Ask HN: What is your opinion on computational photography?

All digital photography is computational, the question is which computation should be aplied and when/where.

In general companies want to create phones which take photos the customer likes, with as little effort as possible. As it turns out people do not want to see accurate photos with natural colors. They certainly do not want to see ugly people or boring scenes, irregardless of the photo being taken.

Like many things phone cameras are a thing which is for people uninterested in the thing itself.

I have my smart phone camera for capturing memories and I have my 3 mirror less cameras for creating art. Seems a good balance. I'm fine with it on phones where I just want to frame and snap and not deal with exposure bracketing and white balance.

This might be nostalgia talking but when I look back at the cellphone photos that I took 10 years ago, they managed to capture the color and light just as I remember, albeit being grainy and of very low resolution. My friends share absolutely gorgeous photos of these beautiful places they've been to and when I go to those same places, I see that the leaves are actually more brownish-green than the saturated hue of green that they captured. Or the water isn't really this turquoise blue that they showed but instead just normal clear water (still pretty). I feel like computational photography is unintentionally altering our memories of these places.

It should be called augmented photography instead.

Photographer here, shooting film since the 70s. Yes, computational photography has made some great advances. In the 90s, I was of the opinion that digital photography would be limited by technology much longer than it turned out. I estimated the size and complexity of the sensors and the megapixels required to equal a 35mm frame, much less medium format, would be cost-prohibitive for another 20+ years. It turned out that the people who knew how to process pixels had more influence than the hardware makers. It doesn't take 50-60MP, but 12MP will do when computational photography is in play.

But technical perfection is not the only determining factor in great photographs. The computational photography people are essentially the gearheads of years past. Yes, there are places where pin-sharp focus and a near-complete lack of distortion, coma, and chromatic aberrations are necessary. But a tack-sharp photograph that is "correctly" exposed is not automatically a great photograph.

Among the most famous and recognizable photographs in the portfolio of Ansel Adams is "Moonrise Over Hernandez, NM". And yet, the negative is at least a stop underexposed and a bitch to print. At least, so I'm told by an acquaintance who worked as one of his assistants for a while. Adams at one point used a chemical intensifier on the foreground of the negative to up the contrast[1].

> Phones' default behavior should be to capture the photo as true to real life as possible

Unfortunately, there is no process capable of capturing the world the way the eyes see it. In his 1985 paper, "A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image"[2] Brian Winston made clear that every photograph is a compromise from "reality", and the nature of those compromises is determined by ideology and culture.

1 http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/grant/ansel-adams-...

2 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025012

I guess it is a fact that what I consider as "true to real" photos from professional cameras are still being modified by the sensor processing algorithms. But thing is, even as a novice photographer, I can figure out and predict how the algorithm will behave and then change my settings accordingly. I feel like with computational photography, it is a blackbox sorta deal where I am always being pressured to adapt to how the cellphone is thinking and not vice versa. More often than not, the picture I capture with my cellphone looks very different than when it was being displayed in the live preview. That part is the one that frustrates me the most.

> More often than not, the picture I capture with my cellphone looks very different than when it was being displayed in the live preview. That part is the one that frustrates me the most.

Is this an android thing? The ones I take on my iphone look identical to the live preview

I love what Google does with it on the pixel phones. All of them take pictures exactly like how I see the scene and I love that

That's a Samsung and sometimes iPhone choice. The Pixels have the best computational photography and they look very natural.

Thanks for asking OP!

My photography back before I deleted Instagram was focused mostly on landscapes and architecture -- when I got my start folks would talk about "the camera you have", and this was just as 4+ megapixel point and shoots were getting into the sub 300 range -- folks complain about "smartphones" but the future that mirrorless lenses has brought us is one that was only delayed by folks like me who refuse to carry a bulky DSLR all day let alone multiple lenses in a cute little bag. [snorts audibly]

I don't think things people have thought through very basic things about computational photography.

For example, Pennsylvania fought hard to not be part of Real ID[0]... but people move around.

I know they scanned my face when I moved to the District of Columbia.

In fact, I specifically commented at one point to a friend it was as if there was a set of folks who wanted for privacy for the wrong reasons, and that they were making a game of connecting me with job interviews folks could treat like free consulting sessions so they could continue engaging in... really rude behavior.

Then again, sometimes people say one thing and mean another -- I know that now, just like I did when I got my first DSLR from Newegg the last time I lived in the city I'm currently living in.

That's a thing you can do -- say one thing and mean another, but that's more for like... a, but the problem becomes you might have some chicken fingers loving autist pump the brakes and quiet part out loud.

The quiet part being "we're not in high school, or at least I'm not, so if you act as exhausting as folks acted in the 2000s, I can just start strangling you then tell the judge it was self defense, just like as I disussed at multiple conferences, I can do the same "claim self defense to the judge" for defense for cyber -- so keep fucking around, and you might keep finding out in ways other than a legally permitted passive aggressive rant on the orange site.

Then again, I hate people, that's why lately I mostly take photos of slugs.

(I've seen a LOT more, larger, in a short timespan, than ever in my life.. they used to be either a different species, much smaller, or they're living longer, because the ones when I was a kid were less than an inch long and really only came out after an intense rain... I saw one the size of my pinkie the other day for the third time in a month, and it's getting cold.)

Also, sorry that this got posted while I was drafting -- unlike the King of North Korea or whatever, I'm not literally a god -- sometimes I make mistakes.

- "Greg"

I'm so confused

No worries, it's purposeful ambiguity day at the cloud factory