| > There is nowhere to go, not with the available physical space. I think that taking a classical digital still image on a tiny sensor is probably soon going to hit an "ISO-wall", but so far we haven't started doing much trickery with the images apart from simple noise/sharpness/toning treatments. I think smartphones will lead the development of "cheats" to get better images. Imagine taking a portrait of 3 people in low-light by exposing a 1 second film (maybe including a couple of flashes). The processor then works (very hard) to build together single frame in which everyone's eyes are open, the moving subjects are frozen and sharp, and the shadow detail is pulled from the dark background by averaging out the noise from the thousands of frames. I think the accelerometer should be used to trace the movement during this exposure, which can be used in combination with the anti-shake blur removal algorithms which are being introduced into various programs now. Add to this some other technologies like deep learning that can be used to "guess" what's in a region of an image where we have noisy, obscured or OOF data. I'm optimist, I think we will see not better classical images, but just better images. There will be lots of crazy "three-eyes"-artifacts produced by this, just like we see when programs try to stitch panoramas. Also, it will upset photography purists to no end. It will question the entire notion of what a photograph is. |