iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King?

Re:iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King? by janekm on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @05:42AM (#23005303)

I think you have somewhat unrealistic expectations of what even a decent photographer could achieve with a graduated neutral density filter (not to mention tilt/shift lenses... maybe 0.1% of even professional photographers use those). The photos in your blog post would have been really hard to achieve with "traditional" photography methods to cover the huge dynamic range (a graduated neutral density filter won't cut it for a street opening facing the sky). Most experienced photographers would employ some form of exposure stacking in that scenario, same as the iPhone did. Of course having more control over the blending would be great. I think if you tried to take the same pictures with a traditional camera you would be surprised by how good the iPhone pictures are compared to the effort it takes to achieve a comparable result.

Oversharpening is a curse in the industry to be sure, unfortunately to most people an oversharpened image looks "better".

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Re:iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King? by leejo on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @07:47AM (#23006054)

Oh no doubt - it still takes experience and technique to achieve a good effect with those tools, and of course they can't be used in all situations so other techniques are required; but it still seems to me that "out of the box" the software is applying HDR like techniques when it isn't needed, or it would look a bit better if every part of the exposure wasn't normalised so much.

It seems that the software is doing a negative film photographer's trick of "expose for the shadows and the highlights will take care of themself" but rather it's "expose for the shadows and the HDR will take care of the highlights" - ending up in this overprocessed looking fake sky effect.

It's like there can't be any ambiguity anymore in a photo due to the exposure, the shadows and the highlights can't clip, we have to see everything. That seems a big change in mindset to me.

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Re:iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King? by janekm on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @05:40AM (#23017238)

I've been giving this some more thought and I think in many ways the photos from modern smartphones are more similar to paintings than what we are used to from photography. They try to create a visual representation of what our visual cortex would perceive the scene to look like.

A painting of a room with a window would typically show both the room and the scene from the window "perfectly exposed", like the iPhone is doing with your skies.

This looks very strange to someone used to images from more traditional cameras, and the artefacts like halos stand out.

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Re:iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King? by foldr on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @06:14AM (#23005470)

Side note: I'm surprised by how heavy-handed the HDR looks in that particular set of photos. I'm used to seeing modern smartphones do a much better job of auto HDR in most situations.

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