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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 r

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.)
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > 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. No, the solution is for the phone to stop blending multiple distinct exposures into one photo, because that's the crux of the problem - that's the "AI transformation" right there, decorrelating the photo from reality. > HN has a strangely luddite tendency when it comes to photography. It's not about luddite tendencies (leaving aside the fact that Luddites were not against technology per se - they were people fucked over by capitalist business owners, by means of being automated away from their careers). It's about recognizing that photos aren't just, or even predominantly, art. Photos are measurements, recorded observations of reality. Computational photography is screwing with that.
    - foldr 3y ago
      No general-purpose camera, analogue or digital, functions particularly well as a measurement tool. They are simply not designed for that purpose. Blending multiple exposures is not an "AI transformation". The first iPhone to do HDR was the iPhone 4, introduced in 2010. If you dislike HDR for some reason, no-one is forcing you to use it. There are lots of iPhone apps that will let you shoot a single exposure. That's never going to be the default in a consumer point-and-shoot camera, though, because it will give worse results for 99% of people 99% of the time.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        Cellphones have been capable of HDR for a very very long time and yet none of those older phones were capable of producing a picture like the one in the article. The problem here was not HDR. The problem was using AI to create a composite image by selectively erasing the subject of the photo from parts of the image, detecting that same person found in other photos, then cutting the subject out of those other images and pasting them into the deleted parts of the original picture before filling in the gaps to make it look like it was all one picture. This was absolutely an "AI transformation" as the original article correctly pointed out: > “It’s made like an AI decision and it stitched those two photos together,”
octacat 3y ago
idk, sigma 50mm art will give you pretty straight lines. At least straight enough for people. Why would you even mention it? Are you taking photos of line meshes or something? Life is imperfect. Lens specs are only good for reviews / marketing because it is hard to otherwise compare lenses for there real value. I am fine with control I am getting from the big camera.

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.)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > 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. No, the solution is for the phone to stop blending multiple distinct exposures into one photo, because that's the crux of the problem - that's the "AI transformation" right there, decorrelating the photo from reality. > HN has a strangely luddite tendency when it comes to photography. It's not about luddite tendencies (leaving aside the fact that Luddites were not against technology per se - they were people fucked over by capitalist business owners, by means of being automated away from their careers). It's about recognizing that photos aren't just, or even predominantly, art. Photos are measurements, recorded observations of reality. Computational photography is screwing with that.
  - foldr 3y ago
    No general-purpose camera, analogue or digital, functions particularly well as a measurement tool. They are simply not designed for that purpose. Blending multiple exposures is not an "AI transformation". The first iPhone to do HDR was the iPhone 4, introduced in 2010. If you dislike HDR for some reason, no-one is forcing you to use it. There are lots of iPhone apps that will let you shoot a single exposure. That's never going to be the default in a consumer point-and-shoot camera, though, because it will give worse results for 99% of people 99% of the time.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      Cellphones have been capable of HDR for a very very long time and yet none of those older phones were capable of producing a picture like the one in the article. The problem here was not HDR. The problem was using AI to create a composite image by selectively erasing the subject of the photo from parts of the image, detecting that same person found in other photos, then cutting the subject out of those other images and pasting them into the deleted parts of the original picture before filling in the gaps to make it look like it was all one picture. This was absolutely an "AI transformation" as the original article correctly pointed out: > “It’s made like an AI decision and it stitched those two photos together,”

octacat 3y ago

idk, sigma 50mm art will give you pretty straight lines. At least straight enough for people. Why would you even mention it? Are you taking photos of line meshes or something? Life is imperfect. Lens specs are only good for reviews / marketing because it is hard to otherwise compare lenses for there real value. I am fine with control I am getting from the big camera.