Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration.
If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face detection then it’s probably not something you can (or would want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a tiny sensor in something other than great light (even a heavy overcast is often not enough) will require a lot of software processing. I’m
not sure exactly what happened here but I’m pretty sure everyone asking for “unmodified raw photos” to be produced don’t understand what they are asking for. Those “unmodified” photos would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions.
No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch. The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable. And the times it messes up are so rare that it becomes a talking point worthy of hundreds of comments.
Simply adjusting light levels and sharpness wouldn't produce this good/clear of a photo in the conditions presented - AI/ML image post-processing is a hard requirement for sensors like these.
The "hard requirement" is just multi-frame noise reduction, which has been around for a lot longer than the AI/ML hype wave, and has always had a risk of producing similar artifacts to this one.
Multi-frame noise reduction only gets you so far. Rotating objects for example present huge issues and result in their own artifacts. In the end there isn’t a free lunch, any system that improves resulting images is making trade offs.
I don't know about this - RAW files are recordings of sensor values. Those sensor values are accurate of what light the sensor measured.
Then the sensor values are converted to a JPEG. So it's still an accurate rendition of the light - even though yes, it is a rendition of the light.
But to completely replace some sensor values with some computer-generated values is a different ballgame, IMO. It's more akin to Photoshop editing, as opposed to Lightroom.
This is really splitting hairs, but even our eyes are interpretation of reality.
The camera sensor does not record the wavelengths of lights it is capturing, only RGB values. We can only reproduce the picture in a way that is convincing to our eyes, not what light what original being captured.
The least that modern phone cameras do is to blend multiple RAW files into a single picture, to improve various metrics. That brings the risk of producing results like the one seen here.
I agree with your point, but just to be clear for people:
When you bring that RAW photo into something like Lightroom or Capture One they’re automatically applying a base curve to the photo before you do anything.
In Capture One you can set that to “flat” which I believe is fairly unprocessed, and it takes a lot of work to get it to a usable state from there. They also have other options, and they recently changed their default setting and it’s pretty incredible how different it is from their old default.
There definitely though is some magic-sauce when de-Bayering [1] the RAW data and then playing games with color spaces and color profiles to end up with that final JPEG.
I agree with your point though. I dislike "computational photography".
They surely are. But not all interpretations are alike. I was recenty looking at (scans of) analog pictures I took years ago using an entry level analog camera and apart from white balance being off, the general skin tone + texture and shadows at least looks very realistic and not like some cardboard version of skin.
I was thinking in terms of creatures from Nausicaa and Mononoke but ... that works too I guess ... The difference is whether those accepted the beings live or nothing can be done to those who were touched by it, but that could be just a perspective difference.
Yeah, even your eyes don't reproduce reality perfectly but at that point it's just semantics. He means he wants to see his daughter the same way through the camera that he sees her through his eyes, in real life, otherwise known to him as "reality".
I don't think it's unreasonable to allow context of the statement to allow us to disregard "reality" as it pertains to quantum wave functions, in favor of something more human. There's a large difference in something that's goal is to capture what the eye sees and something that's goal isn't. It feels like Apple thinks they know what's better for us than we do, which I admit it's perfectly capable of doing in certain scenarios. But, when Apples thoughts do not align or go directly against our wishes it's uncomfortable, it feels like your "reality" is being ripped from your hands in favor of what some giant corporation thinks your reality should be, for any large number of opaque or intentionally obscured reasons.
The amount of post-processing your brain does to make you believe you see far more than you actually do in far higher resolution than you do, whilst combining two 2D views into a pseudo-3D view, is incredible.
There's straight-up blank spots in our raw vision, we don't see ~any color at the edges, etc., and that's just the _start_ of what our eyes/brains elide out. Really crazy stuff.
As far as I understand the goal of using ML augmentation in camera phones is to capture what the eye sees. It's to compensate for the limitations of the hardware which on its own is not able to produce a true-to-eye result. You seem to be implying that the goal is to improve the photo to be better than reality but I don't think that's the case.
Right, but it can only guess at what the eye sees when hardware limitations don't allow it to capture enough information. Maybe most of the time it guesses right, but it's still a guess, and it appears sometimes it guesses wrong. Really wrong.
If it's combining information from multiple shots or multiple camera sensors, isn't that more like sensor fusion than "guessing"? I think calling it guessing is an uncharitable interpretation of what's happening.
That's not even remotely close to AI/ML processing, and also is something you have been able to accomplish-- manually or with presets-- in Lightroom for ages.
Yes but the knowledge of how it was created affects how I see it. If it’s just denoising etc it feels different than if I know it’s painted in some other data.
That's not necessarily true, I don't know the specifics of how it's implemented but it could just be used for select pixels from different frames in the shot?
the photographer replied later that it's due to a leaf hanging down from a branch in the foreground. There was a leaf in between the woman's head and the camera lens. Nothing weird happened.
No free lunch is right. iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen. Instagram kids don't know this, but that's ok, because we don't need them to, and neither do they.
Increasingly these photo"graphs" have nothing to do with reality either. I may be part of a weird minority but when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong. Some Chinese manufacturers have taken this to a ridiculous extreme, they make normal friendly faces look outright scary.
Pictures shouldn't be edited by default, the user should be given the option if they want to. And lets not even get started on the fact that we have all these face recognition algos and such in a device constantly connected to the internet, with people taking pictures of themselves and everyone around them. What could go wrong...
This statement requires more precision. A camera sensor usually has more dynamic range than the display can represent. Lenses often introduce distortions. Sensors capture noise. The tint and color temperature of light sources vary greatly. Here's a set of seven images taken at steps along the path starting from as close as a JPEG can represent to the raw sensor data to a finished image that reasonably represents how my eyes saw the scene:
When using a dedicated camera and generating a JPEG in the camera, a similar set of steps is applied automatically. There's no such thing as "no filter" in digital photography; even the "unprocessed RAW" is one program's opinion of how 12 bits per channel should be rendered at 8 bits per channel to display on your screen (as well as downsampled and compressed, in this case). There are often user-selectable profiles that each have a bit of a different look, much as different film stocks produce different looks (Fuji cameras actually call their profiles "film simulations" and name them after the company's film stocks).
So I think what you really mean is that you want the camera to produce an image that appears on a screen as much like what you saw with your eyes as it can.
> when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong
> Pictures shouldn't be edited by default
I don’t think you can have both of these things. In general, if you want to closely reproduce what your eye sees, you’re going to have to do some editing.
> iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen
yea, whith our first child we still used a dedicated camera (compact, no dslr) and there is a very noticeable drop in imagequality after that because we got lazy and use our phones.
then again "the best camera is the one you have with you"
>The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable
It's more than that, it's completely mind blowing when you compare it to a DSLR.
In "good" lightning condition, your iphone will give you a picture 75% as good as what you could get with a 4k$ fullframe DSLR kit that's 10" long and weight a few pounds.
the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that doesn't know much about photography. And if you need to edit your pictures, you don't get those extra stops of exposure up or down because the iphone already needed all the dynamic range of the sensor to create the picture you got.
It would be very interesting to see a colab between apple and a DSLR company to get the best of both world. A large FF senor and lens ecosystem like Canon combined with whatever dark magic Apple is doing on their tiny sensor would have massive potential.
> the problem is when light is not perfect, that's when the bigger lens/sensor are worth it even for a beginner that doesn't know much about photography.
I think the opposite is true, from my (amateur) experience. It's much harder to get a good photo in poor light with a dedicated camera if you don't know what you're doing than it is to get a good photo with a smartphone.
In good light, the better sensors shine through, but in poor light (e.g. and overcast day, not talking about some limit of darkness condition) the superior processing and auto-adjustment of a top-end phone will make for much better photos. Again, talking exclusively about amateur photography, not what a master can do.
Snapping good low light photos really comes down to how fast your lens is (smaller f stop number). A lot of kit lens (the ones sold with cameras, even nice cameras), are surprisingly low quality lens, and don't really open up much. My Sony A7-3 came with a kit lens that opens up to F3.5.
This summer I purchased the 24mm GM F1.4 and WOW does it take fantastic night photos. No tripod needed, it lets in enough light that I can use 1/30+ shutter speed. https://i.imgur.com/CcNEUsM.jpg (photo I took recently. 1/40s, 1.4F, 1250 ISO. No photoshop magic, just basic lightroom adjustments)
Also, the iphone opens up to 1.4f, so you're probably not making a fair comparison to your camera (assuming your lens does open up as much)
EDIT: Sony has a 1.2F 50mm lens I really want to get my hands on, but now I am an entrepreneur so my spending days are over for awhile.
f1.4 on a tiny sensor does not equal f1.4 on a FF sensor.... that's why they have to use "AI" to fake the bokeh. Yea a f1.2 might be nice but you would have to be really skilled to get stuff in focus wit that razor thin dof.
Yes and no - even latest iphone 13 pro / nexus 6 cameras will produce shots that are blurry in shadows due to aggressive noise reduction or let some fugly color noise pass through the alghoritms. You just need to open any night photo on bigger computer screen instead of just phone.
You have much much better starting point with a full frame.
Of course if you compare a clueless FF user with clueless phone user, phone can win but thats an unfair comparison. You don't invest often 5k into photo equipment and then be oblivious of what options it gives you. And even if you don't actively try to improve yourself, just using the camera will get you there (somewhere) eventually. Its not a rocket science, just keep doing it. That's not a "master" level, more like experienced beginner.
And even in the case of ignorant users, all cameras these days have auto setting which is actually pretty good and you can take final jpegs from it, ignoring the power of raw edit completely. Counter-intuitively, holding a bigger camera system steady for a good shot is easier commpared to lightweight, awkwardly-shaped phone.
That all being said, I will invest into some top-end phone next year mainly due to its camera power these days and convenience of always having it with you, and sharing kids photos with family instantly. No more always lugging around 2.5 kg of Nikon D750 with 24-120 lens and good bag. I will not make technically better pictures with it, but in my case other aspects outweight this.
no as in, "computational photography has been a staple of every modern smartphone sold globally for the past 4 years, and this is one of the only examples of problems ever happening for anyone" lunch
Problems of changing skin texture or text or body shape or background details abound, but are normally of a form where it's easier to dismiss or gaslight anyone pointing them out.
That depends entirely on what you consider "messing up"
if it had put that leaf over some other leaves in the background that weren't captured well, would we have noticed? would it be a better photo?
What if it was meant to be a beautiful leaf photo? If you want an accurate representation of reality, the moment, etc, the majority of cellphone photos would be considered "messed up" imo
Indeed. I wish I had a list of everyone parroting the wisdom that "it's all about the size of the lens, a smartphone can never be as good as a DSLR" so as to ignore their future opinions. Camera phones now beat cameras worth thousands of dollars with better software and larger R&D budgets, at least in low light performance and color gamut.
Closely related: "It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable. Lost information ist lost". This was big due to some US TV show at the time, I guess. Here, the error was in the assumption that the information was lost: as it turns out, there's a wide space of possibilities for image quality to be too low for us to easily read some letters, but good enough to contain the clues allowing a smart algorithm to reconstruct them.
> It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable.
Well, a phone can reconstruct this license plate, and in fact any license plate in lieu of this one! And invent a new one!
Which is worrisome for justice. Presenting proof, that was uploaded to servers, horodated and geostamped, won’t be enough in a court of law. Anyone can answer: “What if the iPhone recreated and inferred the presence of a knife using the neural engine? This face, is it real? The distance, is it repositionned?”
> This face, is it real? The distance, is it repositionned?
Deepfakes, robocalls and Caller ID and voice impersonation, automatic ML in photos, if this train keeps going, we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function.
> we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function
That's where we started, in a way. Perhaps our short time of feeling we had a grip on reality will just have been a passing phase, before returning to normality.
the difference is, before media, everyone understood that if they didn't experience something directly, they had to trust someone who spoke, and that speech was always understood to be an interpretation and possibly fiction.
but now we have all these artificial experiences that might clock real to the senses and have a reputation of fidelity, yet have always been editable and are increasingly made of black box constructive interpretations that value who-knows-what over fidelity. and no part of the process can be interrogated for motivations or detail.
Yes, this is getting better, but it reminds me of a story from a friend who was doing work on some classified satellite imaging systems (he was in hardware, iirc) and went to an internal seminar/briefing by some experts on how, from the front to the end of the system, to get the best images for the customers.
He said they went through hours of details on how the various enhancement algorithms and systems worked, and at the end, the bottom line was basically 'take a better picture in the first place' - as in get the lens, lighting, and parameters right in the first place, and that'll be the biggest factor in how far the processing HW/SW/people can take the enhancements.
Maybe the new software with huge R&D budgets is now better, but I'd suspect this advice is still not obsolete...
I saw your post got a down vote, however for eg any given webcam, the best way to improve your video for your mmeetings is likely not to upgrade the camera but to invest in better lighting (eg a couple of key lights) and optimise your visual setup (framing).
It is good advice indeed.
Still, it's amazing how processing has evolved. I took a picture of my 3yo daughter having finally fallen asleep after a bout of night terrors, in the dark light (using a Hue Ambiance in her room; best things ever) - in the S21 Ultra viewfinder I could see absolutely nothing, however after 3 seconds of a steady hand I was rewarded with a fantastic picture better lit than what my eyes had adjusted to.
(If I had any complaints, it would be that I'd like it to be darker - however I can understand why on average most would like the processed result.)
I definitely agree with the lighting bit, and I think that was indeed included in the category of "first, take a better picture". So yes, focus, exposure, no motion blur, etc...
In theory what prevents me from using a huge lens and sensor on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and then using the same advanced software but now running on a desktop computer or a server that is many times more powerful than a smartphone to do advanced post processing?
The iphone’s depth sensor is one factor. I don’t know of any lidar integrated cameras that aren’t phones, for example.
Also, because phone cameras have gotten so good, the skill floor for what you’re talking about is higher. There’s more skill involved in using software like lightroom than you might think. I’m a hobbyist photographer, and sometimes my iphone just seems more skillful than I am using my nicer camera and Lightroom.
It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power.
DSLR and mirrorless cameras have better optical properties. But they are held back by starting too late and being much worse when it comes to software. These cameras also are limited by their CPUs, which are a decade behind, and by their batteries, which are much smaller but expected to last for thousands of exposures.
> recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks
I mean, sure, but the A15 bionic is much more power constrained and effectively has less 'GPUs' and cores than the M1, likely because the SoC is also constrained by its size within the phone housing.
But that CPU shouldn't really do anything other than shoveling raw sensor data to flash as fast as possible. All the processing can happen on your workstation (or an iPad or whatever).
My Corsair H150i Pro AIO water cooler and decent airflow case (Define 7 W/Corsair ML140s) allows me to run my Ryzen 3900XT at 4.4ghz constantly, all cores, for any kind of real life workload.
The M1-Max at 30W seems to have tge same Geekbench 5 multicore benchmark score as the Ryzen 3900XT at 105W. Think about that.
Also a better single core score. You won't be using all cores all the time.
Hell, one of the major selling points of the most recent iphones is prores recording! Dump half a second of that into a file. If that means a half-full phone can only fit a thousand photos before it's emptied, then sure I'll take it.
> It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there's still a huge issue with silicon processing capabilities/power when it comes to image sensors (which is why camera sensors buffer images between shots). I unfortunately don't remember the context but it said something that it was (very far) from possible to actually get all the sensor data into the processor and as a result you only take a small fraction of the actual incident light/photos practically.
This isn’t true, really: there are massive amounts of data being pushed about in a modern camera, through custom image pipelines that will do many gigabytes per second of throughout, but none of those are really bottlenecks for the sensor data per se.
Most of it ends up in a RAM-like write buffer, because SD cards, or even faster formats like CF-express, can’t keep up with the write speed of tens of 50 megapixel shots coming through every second.
There are sensor readout speed limits, which is why you don’t see cameras exceed 30 frames per second of 8k recording, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t read out the entire full-well capacity of the sensor each of those frames.
I had to check that, as these big chunky camera batteries “feel” like they should have a lot of mAH compared to a phone.
And I am wrong. Depending on the phone.
A Nikon battery: 2280 mAh.
An iPhone 13: anywhere from 2406–4352 mAH.
Yeah, that’s a way smaller power budget than a Pro iPhone, especially as you have autofocus and image stabilization systems that have to move around a lot more mass.
It is not accurate to compare the capacity in Amp-hours because the Nikon EN-EL15C battery has twice the voltage (two Li-ion cells in series) of a single-cell smartphone battery.
As well I'd like to add the thought that the smart phone could be running all kinds of battery draining things in the background. So actual battery life depends not only mAh but how efficiently the device uses its capacity.
And the camera batteries are replaceable. Quickly. In the field. There are also "battery grips" that have extra battery slots in them and automatically switch between the batteries. The camera never has to sit on a charger, only a spare battery does.
Alternatively: I'd point out that the camera app tends to be a highly battery-draining activity on a phone. Most phone users do not leave the camera app up 24/7.
(And as a digital camera user - at least I can hot swap batteries. I miss my old cell phones that allowed for this.)
Napkin math: 7V/2280mAh = 16Wh or equivalent to 3.7V/4300mAh (USB power banks are always measured and marked in 3.7V and mAh as unit to produce largest comparable numbers)
Keep in mind that my Nikon really only consumes power when it's _doing_ something. I can leave my camera "on" for months at a time and come back to a fully charged battery.
The screen is off except when I'm previewing a photo. The viewfinder is physical. The metering is only on for 10-20 seconds after I wake the camera by touching the shutter release and is only displaying on a low power monochromatic LCD. Autofocus only happens while I'm holding the shutter release until it finds focus then locks.
Meanwhile the iPhone battery is powering what is, effectively, an entire laptop with a 5+" screen and cellular, wifi and bluetooth radios.
Articles I can find are quoting an iPhone taking a few hundred shots on a charge. Nikon's testing puts my camera able to take a few _thousand_ per charge. There's literally an order of magnitude difference from my Nikon's 1400mAh battery to a iPhone's 2500-4500mAh battery. Two to three times the capacity for 1/10 the pictures.
That comparison doesn’t work for newer mirrorless cameras. I have a DSLR and mirrorless strapped to my body at each wedding and I go through more than twice the amount of batteries in the mirrorless.
They also take a second or so to wake from standby which is super annoying for my job, so I have it set to 5 minutes. That essentially means it never goes in to standby on a wedding day.
held back? why on earth would anyone want the camera to do more then just give you a raw image file back? if you don't want to be creative then yea i guess go with a phone and let it make all the choices for you.
Nope. The image data _is_ actually lost. What happens is that it gets pimped with what on average was lost when a training process artificially degraded a training set. For the results to look(sic) natural, you need both the training set and the degradation to be close to what you're shooting. If that is not the case, hallucination happens.
> Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration.
Can't replace sensor area with anything other than more sensor area. Week ago I got the perfect demo of that when I filmed a happening at around 10pm with only some dim garden lights off the scene for light. Some other people had their iPhones, I had an f2 lens on my Z6 - while the videos from the iPhones looked like crap even on the phone screens, basically just blobs of dark noise, the Nikon produced a remarkably clean 4K video - at ISO 16000 or so - that made it look like the scene was lit by floodlights.
With video you can’t “cheat”. You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo. That’s what phones to quite well. You only have 1/24s (say) to get the shot before you need to get the next one.
I bet an Iphone12 would have made better stills than my aging canon 60D which I try to keep at 1600 or lower. And that’s pretty remarkable to be honest.
> You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo.
Oh, but you can. A full second would make for a very choppy video of course so you don't have as long in which to do it as you might for a still, but there are benefits to be gained and the Pixel 6 series does exactly that.
I don't understand, why is this ruled out? Assuming that phones reach a point where this is computationally cheap, what would be so hard about having a sliding window for each frame in the video?
Nothing prevents that, but if there is a lot of movement (which would be the point of using video) then the great results aren’t as easy to get. You can’t take a still of someone dancing in a dark room with an iPhone, you can take a still of someone standing reasonably still in a dark room.
Isn't this a similar problem to the blurry-face vs. leaf-face issue discussed? If yes, then one would hand it off to computation to figure out which parts matter and need doctoring, except scaled up to video.
Modern phones take long exposures and try to make sense of it by analyzing it.
Basically, a one second really dark video can be summed up into one very blurry but bright enough photo.
But if you carefully move each frame to compensate for camera movement when summing it up - you might also get a sharp picture. But then the subject moves, or a leaf moves, and the algorithm has to decide which parts of the photo should be a priority for not being blurry. And that would be faces, usually. So the camera now needs to decide what is a face and what isn’t. Just to take one single telephoto picture.
Only doing “in camera processing” like a 2015 digital camera with some sharpening, color curves etc doesn’t cut it anymore. If your phone does that, it’ll be laughed at. Phones these days need to do clever long exposure stacking with image recognition and all.
Wouldn't they even move different parts of the scene differently for summing up? And the summing is for denoising, not for rising levels out of darkness, so it would be perfectly fine to sum only the parts where there is plenty of confidence about the movement, leaving others noisy (or, if more noisy than one would like to admit, de-noise spatially instead of temporally in those places, which brings us back to blurry. Add an "unsharp mask" step to compensate and you get that watercolors look we all know).
Back to moving different parts differently: this seems very similar to the motion prediction parts of video encoding. I wonder if and how much the stacking algorithms make direct use of elements of the video encoding implementations those cameras also have?
Does anything like that exist as a computer-attachable cam, e.g. for Linux? Or are we stuck with <2015 cameras unless they come as part of a smartphone?
How raw is “raw”? If you take a long exposure in a dark room with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than it should. Would a “raw” version of that photo be a traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a short video sequence? (that would actually make the most sense)
I have an iPhone11 but not sure that has the raw option.
If you use a third-party app like Camera+ to shoot RAW, then it is the raw, completely unprocessed sensor data as a DNG file, like any DSLR. Shooting RAW on the ultra-wide camera in a dark environment results in a completely unusable image.
If you use the iOS camera on an iPhone 12 or newer and enable the "ProRAW" option (which is shown as just "RAW" in the camera), you get a processed image, but with the data used as a base for the processing intact for re-processing when you edit it.
Recent iPhones (and many Android phones) have optical image stabilization; an element in the lens moves to compensate if the phone shakes during the exposure. Very new iPhones (and some Android devices) also have sensor-shift image stabilization, which moves the image sensor.
These features are also available on many dedicated cameras and interchangeable camera lenses.
I don't have an iPhone but I've always been shooting RAW on my phones and then processed the photos in LightRoom. As soon as I use one of the "lenses" on my phone (like "night shot" or "panorama" or even "wide angle"/"tele") I only get a JPG. The RAW file is only created when I shoot using the basic camera. This is the case for my current OnePlus but also previous phones (Google, Nokia).
A) I'm not sure what nit you are picking, RAW formats are typically not compressed, and if they are (I haven't encountered any personally) they would be losslessly compressed. They certainly aren't quantized.
B) the context is whether a raw photo can be "manipulated" in any way. The answer is a resounding yes. See: Darpa MediFor project. Search for work by Siwei Lyu (I'm on mobile and don't feel like digging through the links, there's tons of published work out there)
RAW photos are not “just” uncompressed versions of the JPEGs your camera usually gives you. That would be a TIFF. Rather, they contain raw sensor data.
Yes I'm aware, I've had to debayer imagery from industrial cameras and worked on media forensics. I think we are on the same page but commenting past each other.
The problem is vendors all seem to have their own definition of what RAW means nowadays. But the typical meaning is one with the raw pixels via color filter array (eg bayer8), and need debayering (to get the usual rgb8).
You can have raw/Bayer Tiffs, I've worked with them. So the file format is not enough, you gotta know the image encoding.
"RAW just means uncompressed" yes that is technically wrong, but the point I'm addressing is "You can still manipulate a RAW image" and "without the painting-like qualities of its default image processing." It does not matter what the color encoding is, you can still do painting-like processing. I've literally worked on detectors that detect manipulation of RAW, Bayer array images. This is not theoretical.
I guess what I am saying is, Apple giving the user a raw/.dng file is not a guarantee you are actually getting the ADC output straight from the sensor.
Really, the operant question is "what is the processing provenance of this image".
> everyone asking for “unmodified raw photos” to be produced don’t understand what they are asking for. Those “unmodified” photos would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions.
I’m asking for unmodified raw photos and modified ones. Or I would be if Megapixels didn’t already give me both on my GNU/Linux smartphone. The processed versions of the photo’s I’ve taken look great IMO, but I don’t see the harm in keeping the raws around, they’d probably be quite useable for producing even better edited versions if I were to import them into a full desktop image manipulaton program and let it process them with desktop power and more than a couple seconds of time to do it. And I’d think Apple would be be happy to sell bigger overpriced emmcs and iCloud subscriptions to SD-slotless iPhone users with raw image filled phones, and/or pop up a notification to delete them all with a tap when space was low.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here. They definitely did not ask for their face to be replaced by leaves either. Is it either unmodified, or leaves? Is not there a middle ground?
They asked for their phone to make a best effort to stack many pictures into one, cleverly aligning objects as well as possible.
And the camera failed. The alternatives would have been an extremely dark picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an extremely blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face.
> The alternatives would have been an extremely dark picture of a person without a leaf-face, or an extremely blurry picture of a person without a leaf-face.
If that truly is the case, then.. woah. It definitely failed.
This is the "smart HDR" option on an iPhone, described as "In difficult lighting, the best parts of multiple exposures are combined into a single image".
So there is the middle ground of disabling this. Or, alternatively, just not caring about such an error once in a million shots.
(as an aside, I'm pretty sure the structure of the leaves is responsible for this error, as it's an area with usually many strong edges in a somewhat repetitive pattern. That invites misalignments.
Yeah. If I tap "Selfie" on my stock Android 11, I can see my face being smoothed out. I can tell that it is modified. If I have an issue with it, I can disable it. :)
But it would be nice to be able to re-run that software processing later if you can see it has done something silly, right? That at least seems like a valid use for "unmodified" image data.
I believe the Google Camera does this. Not sure if it preserves the original photo before any color corrections, but it allows me to go back and added, remove or change any blur.
Or, maybe, knowing that releasing software that turns out to deliver markedly lower quality results for people already weary from centuries of marginalization would open them up to such accusations, they didn't get lucky so much as their are enjoying the benefit of having listened to such criticism, testing their software across a set of data as diverse as their customers, instead of just that set of photos from D'Brickshaw Ferguson's and Abigail Cumberbatch's wedding.
Here people are like “lol Apple” and understand it’s the fault of the software and there isn’t incipient malice intended. Whereas on the other hand people are apt to make it into something it isn’t.
Zoom showed lots of glitches for all kinds of people -when using "backgrounds", but "Twitter people" latched on to certain outcomes --and Zoom is heavily developed overseas.
If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face detection then it’s probably not something you can (or would want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a tiny sensor in something other than great light (even a heavy overcast is often not enough) will require a lot of software processing. I’m not sure exactly what happened here but I’m pretty sure everyone asking for “unmodified raw photos” to be produced don’t understand what they are asking for. Those “unmodified” photos would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions.