"Clean Up is best explained by this famous photo editing example . . . This tool allows you to capture a moment in time as you wish it happened, not as it actually happened."
FALSE. Apple defines a photo as a record of something that actually happened. iPhones take photos. They doen't auto-swap a high-res moon in for the real one like Samsung phones do.
Clean Up (like crop) is just an editing feature, manually applied after a photo already exists, and using it effectively changes the image from a photo into an "edited image", the same way using Photoshop does.
Definitions of What a Photo Is:
Apple - "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.
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."
- John McCormack, VP of Camera Software Engineering @ Apple
Samsung - "Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop."
- Patrick Chomet, Executive VP of Customer Experience @ Samsung
Google - "It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond."
- Isaac Reynolds, Product Manager for Pixel Cameras @ Google
I hate that we have spent the last 20 or so advancing digital cameras to the point where a everyone has an amazing DSLR in their pocket and now we're at the point in history where we have to define what a photograph is, because everyone is trying to shoehorn some shitty AI image gen thing into our cameras for a quick profit
Frustrating to me, too, as someone who has recently gotten back into photography and it's difficult to know whether the photos I am using as inspiration are actually real or so highly edited that I'd never be able to achieve something similar.
It's one thing to use masks to edit highlights/shadows/color balance for certain areas (skies, buildings, people, etc) but it's an entirely different thing to completely replace the sky, or remove objects because they aren't "appealing"
> It's one thing to use masks to edit highlights/shadows/color balance for certain areas (skies, buildings, people, etc) but it's an entirely different thing to completely replace the sky, or remove objects because they aren't "appealing"
Almost as long as we've had photos, we've been removing "unappealing" things from them. Famously Stalin had Nikolai Yezhov removed from a photo after he was "purged", but the Soviet Union in general is full of these instances.
More lightheartedly, Disney supposedly (though this seems to be subject to some debate) has airbrushed a number of photographs of Walt Disney to remove cigarettes from them. And perhaps most famously of all, Han only shot first if you were born before 1997.
I mean, I get it, it's a whole can of worms. Also, sorry, little late to the reply here!
I think there's like a couple of major areas where it concerns me I guess. The first is when we use these types of technologies to fool people, especially (recently) politically.
The other is when we are talking about photography as art.
For someone's home photos, I really don't much mind. Do as you please I guess, if you want to remember the time and place differently than it was, so be it lol.
But it's really wild that in some cases we have art that starts as a photograph and then becomes something else entirely after editing. It takes all the patience, planning, understanding and in my opinion gratification out of it when you can just say "yea, replace the sky with this fake one so my picture looks incredibly unrealistic"
Those are the two that tend to cause me the most head shaking lately I guess.
> I think there's like a couple of major areas where it concerns me I guess. The first is when we use these types of technologies to fool people, especially (recently) politically.
While I share the concern over the use of tech to fool people, I think my example shows that using it to fool people politically is nearly as old as the tech itself. And realistically, it's the fooling thats the problem. The fraud of claiming this thing represents truth when it does not. But not only is that as old as the tech of photography itself, it can be done even without manipulating the photo. Don't have a massive crowd to your political rally? Just tighten the angles you take the photo from and don't show the empty arena in its entirety. Or maybe you want to convey a sense of wild recklessness and a breakdown of civility, just get a few closeups of a single trash can on fire and imply its representative of the larger scene.
As for the art, I feel like this is just the same discussion about art we always have. What is art? The tech is new so people are throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, but eventually it will fall into its place as a tool in the tool belt, just like every other technology before. A lot of people I'm sure felt the same way about CGI in movies, but does the fact that you didn't have to shoot everything for real and wire RDJ to a plane 20k feet in the air in an Iron Man suit make the Avengers any less "art" than any other film is? We'll probably see the same sort of people making entire careers out of the skills necessary to get the most out of an AI system just like they do for getting the most out of CGI systems today. Heck, we can probably look forward to the trend of "AI free" art in 20-30 years, just like we're seeing the trend of "CGI free" movies today.
We're at that point in history BECAUSE everyone has a DSLR in their pocket.
Image quality on modern phones is in large part due to a lot of image processing done by the phone. Multiple photos being taken, combined for least blur and best dynamic range, colour balanced to best represent skin tones etc.
The line between the sort of algorithms that run on an iPhone and inserting a moon is largely philosophical rather than technical. It's an extremely important philosophical line! But the sort of things that have been added are the logical continuation of the sort of work that the camera teams have been doing.
[For context, I'm a Google Pixel owner, but of those three statements the Apple one is the one I agree the most with]
I’d agree with your assessment of what Apple considers a photograph if I could turn off the post-processing that turns everything in the background into a smeary, blobby mess.
That’s Portrait Mode. You only get that if you change from Photo mode to Portrait mode in the Camera app, or in later OSes by retroactively applying a Portrait effect in Edit mode. The addition of the latter feature also made it possible to retroactively remove the Portrait Mode effect from a photo, as long as you have the actual source asset and not a rendered JPEG/HEIC with the effect baked in.
If you mean the fake bokeh that blurs the background, turn off portrait mode.
You can toggle "pro raw" in the default camera app. It captures a lot more information from the sensor. The files are a lot larger, it isn't throwing away information that isn't visible like in the shadows. This gives you more flexibility like changing color balance and exposure after the fact because of that extra data. But there is still some sharpening and post processing.
You can use the camera app inside lightroom or "procamera" or other apps and take raw photos, where it records all of the sensor data without any post processing. Most people don't want this, you need to develop the images using software like lightroom to look good.
This comment and the article they came from are a perfect snapshot of this moment. The fact that major players at each company have made public statements about the philosophical definition of what a photo is. I mean, of course they have. Of course. The times be wild.
FALSE. Apple defines a photo as a record of something that actually happened. iPhones take photos. They doen't auto-swap a high-res moon in for the real one like Samsung phones do.
Clean Up (like crop) is just an editing feature, manually applied after a photo already exists, and using it effectively changes the image from a photo into an "edited image", the same way using Photoshop does.
Definitions of What a Photo Is:
Apple - "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. 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." - John McCormack, VP of Camera Software Engineering @ Apple
Samsung - "Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop." - Patrick Chomet, Executive VP of Customer Experience @ Samsung
Google - "It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond." - Isaac Reynolds, Product Manager for Pixel Cameras @ Google
Definitions via https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252231/lets-compare-app...