Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty. People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.
I know that's true, but I find that the images on my Pixel are starting to have a bit of an eery feel, with some of the details looking more and more like AI generated images. I'd give back a bit of the quality for more "natural" looking images.
I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced. Maybe it's time to get back into Polaroids.
> I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced.
I'd caution that judicious/proper post-processing is actually needed if you want that result, because of the differences between the sensors.
Your human experience comes from many small pictures taken by a set of lenses panning across multiple points in a scene with constantly adjusting exposure times and focal lengths, all biologically composited into what feels like a single moment.
Trying to fully replicate that with a single artificial picture is going to be deficient in certain ways.
---
Separately, a pet peeve of mine: Too many people have been subtly brainwashed into conflating the "like I was really there" with " like a Hollywood film camera was really there." Then the next thing you know your medieval fantasy game has lens flares in it for no good reason.
I recently bought a real camera partially for this reason. I don't even mind how inconvenient it can be at times because honestly taking photos with a full camera rather than your phone is fun. While on the phone it has become quite dull in my opinion.
But knowing that the phone does a lot of software tweaking to get a picture to look similar to how good a full camera is made me want to switch. I think this was around the time that article about Samsung basically replacing a photo of the moon.
Get raw, and marvel at its imperfection and ugliness in many aspects. If given phone ain't giving up raw data, take any decent camera, raw sensor data has been part of it since its beginning.
But those pics will be probably further from perceived reality than those enhanced by software (lets not get retarded here and don't brand every data processing as 'AI'). Distortions not only of barrel type, waning brightness towards edges, moire, heavy vignetting, tons of noise, over/underexposition, maybe some dead pixels... thats not how I see my days go by.
What does this mean? Sure, if generative AI is filling in features that weren't present, anyone would call that doctored or fake. But computational photography is mostly about recognizing patterns and filling in assumed detail... which is also how your visual cortex works.
What makes a Polaroid any more "real" than an iPhone picture to you? Can any photo truly be real? (Deleuze has some interesting thoughts on the matter)
Interpretation of this on its nose suggest the algorithms are the core feature not AI, as there is no artificial intelligence involved in these processes that I’m aware of.
If you actually peak under the hood they just pass through weighted selectors, no different than a switch statement
what about the infamous recognizing the moon in the background that is just an over exposed white fuzzy circle and replacing with a stock image with full surface details? clearly there's some sort of ML/recognition of content within the image
Yes that would be ML as far as I’m aware, but the thing in reference is software compensation for image quality. Effectively smartphones automatically upscale photos by default. I think the only exception is when you choose to shoot in raw
