a shame that being higher in the search says almost nothing about your knowledge on a subject and only means you’re better at manipulating the algorithm rather than having actual higher quality information. i really wish that our searches would prioritize quality of information. at this point, years later, i think it’s pretty clear that the “wisdom of the crowd will shoot the highest quality to the top” has been proven to not be the case. also, i don’t want to imply that amateurs can’t have valid and interesting perspectives, sometimes they might, just that being higher in search means quite literally nothing on wisdom of a subject—especially if a grifter can monetize off a trendy nuanced subject. anyway, this video was incredible information. thx for sharing his background.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    >> i really wish that our searches would prioritize quality of information Use a free service, and the person providing it doesn't have an incentive to give you what you want. Which is how we got current Google.
pivo 3y ago
Well, there was one bit of nonsense and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm referring to the Ren & Stimpy "Log Song" sound track to the video of the woman walking up the stairs: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ren+and+stimpy+log+song&atb=v327-1&pn=1&iax=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqVg6T0f1FJ0&ia=videossound https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ren+and+stimpy+log+song&atb...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Graziano_M 3y ago
This video is excellent. About halfway through I was thinking, "Oh so this is like RAW for video" and then seconds later he gets to explaining how it's not exactly RAW.

by ta8645 3y ago

dclowd9901 3y ago

I don’t know if it’s the same thing, but capture on my Nikon D7100 always felt more “manipulable” than capture on an iPhone or the like, I suspected as a downstream effect of using RAW format with a larger image sensor. Interpreting log through this understanding, it felt pretty intuitive reading through this post. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it feels accurate…

matsemann 3y ago
One reason is also that phone cameras have many limitations, so to get good images they have to "cheat" to work around those limitations. Additionally they often apply filters to the images so it looks good "out of the box", like contrast, smoothing, sharpening. Those choices done for you mean you lose information to do better yourself.
- olivermuty 3y ago
  Which is a great if you consider that 99.98% of iphone owners wont know how to do it better themselves. It will be fascinating for anthropologists a few hundred years from now to see the increase in quality in «every day photography» that came with the increasing quality of smartphone camera software.
  - cdogl 3y ago
    I can’t help but nitpick that this isn’t really an anthropologists’ domain.
    - jb1991 3y ago
      Why not? Studying a culture from hundreds of years ago and measuring its advances in various ways, technological and societal.. seems fitting for the National Geographic's definition of anthropology as "study of the development of human societies and cultures".
      - guappa 3y ago
        The point is moot. Apple and google cloud won't exist and all the photos will be gone.
        gambiting 3y ago
        You do know that people still print photos, right? Some of them will definitely survive. And unless the human civilization collapses I don't see why some digital media wouldn't survive either.
        DonHopkins 3y ago
        Speaking of photography and the progression of technology (and not spoiling the amazing final scene of the story) I highly recommend reading this poignant prescient classic: "The Wedding Album" short story by David Marusek >"Wait a minute!" shouted Benjamin, waving his arms above his head. "I get it now. we're the sims!" The guests laughed, and he laughed too. "I guess my sims always say that, don't they?" The other Benjamin nodded yes and sipped his champagne. "I just never expected to be a sim," Benjamin went on. This brought another round of laughter, and he said sheepishly, "I guess my sims all say that, too." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_Album_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_Album_(short_story... >"The Wedding Album" is a science fiction short story by David Marusek. It was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction in June 1999. >Synopsis: After their wedding, Anne and Ben realize that they are merely recordings of the real Anne and Ben, destined to relive the hours surrounding the wedding for all eternity. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13576562 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13576562 >With wedding photos and videos and mementos of all kinds, newlyweds attempt to hold on to their special day and to cherish it forever. Someday technology may enable us to record not only our appearance and voices but everything we know, feel, fear, and love at the moment the shutter clicks. Then our wedding mementos, like Anne and Ben’s in this story, take on a life of their own in a world where love may be eternal, but the world is not. Till deletion do us part . . .
  - matsemann 3y ago
    Yes, nothing really wrong with this. Just pointing out that what hits the sensor is far off from what's being saved. However, some phones now even apply AI filters to fill in detail it didn't capture. Like adding craters to the moon. And the thing about contrast, sharpness etc is that "more always looks better" at a quick glance. So when people are doing comparisons between phones etc, the one destroying the picture the most might be declared the winner.
  - plastic3169 3y ago
    I think just the fact that people started practicing every day photography and seeing hundreds of shots done by peers everyday will be a huge factor in raising quality as well.
  - soultrees 3y ago
    I actually think what’s happening is that it’s averaging out photography with such amazing tools in everyone’s hands, however we are seeing an outlier explosion of creative photography that we haven’t seen before. That said, the dopamine hit comes from taking your own shots and seeing the visual perfectness Apple creates, rarely if ever will those shots give the same effect to a viewer. So they don’t need to be photography-perfect, they just need to appeal enough to our monkey brains and monkey eyes to get that shot of dopamine to want us to take more pictures, therefore using the phone and resulting cloud storage more.
    - baz00 3y ago
      The magic of phone cameras disappears in a moment when you get hold of a mirrorless for 5 minutes. Even a bottom end one is orders of magnitude better than the best phone camera even if it’s got a lot less megapixels.
      - cooper_ganglia 3y ago
        The magic of phone cameras lies in their convenience.
      - ClikeX 3y ago
        My mirrorless definitely beats my iPhone. But I have to put in more time, it’s not with me at all times and I need to transfer the images. In the end, the best camera is the one I have with me. And if I can take a pretty good portrait shot of my kid while I’m at a diner then I’m happy. To me, the memory/moment is more important than the “quality”.
      - kajecounterhack 3y ago
        I love my mirrorless, but it certainly wasn't 5 minutes. The first two lenses I tried (cheap ones obviously) were pretty underwhelming. Once I got a large aperture lens, I started to really get it. Even then, so many of my photos came out dark or blurry because I hadn't learned how to pick settings or focus for different lighting conditions and subject movement speeds. Autofocus on consumer cameras is pretty trash compared to iPhone/Pixel. EyeAF my ass. These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    You remind me of a comment I heard from a user, "I like the magic wand button in Photos. Why doesn't it just automatically magic wand every photo?" Ha ha, I have no idea. Almost a decade ago I worked on the Photos team for a stint, I should have asked.
    - jameshart 3y ago
      Maybe similar to the (alleged) reason cakemixes require you to add an egg: it makes it feel more like you baked it yourself if you have to do more than just add water and put it in the oven. Maybe users feel like they ‘touched up’ their photo if they tap the magic wand button.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deepGem 3y ago
  I wonder if there is a big enough market for a middle ground device. A good SLR like camera which has a great sensor and a lens but a good control compromise on the software. Not fully managed PaaS but the VM equivalent, if you consider Nikon D7100 as the bare metal Linux box of the 90s.
  - internetter 3y ago
    Honestly the iPhone with an app like Halide is this. In some cases, iphone processed photos and videos get almost indistinguishable from thousands of dollars worth of camera, but sometimes they go overboard with processing. Halide lets you dial that back a bit.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chefandy 3y ago
It's not my primary job, but I do some pro and fine art captures as well as video compositing and photo editing– the pro phones definitely have their uses just as my little micro 4/3 and full frame DSLR do, both with still and video work. With glass and a sensor that small they aren't for everything, but the days of mandatory compression, limited color depth, mandatory "enhancements" and all of that stuff are over. If I'm shooting a handheld gimbal video, of something like a person talking outdoors not in direct sunlight, I'm grabbing that iPhone Pro without thinking twice.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Well, except that log (as well as almost every other format : "gamma" refers to the exponent of a power function !) is the opposite of raw : raw is focused on fidelity to the number of photons, log and others on fidelity to how the (human) eye reacts to these photons : https://prolost.com/blog/rawvslog/ https://prolost.com/blog/rawvslog/
jsjohnst 3y ago
This is almost entirely due to sensor size. The sensor on the iPhone is smaller than your pinky nail with pixels between 1µm and 2µm in size (depending on which camera is used), the Nikon on the other hand has pixels over twice the largest size on an iPhone.

pen2l 3y ago

The guy in the video is Stu, not only does he have an impressive resume (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0556179/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0556179/ known for originality, e.g. he did Sin City's look), he is also the original author of MagicBullet, which is one of the most used software by people in the industry to do easy color work. If there's one person who knows about color work, LUTs in creative work, color encoding systems, etc., it's him so naturally he knows how to present relevant subject matter without nonsense.

toofy 3y ago
oh thx for sharing his background. this highlights something that i repeatedly find so frustrating. this guy knows what he’s talking about. he has authority in his field. he has proven both theoretically and materially that his wisdom is high quality. yet, videos from people with far less expertise on the subject matter will likely drown his out. over and over again i’ve seen the top videos on so many subjects repeating just plain wrong information but the “creator” says it with confidence so people just eat it up. even worse, so many times i’ve seen people in the comments try to nicely point out where the “creator” went wrong, and people go after the commenter for daring to imply this person on the magic screen might be misinformed. it’s such a shame that being higher in the search says almost nothing about your knowledge on a subject and only means you’re better at manipulating the algorithm rather than having actual higher quality information. i really wish that our searches would prioritize quality of information. at this point, years later, i think it’s pretty clear that the “wisdom of the crowd will shoot the highest quality to the top” has been proven to not be the case. also, i don’t want to imply that amateurs can’t have valid and interesting perspectives, sometimes they might, just that being higher in search means quite literally nothing on wisdom of a subject—especially if a grifter can monetize off a trendy nuanced subject. anyway, this video was incredible information. thx for sharing his background.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  >> i really wish that our searches would prioritize quality of information Use a free service, and the person providing it doesn't have an incentive to give you what you want. Which is how we got current Google.

pivo 3y ago

Well, there was one bit of nonsense and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm referring to the Ren & Stimpy "Log Song" sound track to the video of the woman walking up the stairs: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ren+and+stimpy+log+song&atb=v327-1&pn=1&iax=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqVg6T0f1FJ0&ia=videossound https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ren+and+stimpy+log+song&atb...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Graziano_M 3y ago

This video is excellent. About halfway through I was thinking, "Oh so this is like RAW for video" and then seconds later he gets to explaining how it's not exactly RAW.