This does not address the detrimental parts of computational photography.

Which I’m personally failing to witness consistently by the “evidence” in this article.

Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”

Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.

Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.

And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.

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Derbasti 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0.

Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality, I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.

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_tik_ 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can see a noticeable loss of detail in the iPhone sample photos. Personally, I prefer cameras that prioritize capturing more detail over simply producing visually pleasing images. Detailed photos offer much more flexibility for post-processing.

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chongli 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem with computational photography is that it uses software to make photos "look good" for everyday users. That may be an advantage for those users but it is basically a non-starter for a photographer because it makes it a crapshoot to take photos which predictably and faithfully render the scene.

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askbjoernhansen 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Lots of apps gives you other options for how to process the image data.

I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.

I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".

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dkga 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This made me ask, is there a (perhaps Swift) API to get the raw pixels coming in from the camera, if there is such a thing? I mean, before any processing, etc.

	▲	Narew 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		There is. If you use lightroom app for example you can have access to raw pixel. But I'm not sure there is a way to get all the images the camera app from the iphone take. Phone don't take one shot to create the final image. they take hundred of shot and combine them.

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ChrisGreenHeur 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Your brain also uses software to make what you see look good