I'm furious at HTC and Samsung for ruining some of what would've been very precious photos I took with filters that they have on by default and don't tell you. There are some particular ones that were great moments that they absolutely destroyed, on purpose. Why would I want my phone's camera to deliberately change the shape of me and my friend's faces and replace our skin with porcelain?!
I honestly never saw this coming. It's the craziest dystopia nobody talked about. Cameras aren't even cameras anymore! Are there some phones with camera-filters on, without the option for you to turn them off? Cameraphones need to make a comeback; you know, phones with cameras and not some sci-fi CGI BS.
I don't trust anything coming from a smartphone camera now. Even my own phones.
Maybe related: I've noticed on iPhones and Samsungs that I cannot get a picture to match reality. I feel like it was easier to get a picture with colors that closely matched reality YEARS ago. Why have cameras gone downhill? Or is it my imagination?
When I take a photo of the grass and sky with any modern smartphone it never looks right. I try and try and try to adjust the settings and I can just never get a good photo anymore.
Edit: Example: I couldn't take a picture of the smoke on the West coast recently. The dark grey and orange skies would all come out looking blue or something. It's like the 'camera' is telling me I'm f'ing crazy for taking a picture of smoky skies, and surely I want to pretend the smoke isn't there at all! That's why I'm taking a picture right? So I can pretend that reality isn't real. I have no photos that match the smoke. I have only my memory and other people's photos. WTF.
> Edit: Example: I couldn't take a picture of the smoke on the West coast recently. The dark grey and orange skies would all come out looking blue or something. It's like the 'camera' is telling me I'm f'ing crazy for taking a picture of smoky skies, and surely I want to pretend the smoke isn't there at all! That's why I'm taking a picture right? So I can pretend that reality isn't real. I have no photos that match the smoke. I have only my memory and other people's photos. WTF.
That's automatic white balance adjustment. It's not used to an orange sky, so it can't figure out what color should be considered "white". If you want an example of why this is important, turn off automatic WB and take a photo under fluorescent light followed by a photo lit by candles.
I have no idea about Android phones, but iPhones do some amount of denoise, contrast adjustment, and a few other limited postprocessing steps automatically.
> Maybe related: I've noticed on iPhones and Samsungs that I cannot get a picture to match reality.
I know I'll come across as pedantic, but you'll have trouble doing that even with DSLRs. Whether you're doing film or digital imagery, you're not capturing reality. With camera sensors, the raw data you capture (RGB brightness for each pixel, for example), needs to have some color/brightness/contrast curve applies to make it look realistic (i.e. linear will not look like reality at all). Each manufacturer picks their own curve, and then also has options (vivid, etc) - and some of them do pick less realistic options for defaults as customers think they make for better photos.
Not to mention tricks to fix overexposed pixels, etc. There's quite a bit of manipulation done before you get the JPG.
Cell phone cameras are akin to cheaper digital cameras that used to be (and perhaps still are) on the market - where you don't have much control on this. This is not new to smartphones - it's just that smartphones have more processing power to do more.
Long time photographers know this. It's not "capture reality", but "how much deviation from reality am I willing to accept", with 0 not being an option.
I think he is referring to machine-learning features adjusting local contrast and color, not simple white balance. In recent phones it happens even when HDR is off. I've had a few photos ruined by it too, with a strong halo around people's faces or a red-looking sun.
You can install an alternative photo app like Halide to take control of every variable, even aperture size, but it's a bit of a hassle when any 'dumb' camera would do the job.
> Edit: Example: I couldn't take a picture of the smoke on the West coast recently. The dark grey and orange skies would all come out looking blue or something. It's like the 'camera' is telling me I'm f'ing crazy for taking a picture of smoky skies, and surely I want to pretend the smoke isn't there at all! That's why I'm taking a picture right? So I can pretend that reality isn't real. I have no photos that match the smoke. I have only my memory and other people's photos. WTF.
That was due to automatic white balance, which is perhaps the most basic and low-tech automatic adjustment on your phone. We're talking deep AI tech from the 90s, if not earlier.
I ran into the same problem on that day, so I googled "iphone manual white balance", got an app that looked decent (Obscura), and took my pictures without issue. Try that next time. (But get another app, Obscura literally takes half a minute to load for some reason.)
You don't have to use a different app, actually. The standard Camera app lets you lock white balance. To capture orange skies, you just long-tap while pointing at a white source (another iPhone or iPad, for example) to lock the white balance. Then turn your camera to what you want to shoot, and it will keep the WB locked.
That's not how cameras work though. The raw output of a phone camera would be horribly off-color. It would NOT capture the image you are expecting. So the phone applies a number of filters to try to correct the flaws inherent in a camera with such small optics. You only notice when the external conditions (smoke-filled skies) don't match the assumptions that went into the filter design.
I'm aware of that. And yet, somehow we have many photos of the recent wildfires in California, captured by cameras, so setting a correct whitepoint is clearly possible.
You'll see these kinds of filters at lots of places in Asia. For example, in Japan, there are many "ki-re-i" photo booths that will automatically clean up your face for your ID pictures.
Even the old Panasonic digital camera I bought 13 years ago has a smooth skin option.
Coming from Europe where you are usually asked to not even smile on ID photos, it blows my mind that there is a whole legal ID photo retouching industry on Japan. Or are such retouched photos not supposed to be used for official purposes?
In the US, for things like passports, retouching is disallowed. However, if the effects are small, they'll have no way of detecting. No one's going to scrutinize your face for all the wrinkles you removed.
I haven't needed to use one of them, but if you look at the pictures on this website (https://travel.e-japanese.jp/japan-id-photo), you'll see that it's possible to select passport pictures and also apply skin correction/lightening to the pictures. I don't know if those options are disabled for official photos though.
