Apple and Google Diverge on Photography Philosophy (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0175029045
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/09/18/1851258/apple-and-google-diverge-on-photography-philosophy
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/24247538/apple-iphone-16-pro-review
> I asked Apple's VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack about Google's view that the Pixel camera now captures "memories" instead of photos, and he told me that Apple has a strong point of view about what a photograph is -- that it's something that actually happened. It was a long and thoughtful answer, so I'm just going to print the whole thing:
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> "Here's our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it's a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.
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> "Whether that's a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that's got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid's first steps, or my parents' last breath, It's something that really happened. It's something that is a marker in my life, and it's something that deserves to be celebrated.
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> "And that is why when we think about evolving in the camera, we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It's been around for 198 years. People seem to like it. There's a lot to learn from that. There's a lot to rely on from that.
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> "Think about stylization, the first example of stylization that we can find is Roger Fenton in 1854 -- that's 170 years ago. It's a durable, long-term, lasting thing. We stand proudly on the shoulders of photographic history."
Further reading : [3]'There is No Such Thing as a Real Picture,' Says Samsung Exec .
[1] https://www.theverge.com/24247538/apple-iphone-16-pro-review
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/google-pixel-9-real-tone-pixel-camera-interview/
[3] https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/02/05/1357246/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-real-picture-says-samsung-exec
Re: (Score:2)
B-b-but google is a private company so the first amendment doesn't apply!.. (Nevermind all the DARPA grants and some purchases of software from In-Q-Tel..) /s You have to have your rights limited by the government face of the security state, or it doesn't count!
To bad we can only have 1 option. (Score:1)
Call me crazy, but what if there was a button? AI-enhanced on, AI-enhanced off? I take photos to augment my memory, the point is so that my natural intelligence doesn't modify the memory.
Apple does lots of processing (Score:5, Informative)
This is just typical Apple bullshit.
You're never seeing direct sensory data turned into exact rgb values on their phones. There's a shit ton more math going on behind the scenes. Color tweaks. Sharpness tweaks. Focus tweaks. Google gives more powerful options for editing the photos that come out, is all.
Meanwhile, for decades, people have been editing their digital images in photoshop or similar. Meanwhile, for over a century, people have been practicing advanced film development techniques like dodging and burning, but also outright manipulation.
Re:Apple does lots of processing (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it takes a lot of math to duplicate the photons passing through the camera lens into nearly identical photons emitted from the LCD panel, but what Google is talking about is things like swapping faces in a photo or removing people entirely.
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds to me like Apple is worried that they're losing the photography war, that Google is doing a better job of giving people the photos they want.
Personally, I really like the fact that my Pixel gives me a group photo with everyone's eyes open, even if there was no single millisecond in which no one was blinking[*], just for one example. My family with iPhones all take several shots of each group photo in attempt to increase the odds that one of them is good. I get one shot and know it will be good --
Jon McCormack has never set foot in a darkroom (Score:3)
Since the very first picture of something real was developed, people have been doing photography to create the surreal or the outright unreal. Image manipulation especially for the purposes of making a picture more ideal in the eyes of the viewer / photographer is as old as the camera itself.
As for celebrating the moment, if your wedding photographer took a snap at a weeding and gave them to you on a USB stick you'd likely refuse to pay them. The correct answer is somewhere in between these extremes. Yes Google is right, we celebrate memories and try to preserve the memory. No one wants a photo with a piece of trash lying around unless your distinct memory was how dirty that landscape was. We crave manipulation to remind us of the what we want to remember.
Adobe (Score:3)
Someone should tell Apple that one of their biggest software partners is giving people the tools to turn photographs of "what happened" into "what the photographer actually wanted to take a picture of" for a really long time now: Adobe Systems.
Seems to me that Apple owes a whole lot of their still existing to pro photographers wanting to edit photos using their hardware.
Good for JD (Score:1)
JD can create a photo of himself cooking up the neighbor's cat, like he remembers doing.
Didn't Apple do AI photos first? (Score:2)
Didn't apple do AI photo improvements a long time ago? How is this different?
As open to interpretation (Score:3)
"You can't take a picture of this, it's already gone."
- Nate, Six Feet Under
photography and pixels. (Score:3)
Went to a seminar about photography. Was from some famous photographer. Dude shows big picture of older naked lady. Scarred from surgery. "This was my wife. She died of cancer, what are your thoughts?" He then took his time to hear out everyone in the room. Eye opener.
Re: (Score:3)
That's a good point for the Instagram-selfie use case which is quite significant among the iPhone userbase.
It sounds more like Apple extolling the virtues of Lightning connectors while their labs were building USB-C boards.
Check back here next June and let's see if Apple has discovered "Perceptual Reality Imaging".
Wayback this for the USPTO dispute. ;)
Photo vs. Painting (Score:2)
> Google is helping people fix their shitty photos and Apple is stepping aside and letting the majority of their users keep taking crappy photos
Yes and no. I think what most people want is reality captured in the best way possible. Tweaking colours, contrast etc. is fine but "creating the moment the way you remember it" is going far beyond that. Indeed, it strikes me more as a description of a painting because to achieve that requires subjective, artistic interpretation. This is not a photograph.
That's not to say it might not be a fun feature - after all paintings we how we captured reality before we had cameras - but if they are going that rou