Apple and Google Diverge on Photography Philosophy (theverge.com) 39
Apple's VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack has affirmed the company's commitment to traditional photography in an interview, contrasting with Google's "memories" approach for Pixel cameras. (A Google executive said last month of the AI usage in the pictures Pixel smartphone owners take: "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.") The Verge: 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:
"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.
"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.
"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: 'There is No Such Thing as a Real Picture,' Says Samsung Exec.
"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.
"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.
"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: 'There is No Such Thing as a Real Picture,' Says Samsung Exec.
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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
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There's something particularly chilling about the phrase "The way you remember it".
Eyewitness testimony is surprisingly unreliable. Biases and beliefs strongly color what you think you saw happen. Do we really WANT the phones that are recording the police shooting an unarmed man in the back to actually record it as if the man is shooting at the police first?
Re:Photo vs. Painting (Score:4, Insightful)
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 route they should make very sure that nobody mistakes it for a photograph of objective reality.
Exactly.
This idea is great; if you can turn it on and off. Or even better, if it's a Separate App, like iOS' Photo Booth. And even even better if it's non-destructive.
But to just replace a once in a lifetime capture with what is essentially an AI Hallucination. . . ?
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On the bright side, we'll finally get pictures of Bigfoot and UFOs on modern cameras. Well, after the AI is done fixing it to "the way you remember it".
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On the bright side, we'll finally get pictures of Bigfoot and UFOs on modern cameras. Well, after the AI is done fixing it to "the way you remember it".
Bonus!
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Nevermind all the DARPA grants and some purchases of software from In-Q-Tel..
None of that makes them a government actor, legally speaking.
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To bad we can only have 1 option. (Score:2)
Re: To bad we can only have 1 option. (Score:3)
Samsung has a setting called "quality optimization" buried under "intelligent optimization". There are 3 values . Maximum, medium and minimum. There's no way to completely turn it off.
The description for "minimum" that it will not optimize pictures after they are taken.
This prevents it from choosing a different frame than the photographer intend, which is a major problem with the default setting. It's a nightmare for moving subjects. You think you've got a great capture and then the AI changed the frame to
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:Apple does lots of processing (Score:4, Insightful)
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 -- and that's what I want from a phone camera.
This is a really interesting debate to me because I'm a photographer. Not a pro, but a moderately-serious amateur, good enough that I semi-regularly do portrait work, weddings, etc., (though what I really enjoy is wildlife and landscape photography), and people are very happy with the results. And photographers never talk about "taking" photos, but about "creating" photos. Angle, composition, lighting, exposure, depth of field... there's a lot that goes into creating the image that you want even if without any post-processing. After the shoot comes the editing, and every photo is edited, even if the editing is nothing more than tweaking the color balance and cropping. Usually it's quite a bit more than that, sometimes even full-on "photoshopping". Even journalistic photography includes a lot of editing (though it shouldn't include photoshopping).
What Google is doing is automating much of this, so that non-photographers can create nice-looking photographs without the effort. Of course, sometimes the automation will get it wrong... but my experience is that my Pixel phones are incredibly good at giving me good results. They don't have the versatility of my DSLRs, thousands of dollars of lenses, filters, lights, and significant time in post-processing, but for creating memories of family events, vacations, etc., Google's phones do a great job, and I often don't bother with the DSLR any more.
[*] The way this works is that the phone actually grabs a few dozen images, before and after the shutter button is pressed, then the software picks the best one and swaps faces in from others as needed.
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There's a difference between photoshopping eyes open and inserting people that weren't there, or replacing their face.
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There's a difference between photoshopping eyes open and inserting people that weren't there, or replacing their face.
Sometimes it's about creating a "memory" of the event you wish you'd had, I guess. Not my thing, but I'm not going to tell people that what they want is wrong.
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Most of it is just saving you the hassle of taking several photos until you get one where nobody is blinking, nobody is walking through the background, that sort of thing.
Ironically Google's cameras produce more realistic images than Apple's do, generally speaking. Apple has tuned for "Instagram ready", an image that "pops" with exaggerated colour and artificial skin tones/lighting. Google if anything tends to under-saturate sometimes, but gives you the tools to then edit the image to your liking.
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The Pixel 9 with the improved camera hardware is going to be amazing.
I've been using a Pixel 9 XL Pro for about six months, and I've been very happy with it. But frankly they've all gotten incredibly good, so I can't honestly say I've noticed huge improvement. I haven't really focused on it though. If I want a really great photo I reach for my DSLR and put in the work to create it; my phone camera is for "memories", and I don't think I've had any disappointing shots for years.
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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.
What are you talking about sharpness tweaks and raw sensor data?
Red eye adjustment is not on the same level as replacing someone's entire face.
Have you even seen this clown show?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Look, I'm assuming you just haven't seen those ads or know what they're talking about.
Yes, photoshopping images isn't new, also the debate over how much is too much is not new. Masking out a photo bomber - OK, making all your models skinny with alien bone structure - eeeeeeeehhhhh. That dark and ugly
Jon McCormack has never set foot in a darkroom (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
They're both right.
They're not even talking about the same thing. The Google guy says maybe not authentic to a particular millisecond, he's talking about some kind of image manipulation, the Apple guy is talking about things that really happened, he's referring to not inserting people into photos, replacing their faces etc. Go watch the ads for that stuff, it's cringy. Google wasn't even talking about that, who knows what their argument for it is. Replacing someone's face isn't preserving a memory.
Adobe (Score:4)
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.
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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.
1) There is a large difference in tweaking the settings on a photo like color balance and adding things to a photo that were not there. 2) Photographers generally keep the original raw photos even after their tweaks. In fact, the consumer NAS companies like Synology exist because creators keep the original photo and video files which take up a lot of space.
Seems to me that Apple owes a whole lot of their still existing to pro photographers wanting to edit photos using their hardware.
And pro photographers keep the originals. They do not destroy them. In Google's world, pro photographers would keep only the modified photos and erase th
Good for JD (Score:1)
Didn't Apple do AI photos first? (Score:2)
Didn't apple do AI photo improvements a long time ago? How is this different?
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The difference is Apple uses AI to adjust the photos - how you might adjust photos for lighting, contrast and focus and such.
Google is basically using AI to edit your photos. Say you take a photo, then say "I recall there was a cat there". You tell that to Google, and *poof*, a cat appears in the image as you remember.
Or perhaps you're going through your wedding photos, and it has your now-estranged sister in it. You tell Google yo
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Didn't apple do AI photo improvements a long time ago? How is this different?
Take AI out of it, this all centers on what are we calling photo improvements.
Photoshop, generative AI, whatever, they can all do these things but nobody can deny there's a yuck vector here.
For sure, people can use generative AI to do whatever with their own photos, that's their business. If you put a generative AI editing tool on there people will use it for whatever, but Google and Samsung advertise some cringy stuff with this feature. I can't see Apple completely avoiding generative AI photo editing fore
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:4)
Fauxtography (Score:1)
Samsung (Score:3)
Has 10x the market share of Google in the US. Even Motorola sold more units than Google. Google is a minor player in the smartphone market.
The Samsung camera's default settings have majorly messed up my photos. They record multiple frames. You can see the frame you actually shot appear on the screen. And then the AI chooses another frame. And it's not the one I intended. This really wreaks havoc with moving subjects such as pets. And there is zero opportunity to correct the AI's choice of frame.
I finally found the setting to turn it off, and regained some semblance of sanity.
Samsung has also been known to cheat with night photos and use AI to reproduce the moon images that weren't possible to Zoom in with the phone camera.
I would never own an Apple device due to the walled garden, but they are correct on this stance.
Human memory... (Score:2)
This is a rare occasion that I find myself agreeing with a corporation like Apple; Yeah, our photos r
Human memory is bad enough ... (Score:2)
... without using AI-generated images to reinforce the errors. Unite that with the "recovered memory" enthusiasts to get some really troubling court cases.