[Auracle]

So when I took an 8 second exposure of the aurora on Friday and then used Capture One to process the raw to make it more vivid than it was in real life - is that a record of what was?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not super keen on AI type stuff in cameras as a whole. The line is muddy though. A smartphone camera straight up can’t capture the moon well, or at all. If it then looks more like it did in real life after processing is that better or worse than my above example?

[TeMPOraL]

How often do you capture auroras or other beauty shots, vs. readouts on your electricity meter, stickers on the back of your furnace, receipts, and a hundred other displays and documents you need to send someone? I definitely do plenty of the latter, and in such cases, I'd really appreciate the AI to not spice things up with details it thinks should be there.

I'm by no means against the feature. Hell, I shoot 90% of my family photos in Portrait mode on my Galaxy phone, which does some creative bluring and probably some other magic[0]. I just really appreciate being able to turn the magic on or off myself. That, and knowing exactly what the magic is[1].

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[0] - I don't know what exactly it does, but switching from normal to Portrait mode is all it takes for my photos to suddenly look amazing, as judged by my wife, vs. plain sucking.

[1] - See e.g. "scene optimizer" in Galaxy phones. It's a toggle on normal photo mode. I have no first clue what it does, I can't see any obvious immediate difference between shots taken with vs. without that feature.

[pavlov]

When I'm taking a picture of a receipt or sticker behind a machine, I don't actually want a literal photograph of the entire scene but just a reproduction of the text content.

Any environmental lighting, color and texture of the desk, and all other visual detail are only a distraction.

So if the camera would recognize this intent and just give me the receipt looking like it came from a scanner, that would in fact be a great improvement. So I think your example is in fact a point in favor of having AI meddle with most photos that people shoot.

[Auracle]

My job the last 10 years was a photographer, and I still take a lot of photos of my kids, dog, wife, etc.

[dendrite9]

I recently took a picture of a lizard on a granite with large grains. When I zoomed in to identify the type of lizard I saw that all the grains and some leaves on a tree had been simplified with some type of swirl. I find it unlikely those swirls were artifacts of the sensor itself. My assumption is the effect is related to compression given how often it repeated but I'm not sure.