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> Is it 100% pixel perfect to what was happening at the time? No, but I also don’t care. No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflect

> Is it 100% pixel perfect to what was happening at the time? No, but I also don’t care. No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. You don't have to be a purist to want the ability to decide what gets captured or to have control over how it looks though. Those kinds of choices are part of what make photography an art. In the end, this tech just takes control from you. If you're fine with Apple deciding what the subject of pictures should be and how they should look that's fine, but I expect a lot of people wont be.

willseth 3y ago
Try to photograph a toddler without this feature. Good luck. Does the fact that the iPhone allows me to do this pretty reliably without any fuss mean I have more or less control?
- leephillips 3y ago
  Odd. I have hundreds of great shots of my toddlers, none taken with these “features”.
  - willseth 3y ago
    I know you’re pretending to be dense on purpose, but taking a dozen pictures at once and automatically picking the best one can obviously save a lot of shots. Same with combining exposures.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      The camera in this case wasn't taking many shots and selecting one. It wasn't just combining exposures either. It did a bunch of shitty cut/paste operations to produce an altered composite image which showed something that never happened. Some automatic features are wonderful. People have been able to take pictures of fast moving toddlers and pets for ages because of them. The camera "features" that secretly alter images to create lies and don't give you a photograph of what you asked them to capture are a problem.
      - willseth 3y ago
        I didn’t misunderstand what happened, and I know how the iPhone camera works. I was only noting a couple common cases where computational photography is really nice. I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”. I know those types of anomalies can happen, but they’re clearly design flaws, i.e. Apple doesn’t actually want their camera to make fantasy images. I don’t want that either.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”. That you know of. There could be many lies in those photos, both subtle and blunt, which you didn't notice at the moment because you weren't primed to look for them, and which you won't notice now, because you no longer remember the details of the scenes/situations being photographed, days or months ago. Are you sure I'm wrong? Are you sure that there are no hard lies in your photos? Would you be able to tell?
        kaba0 3y ago
        A blurry limb is just as much a lie.
        willseth 3y ago
        If we’re going to be this pedantic about it: iPhone’s camera will not add or remove things that weren’t captured in its temporal window. It won’t change the semantic meaning of an image. It won’t make a sad face person look happy, make daytime look like nighttime, or change dogs into cats. It can make mistakes like from the OP, but the point is that Apple also sees this as a mistake, so I would expect the error rate to improve over time. This is a different approach from other computational photography apps, like Google’s, where it looks like they are more willing to push the boundaries into fantasy images. Apple’s approach seems to be more grounded, like they simply want to get great pro DSLR level images automatically.
        3y ago
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  It's solved with constantly taking pictures into a ring buffer, either compensating for the touchscreen lag automatically or letting you select the best frame manually with a slider after the shot. Most cameras can do that (if you disable the best frame auto-selection).
  - kaba0 3y ago
    The two features are not exclusionary. For low-light situations you will need this feature either way, a bunch of noisy pictures doesn’t help you.
- _trampeltier 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kaba0 3y ago
    [flagged]
ALittleLight 3y ago
I think you have that backwards. The vast majority of people will prefer Apple's computational enhancements. A small number of photography enthusiasts will prefer manual control (and a smaller number will benefit from it).
- sharkweek 3y ago
  Yeah I 100% agree - When I pull my phone out to take a picture of the kids/my dog/something randomly interesting, all I want is to point my camera at whatever I want to capture and have it turn out. Don’t care how it happens I don’t want to think about settings.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    And you simply don't care if two different people are shown in the photo in poses that didn't happen at the same time? That doesn't seem to me like capturing whatever it was you wanted to capture.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      It won’t happen in direct sunlight, and yeah, I will definitely take it over not having that picture in a presentable state. How is that different than creating a panorama photo?
      - thfuran 3y ago
        Panoramas are mostly taken of static scenes or at least with the knowledge that it's going to mess things up if people move around. Regular photographs are generally both taken and viewed with the assumption that all the things in it happened at the same time (modulo shutter speed).
        kaba0 3y ago
        Modulo now in low-light, moving scenes you actually get a decent photo. It doesn’t happen in good lighting, and this whole article is bullshit.
frogblast 3y ago
> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. In these difficult scenarios, the alternative photo I'd get using such a small camera without this kind processing would be entirely unusable. I couldn't rescue those photos with hours of manual edits. That may be "in control", but it isn't useful.
- andrei_says_ 3y ago
  Is an argument about corner cases where computational improvement does make sense an argument in good faith when used as an excuse to take away control in all cases?
  - jack_pp 3y ago
    Afaik there are photo apps on the iphone that let you have all the control you want so you can use those when you want control and use the default when you just want a quick photo knowing the pros/cons.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    How is that different from a noise removal algorithm? Is it also taking away control from you!
    - andrei_says_ 3y ago
      The Apple algorithm visibly and significantly changes color, contrast, and likely curves, for every image, including in RAW format. Without my consent and with no option to opt out. The Apple camera app is accessible quickly without unlocking the phone and I use that feature most of the time when I travel. So I end up with thousands of crappyfied images. Infuriating.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        You buying the device which makes proper images in low-light/moving situations despite its small sensor size is your goddamn consent. Buy a shitty cellphone from 2004 if you want shitty photos. Or throw some blur and noise on an iphone photo if that makes you happier.
orbital-decay 3y ago
>In the end, this tech just takes control from you. 1. "This tech" is too broad of a qualifier, as GP is talking about computational photography in general, which is many things at once. Most of those things work great; some others are unpredictable. There are plenty of custom camera apps besides Apple's default camera which will always try to stay as predictable as possible. 2. There is such a thing as too much control. Proper automation is good, especially if you aren't doing a carefully set up session. The computational autofocus in high-end cameras is amazing nowadays. You can nail it every time now without thinking, with rare exceptions.
graypegg 3y ago
To play devils advocate here: the best camera is the one you have with you, and computational photography does mean you can just push a button without thinking and get a clear picture that captures a memory. It’s obviously an argument to say that Apple shouldn’t get to choose how your memories are recorded, but I know I’ve captured a lot more moments I would’ve otherwise missed because of just how automatic phone cameras are. There’s a place for both kinds of cameras IMO.
- WWLink 3y ago
  I used to keep a powershot digital elph in my pocket whenever I left the house. TBH I took way more pictures with it. I could blindly turn it on and snap a picture while driving, without ever taking my eyes off the road. There's no way in the world I could do that with an iphone lol. I mean, I suppose if I happened to hit the bottom right corner button and then used the volume button maybe? Maybe. It's way more likely I'd cock it up lol.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    >I could blindly turn it on and snap a picture while driving, without ever taking my eyes off the road. Isn't driving while blind illegal?
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    You can always configure it to start the camera by swiping left on the lock screen. Then, the volume buttons are big enough to easily hit one of them.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > computational photography does mean you can just push a button without thinking and get a clear picture that captures a memory. I'd argue that the women trying to take a photo of herself in her wedding dress did not get a clear picture that captures a memory. She got a very confusing picture that captured something which never happened. There are lots of great automatic camera features which are super helpful, but don't falsify events. If I take a picture of my kid I want my actual child in the photo, not a cobbled together AI generated monstrosity of what apple thinks my kid ought to have looked like in that moment. Automatic cameras are great. Cameras that outright lie to you are not.
dumbfounder 3y ago
But regular people expect it. And then they take a picture of the moon and they are disappointed.
- astrange 3y ago
  It's easy to take a picture of the moon. It's always lit the same because it's in space. ISO 100, f/11, manual focus at infinity, shutter speed 1/100. Phones aren't good at this, partly because autofocus isn't designed for moons, partly because you want a really long lens and they don't have one.
bawolff 3y ago
> Those kinds of choices are part of what make photography an art. Ah yes, for all those people using their iphone to make true art instead of for taking a selfie. The market for cell phone cameras are generally casual users. High end artists generally use fancy cameras. Different trade offs for different use cases.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I think you’d be surprised how much phones have encroached on the fancy camera space. Also, the limiting factor in phone camera quality is more the lens than anything else. The SW backing it is much more powerful than what you get in standalone cameras although those manufacturers are trying to keep up (that’s why phone cameras can be so competitive with more expensive ones). I expect within the next 10 years we’ll see meaningful improvements to the lenses used in phones to the point where dedicated cameras will have shrunk even more (i.e. decoupling the size of the lens / sensor from the surface area on the back of the phone).
  - FalconSensei 3y ago
    > The SW backing it is much more powerful than what you get in standalone cameras that is very due to camera makers not giving a sh*t though. Maybe now they do, but it's overdue. And I'm not even talking about the phone apps for connection, or image processing, but more on a user interface and usability PoV, and also interesting modes for the user. Fuji and Ricoh are the only ones that I see are trying to make things easier or more fun or interesting for non-professionals. Fuji has the whole user customization that people use for recipes and film simulation (on top of the film simulations they already have), and Ricoh is the only one (I know of) that has snap focus, distance priority, and custom user modes that are easy to switch to, and to use. But even Fuji and Ricoh could still improve a lot, since there's always a detail or another that I'm like... why did they made it like that? or... why didn't they add this thing?
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      I don't think it's only that. The processing in a phone is expensive. If you'd build a high end camera with a Snapdragon 8 gen 3 it would raise the price a lot. In a phone that's not an issue because you need the chip there anyway for other tasks. So there's just much more compute power available, not to mention a connection to the cloud with even more potential compute.
colordrops 3y ago
If this feature or similar features could be disabled, it doesn't need to be an either/or situation. I don't have an iPhone though, so no idea if it's configurable. But seems that it should be, assuming it's not implemented deep in hardware.
- autoexec 3y ago
  I agree. I'd have no issue with this if it were something people could disable and it was clearly disclosed and explained as the default.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Doesn't even need to have an off-switch, if it would preserve the inputs that went into AI stitching magic, so that one could recover reality if/when they needed it.
    - dsego 3y ago
      I think you can with live photos, basically you get a short video included.
- kaba0 3y ago
  But why? Because out of the literally trillions of images shot with an iphone a tiny tiny percentage comes out wrong, similarly to how panorama images will look if you move? It unequivocally improves the quality of images in low light by a huge margin. This is a non-issue.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    Because this isn't the only change that is made to the photos through computation. Because it would be trivial to add an option to disable.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. Having control isn't always the best option. While photographers may appreciate having a camera over which they can have a high degree of control, they're not snobs about it. Photographers will tell you that having a handy point and shoot with good automation or correction of some kind is extremely useful when you're out and about and need to take a photo quickly. For everyday photos, it's what you'll want usually. If not, there are plenty of cameras on the market to choose from.
kazinator 3y ago
No lens is going to produce a straight arm out of one that was bent at the elbow, or vice versa, while not disturbing anything else. It is not "photography".
- addaon 3y ago
  Depends on the refractive index of the lens [1]. [1] https://gebseng.com/media_archeology/reading_materials/Bob_Shaw-Light_of_Other_Days.pdf https://gebseng.com/media_archeology/reading_materials/Bob_S...
- eproxus 3y ago
  No lens is going to reproduce a perfectly straight line without lens compensation either. Lenses are bending light to distill a moment in space time into a 2D representation which by definition will always be imperfect. What counts as “photography” really? GP> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. In the end, any tech is always going to take control away from you one way or another. That’s the whole point of using it, so you can achieve things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    Though it may be that no lens will reproduce a perfectly straight line, the transformation which warps the line is a relatively simple and invertible mapping which preserves local as well as global features. It might not be a conformal mapping but, say, if the image of a grid is projected through the lens, the projected image will have the same number of divisions and crossings, in the same relation to each other. We cannot say this about an AI-powered transformation which changes a body posture. > What counts as “photography” really? Focusing light via a lens into an exposure plate, from which an image is sampled.
    - foldr 3y ago
      There’s no AI transformation altering her body posture. It’s just that the phone is blending multiple exposures during which she was posing in different ways. The phone doesn’t realize that the images of the women in the mirror correspond to the woman in the center, so it hasn’t felt it necessary to use the same keyframe as the reference for the different parts of the photo. People are jumping to crazy explanations for this when there is a much simpler explanation that’s obvious to anyone who’s ever done a bit of manual HDR. Ironically, the solution to this problem is more AI, not less. The phone needs to understand mirrors in order to make smarter HDR blending decisions. HN has a strangely luddite tendency when it comes to photography. Lots of people are up in arms about phones somehow ruining photography by doing things that you could easily do in a traditional darkroom. (It's not difficult to expose multiple negatives onto the same sheet of photo paper.)
nextaccountic 3y ago
> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. If you're fine with Apple deciding what the subject of pictures should be and how they should look that's fine, but I expect a lot of people wont be. Can't this be disabled? And can't some other product with a similar technology offer knobs for configuring exactly how it behaves?
- kaba0 3y ago
  It can make a RAW file as well, so just the usual clickbait article/comments.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    It can, but does it? Defaults matter. I wouldn't want to discover that my camera was screwing with me only after I sent the photos of an accident to my insurer, a day after it happened.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. Don't fall into this trap. A lens and computational photography are not alike. One is a static filter, doing simple(ish) transformation of incoming light. The other is arbitrary computation operating in semantic space, halfway between photography and generative AI. Those are qualitatively different. Or, put another way: you can undo effects of a lens, or the way photo was developed classically, because each pixel is still correlated with reality, just modulo a simple, reversible transformation. It's something we intuitively understand, which is why we often don't notice. In contrast, computational photography decorrelates pixels from reality. It's not a mathematical transformation you can reverse - it's high-level interpretation, and most of the source data is discarded. Is this a big deal? I'd say it is. Not just because it rubs some the wrong way (it definitely makes something no longer be a "photo" to me). But consider that all camera manufacturers, phone or otherwise, are jumping on this bandwagon, so in a few years it's going to be hard to find a camera without built-in image-correcting "AI" - and then consider just how much science and computer vision applications are done with COTS parts. A lot of papers will have to be retracted before academia realizes they can no longer trust regular cameras in anything. Someone will get hurt when a robot - or a car - hits them because "it didn't see them standing there", thanks to camera hardware conveniently bullshitting them out of the picture. (Pro tip for modern conflict: best not use newest iPhones for zeroing in artillery strikes.) Ultimately you're right, though: this is an issue of control. Computational photography isn't bad per se. It being enabled by default, without an off-switch, and operating destructively by default (instead of storing originals plus composite), is a problem. It wasn't that big of a deal with previous stuff like automatic color corrections, because it was correlated with reality and undoable in a pinch, if needed. Computational photography isn't undoable. If you don't have the inputs, you can't recover them.
- bambax 3y ago
  Yes. Also, it seems inevitable that at some points photos that you can't publish on Facebook won't be possible to make. Is a nipple present in the scene? Then too bad, you can't press the shutter.
easyThrowaway 3y ago
The first thing they teach you at any photography course worth its money is that framing the picture itself is a distortion of reality. It's you deciding what's worth being recorded and what should be discarded. There's no "objective photography", no matter how hard we try distinguishing between old and new tech.
esskay 3y ago
> If you're fine with Apple deciding what the subject of pictures should be and how they should look that's fine, but I expect a lot of people wont be. The majority dont care, as the majority are not photographers, nor is it meant to be a product for photographers. Average joe just wants a good photo of that moment, which it does exceptionally well. The tech 'taking control from you' is its exact purpose, as again, not everyone is a photographer. The whole point is to allow 'normal people' to get a good photo at the press of a button, it'd be incredibly foolish and unreasonable to expect them to faff about with a bunch of camera settings so it does it for you.
- alt227 3y ago
  The bride in the original article doesnt seem to be a photographer, yet she seems to care quite a bit that the photo is not an acurate representation of reality at that moment.
  - esskay 3y ago
    Yep and it's one of those very rare occasions where something odd happens. You and I both know fully well that its not 'the norm', hence why average joe couldn't care less.
kaba0 3y ago
Getting a roughly correct image vs a blurry mess doesn’t take control away from you and it is just bullshitting on a non-issue.
throw0101b 3y ago
> No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. More importantly than that: framing, exposure, aperture choices by anyone not simply shooting with their camera in the Auto mode. * https://petapixel.com/digital-camera-modes-a-complete-guide/#Auto_Mode_Green_BoxAUTO https://petapixel.com/digital-camera-modes-a-complete-guide/... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_dial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_dial * https://photographylife.com/understanding-digital-camera-modes https://photographylife.com/understanding-digital-camera-mod...
bhpm 3y ago
The tech doesn’t “just” take control from me. It also exponentially increases the chances that the photo I wanted to take will be the photo that is saved on my device and shared with my friends. It’s just picture of my dog. It’s not that serious.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > It’s just picture of my dog. It’s not that serious. Until you want to send it to your vet, but you can't, because your phone keeps beautifying out the exact medical problem you're trying to image.
  - bhpm 3y ago
    When will that happen? I’ve sent phots to my dog’s vet (I go to a doctor for humans myself) but this hasn’t been a problem. If you could let me know when this will happen I’ll make sure I don’t rely on it.
fennecbutt 3y ago
Yes but every photographer strives for a baseline of "as close as possible" otherwise lenses wouldn't be expensive bc "photographers don't strive for reality" so who cares about chromatic aberration, vignetting etc.

willseth 3y ago

Try to photograph a toddler without this feature. Good luck. Does the fact that the iPhone allows me to do this pretty reliably without any fuss mean I have more or less control?

leephillips 3y ago
Odd. I have hundreds of great shots of my toddlers, none taken with these “features”.
- willseth 3y ago
  I know you’re pretending to be dense on purpose, but taking a dozen pictures at once and automatically picking the best one can obviously save a lot of shots. Same with combining exposures.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The camera in this case wasn't taking many shots and selecting one. It wasn't just combining exposures either. It did a bunch of shitty cut/paste operations to produce an altered composite image which showed something that never happened. Some automatic features are wonderful. People have been able to take pictures of fast moving toddlers and pets for ages because of them. The camera "features" that secretly alter images to create lies and don't give you a photograph of what you asked them to capture are a problem.
    - willseth 3y ago
      I didn’t misunderstand what happened, and I know how the iPhone camera works. I was only noting a couple common cases where computational photography is really nice. I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”. I know those types of anomalies can happen, but they’re clearly design flaws, i.e. Apple doesn’t actually want their camera to make fantasy images. I don’t want that either.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > I’m pretty picky about my photos and nothing I’ve shot with my iPhone has ever approached “lies”. That you know of. There could be many lies in those photos, both subtle and blunt, which you didn't notice at the moment because you weren't primed to look for them, and which you won't notice now, because you no longer remember the details of the scenes/situations being photographed, days or months ago. Are you sure I'm wrong? Are you sure that there are no hard lies in your photos? Would you be able to tell?
        kaba0 3y ago
        A blurry limb is just as much a lie.
        willseth 3y ago
        If we’re going to be this pedantic about it: iPhone’s camera will not add or remove things that weren’t captured in its temporal window. It won’t change the semantic meaning of an image. It won’t make a sad face person look happy, make daytime look like nighttime, or change dogs into cats. It can make mistakes like from the OP, but the point is that Apple also sees this as a mistake, so I would expect the error rate to improve over time. This is a different approach from other computational photography apps, like Google’s, where it looks like they are more willing to push the boundaries into fantasy images. Apple’s approach seems to be more grounded, like they simply want to get great pro DSLR level images automatically.
        3y ago
orbital-decay 3y ago
It's solved with constantly taking pictures into a ring buffer, either compensating for the touchscreen lag automatically or letting you select the best frame manually with a slider after the shot. Most cameras can do that (if you disable the best frame auto-selection).
- kaba0 3y ago
  The two features are not exclusionary. For low-light situations you will need this feature either way, a bunch of noisy pictures doesn’t help you.
_trampeltier 3y ago
[flagged]
- kaba0 3y ago
  [flagged]

ALittleLight 3y ago

I think you have that backwards. The vast majority of people will prefer Apple's computational enhancements. A small number of photography enthusiasts will prefer manual control (and a smaller number will benefit from it).

sharkweek 3y ago
Yeah I 100% agree - When I pull my phone out to take a picture of the kids/my dog/something randomly interesting, all I want is to point my camera at whatever I want to capture and have it turn out. Don’t care how it happens I don’t want to think about settings.
- thfuran 3y ago
  And you simply don't care if two different people are shown in the photo in poses that didn't happen at the same time? That doesn't seem to me like capturing whatever it was you wanted to capture.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    It won’t happen in direct sunlight, and yeah, I will definitely take it over not having that picture in a presentable state. How is that different than creating a panorama photo?
    - thfuran 3y ago
      Panoramas are mostly taken of static scenes or at least with the knowledge that it's going to mess things up if people move around. Regular photographs are generally both taken and viewed with the assumption that all the things in it happened at the same time (modulo shutter speed).
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Modulo now in low-light, moving scenes you actually get a decent photo. It doesn’t happen in good lighting, and this whole article is bullshit.

frogblast 3y ago

> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. In these difficult scenarios, the alternative photo I'd get using such a small camera without this kind processing would be entirely unusable. I couldn't rescue those photos with hours of manual edits. That may be "in control", but it isn't useful.

andrei_says_ 3y ago
Is an argument about corner cases where computational improvement does make sense an argument in good faith when used as an excuse to take away control in all cases?
- jack_pp 3y ago
  Afaik there are photo apps on the iphone that let you have all the control you want so you can use those when you want control and use the default when you just want a quick photo knowing the pros/cons.
- kaba0 3y ago
  How is that different from a noise removal algorithm? Is it also taking away control from you!
  - andrei_says_ 3y ago
    The Apple algorithm visibly and significantly changes color, contrast, and likely curves, for every image, including in RAW format. Without my consent and with no option to opt out. The Apple camera app is accessible quickly without unlocking the phone and I use that feature most of the time when I travel. So I end up with thousands of crappyfied images. Infuriating.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      You buying the device which makes proper images in low-light/moving situations despite its small sensor size is your goddamn consent. Buy a shitty cellphone from 2004 if you want shitty photos. Or throw some blur and noise on an iphone photo if that makes you happier.

orbital-decay 3y ago

>In the end, this tech just takes control from you. 1. "This tech" is too broad of a qualifier, as GP is talking about computational photography in general, which is many things at once. Most of those things work great; some others are unpredictable. There are plenty of custom camera apps besides Apple's default camera which will always try to stay as predictable as possible. 2. There is such a thing as too much control. Proper automation is good, especially if you aren't doing a carefully set up session. The computational autofocus in high-end cameras is amazing nowadays. You can nail it every time now without thinking, with rare exceptions.

graypegg 3y ago

To play devils advocate here: the best camera is the one you have with you, and computational photography does mean you can just push a button without thinking and get a clear picture that captures a memory. It’s obviously an argument to say that Apple shouldn’t get to choose how your memories are recorded, but I know I’ve captured a lot more moments I would’ve otherwise missed because of just how automatic phone cameras are. There’s a place for both kinds of cameras IMO.

WWLink 3y ago
I used to keep a powershot digital elph in my pocket whenever I left the house. TBH I took way more pictures with it. I could blindly turn it on and snap a picture while driving, without ever taking my eyes off the road. There's no way in the world I could do that with an iphone lol. I mean, I suppose if I happened to hit the bottom right corner button and then used the volume button maybe? Maybe. It's way more likely I'd cock it up lol.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  >I could blindly turn it on and snap a picture while driving, without ever taking my eyes off the road. Isn't driving while blind illegal?
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  You can always configure it to start the camera by swiping left on the lock screen. Then, the volume buttons are big enough to easily hit one of them.
autoexec 3y ago
> computational photography does mean you can just push a button without thinking and get a clear picture that captures a memory. I'd argue that the women trying to take a photo of herself in her wedding dress did not get a clear picture that captures a memory. She got a very confusing picture that captured something which never happened. There are lots of great automatic camera features which are super helpful, but don't falsify events. If I take a picture of my kid I want my actual child in the photo, not a cobbled together AI generated monstrosity of what apple thinks my kid ought to have looked like in that moment. Automatic cameras are great. Cameras that outright lie to you are not.

dumbfounder 3y ago

But regular people expect it. And then they take a picture of the moon and they are disappointed.

astrange 3y ago
It's easy to take a picture of the moon. It's always lit the same because it's in space. ISO 100, f/11, manual focus at infinity, shutter speed 1/100. Phones aren't good at this, partly because autofocus isn't designed for moons, partly because you want a really long lens and they don't have one.

bawolff 3y ago

> Those kinds of choices are part of what make photography an art. Ah yes, for all those people using their iphone to make true art instead of for taking a selfie. The market for cell phone cameras are generally casual users. High end artists generally use fancy cameras. Different trade offs for different use cases.

vlovich123 3y ago
I think you’d be surprised how much phones have encroached on the fancy camera space. Also, the limiting factor in phone camera quality is more the lens than anything else. The SW backing it is much more powerful than what you get in standalone cameras although those manufacturers are trying to keep up (that’s why phone cameras can be so competitive with more expensive ones). I expect within the next 10 years we’ll see meaningful improvements to the lenses used in phones to the point where dedicated cameras will have shrunk even more (i.e. decoupling the size of the lens / sensor from the surface area on the back of the phone).
- FalconSensei 3y ago
  > The SW backing it is much more powerful than what you get in standalone cameras that is very due to camera makers not giving a sh*t though. Maybe now they do, but it's overdue. And I'm not even talking about the phone apps for connection, or image processing, but more on a user interface and usability PoV, and also interesting modes for the user. Fuji and Ricoh are the only ones that I see are trying to make things easier or more fun or interesting for non-professionals. Fuji has the whole user customization that people use for recipes and film simulation (on top of the film simulations they already have), and Ricoh is the only one (I know of) that has snap focus, distance priority, and custom user modes that are easy to switch to, and to use. But even Fuji and Ricoh could still improve a lot, since there's always a detail or another that I'm like... why did they made it like that? or... why didn't they add this thing?
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    I don't think it's only that. The processing in a phone is expensive. If you'd build a high end camera with a Snapdragon 8 gen 3 it would raise the price a lot. In a phone that's not an issue because you need the chip there anyway for other tasks. So there's just much more compute power available, not to mention a connection to the cloud with even more potential compute.

colordrops 3y ago

If this feature or similar features could be disabled, it doesn't need to be an either/or situation. I don't have an iPhone though, so no idea if it's configurable. But seems that it should be, assuming it's not implemented deep in hardware.

autoexec 3y ago
I agree. I'd have no issue with this if it were something people could disable and it was clearly disclosed and explained as the default.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Doesn't even need to have an off-switch, if it would preserve the inputs that went into AI stitching magic, so that one could recover reality if/when they needed it.
  - dsego 3y ago
    I think you can with live photos, basically you get a short video included.
kaba0 3y ago
But why? Because out of the literally trillions of images shot with an iphone a tiny tiny percentage comes out wrong, similarly to how panorama images will look if you move? It unequivocally improves the quality of images in low light by a huge margin. This is a non-issue.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Because this isn't the only change that is made to the photos through computation. Because it would be trivial to add an option to disable.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. Having control isn't always the best option. While photographers may appreciate having a camera over which they can have a high degree of control, they're not snobs about it. Photographers will tell you that having a handy point and shoot with good automation or correction of some kind is extremely useful when you're out and about and need to take a photo quickly. For everyday photos, it's what you'll want usually. If not, there are plenty of cameras on the market to choose from.

kazinator 3y ago

No lens is going to produce a straight arm out of one that was bent at the elbow, or vice versa, while not disturbing anything else. It is not "photography".

addaon 3y ago
Depends on the refractive index of the lens [1]. [1] https://gebseng.com/media_archeology/reading_materials/Bob_Shaw-Light_of_Other_Days.pdf https://gebseng.com/media_archeology/reading_materials/Bob_S...
eproxus 3y ago
No lens is going to reproduce a perfectly straight line without lens compensation either. Lenses are bending light to distill a moment in space time into a 2D representation which by definition will always be imperfect. What counts as “photography” really? GP> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. In the end, any tech is always going to take control away from you one way or another. That’s the whole point of using it, so you can achieve things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Though it may be that no lens will reproduce a perfectly straight line, the transformation which warps the line is a relatively simple and invertible mapping which preserves local as well as global features. It might not be a conformal mapping but, say, if the image of a grid is projected through the lens, the projected image will have the same number of divisions and crossings, in the same relation to each other. We cannot say this about an AI-powered transformation which changes a body posture. > What counts as “photography” really? Focusing light via a lens into an exposure plate, from which an image is sampled.
  - foldr 3y ago
    There’s no AI transformation altering her body posture. It’s just that the phone is blending multiple exposures during which she was posing in different ways. The phone doesn’t realize that the images of the women in the mirror correspond to the woman in the center, so it hasn’t felt it necessary to use the same keyframe as the reference for the different parts of the photo. People are jumping to crazy explanations for this when there is a much simpler explanation that’s obvious to anyone who’s ever done a bit of manual HDR. Ironically, the solution to this problem is more AI, not less. The phone needs to understand mirrors in order to make smarter HDR blending decisions. HN has a strangely luddite tendency when it comes to photography. Lots of people are up in arms about phones somehow ruining photography by doing things that you could easily do in a traditional darkroom. (It's not difficult to expose multiple negatives onto the same sheet of photo paper.)

nextaccountic 3y ago

> In the end, this tech just takes control from you. If you're fine with Apple deciding what the subject of pictures should be and how they should look that's fine, but I expect a lot of people wont be. Can't this be disabled? And can't some other product with a similar technology offer knobs for configuring exactly how it behaves?

kaba0 3y ago
It can make a RAW file as well, so just the usual clickbait article/comments.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  It can, but does it? Defaults matter. I wouldn't want to discover that my camera was screwing with me only after I sent the photos of an accident to my insurer, a day after it happened.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. The lens itself introduces flaws/changes as does film and developing. Don't fall into this trap. A lens and computational photography are not alike. One is a static filter, doing simple(ish) transformation of incoming light. The other is arbitrary computation operating in semantic space, halfway between photography and generative AI. Those are qualitatively different. Or, put another way: you can undo effects of a lens, or the way photo was developed classically, because each pixel is still correlated with reality, just modulo a simple, reversible transformation. It's something we intuitively understand, which is why we often don't notice. In contrast, computational photography decorrelates pixels from reality. It's not a mathematical transformation you can reverse - it's high-level interpretation, and most of the source data is discarded. Is this a big deal? I'd say it is. Not just because it rubs some the wrong way (it definitely makes something no longer be a "photo" to me). But consider that all camera manufacturers, phone or otherwise, are jumping on this bandwagon, so in a few years it's going to be hard to find a camera without built-in image-correcting "AI" - and then consider just how much science and computer vision applications are done with COTS parts. A lot of papers will have to be retracted before academia realizes they can no longer trust regular cameras in anything. Someone will get hurt when a robot - or a car - hits them because "it didn't see them standing there", thanks to camera hardware conveniently bullshitting them out of the picture. (Pro tip for modern conflict: best not use newest iPhones for zeroing in artillery strikes.) Ultimately you're right, though: this is an issue of control. Computational photography isn't bad per se. It being enabled by default, without an off-switch, and operating destructively by default (instead of storing originals plus composite), is a problem. It wasn't that big of a deal with previous stuff like automatic color corrections, because it was correlated with reality and undoable in a pinch, if needed. Computational photography isn't undoable. If you don't have the inputs, you can't recover them.

bambax 3y ago
Yes. Also, it seems inevitable that at some points photos that you can't publish on Facebook won't be possible to make. Is a nipple present in the scene? Then too bad, you can't press the shutter.

easyThrowaway 3y ago

The first thing they teach you at any photography course worth its money is that framing the picture itself is a distortion of reality. It's you deciding what's worth being recorded and what should be discarded. There's no "objective photography", no matter how hard we try distinguishing between old and new tech.

esskay 3y ago

> If you're fine with Apple deciding what the subject of pictures should be and how they should look that's fine, but I expect a lot of people wont be. The majority dont care, as the majority are not photographers, nor is it meant to be a product for photographers. Average joe just wants a good photo of that moment, which it does exceptionally well. The tech 'taking control from you' is its exact purpose, as again, not everyone is a photographer. The whole point is to allow 'normal people' to get a good photo at the press of a button, it'd be incredibly foolish and unreasonable to expect them to faff about with a bunch of camera settings so it does it for you.

alt227 3y ago
The bride in the original article doesnt seem to be a photographer, yet she seems to care quite a bit that the photo is not an acurate representation of reality at that moment.
- esskay 3y ago
  Yep and it's one of those very rare occasions where something odd happens. You and I both know fully well that its not 'the norm', hence why average joe couldn't care less.

kaba0 3y ago

Getting a roughly correct image vs a blurry mess doesn’t take control away from you and it is just bullshitting on a non-issue.

throw0101b 3y ago

> No photographer thinks images the they get on film are perfect reflections of reality. More importantly than that: framing, exposure, aperture choices by anyone not simply shooting with their camera in the Auto mode. * https://petapixel.com/digital-camera-modes-a-complete-guide/#Auto_Mode_Green_BoxAUTO https://petapixel.com/digital-camera-modes-a-complete-guide/... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_dial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_dial * https://photographylife.com/understanding-digital-camera-modes https://photographylife.com/understanding-digital-camera-mod...

bhpm 3y ago

The tech doesn’t “just” take control from me. It also exponentially increases the chances that the photo I wanted to take will be the photo that is saved on my device and shared with my friends. It’s just picture of my dog. It’s not that serious.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> It’s just picture of my dog. It’s not that serious. Until you want to send it to your vet, but you can't, because your phone keeps beautifying out the exact medical problem you're trying to image.
- bhpm 3y ago
  When will that happen? I’ve sent phots to my dog’s vet (I go to a doctor for humans myself) but this hasn’t been a problem. If you could let me know when this will happen I’ll make sure I don’t rely on it.

fennecbutt 3y ago

Yes but every photographer strives for a baseline of "as close as possible" otherwise lenses wouldn't be expensive bc "photographers don't strive for reality" so who cares about chromatic aberration, vignetting etc.