> A better discriminator might be global edits vs local edits,

Even that isn't all that clear-cut. Is noise removal a local edit? It only touches some pixels, but obviously, that's a silly take.

Is automated dust removal still global? The same idea, just a bit more selective. If we let it slide, what about automated skin blemish removal? Depth map + relighting, de-hazing, or fake bokeh? I think that modern image processing techniques really blur the distinction here because many edits that would previously need to be done selectively by hand are now a "global" filter that's a single keypress away.

Intent is the defining factor, as you note, but intent is... often hazy. If you dial down the exposure to make the photo more dramatic / more sinister, you're manipulating emotions too. Yet, that kind of editing is perfectly OK in photojournalism. Adding or removing elements for dramatic effect? Not so much.

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card_zero a day ago | parent [-]

What's this, special pleading for doctored photos?

The only process in the article that involves nearby pixels is to combine R G and B (and other G) into one screen pixel. (In principle these could be mapped to subpixels.) Everything fancier than that can be reasonably called some fake cosmetic bullshit.

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seba_dos1 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The article doesn't even go anywhere near what you need to do in order to get an acceptable output. It only shows the absolute basics. If you apply only those to a photo from a phone camera, it will be massively distorted (the effect is smaller, but still present on big cameras).

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cellular 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When i worked on image pipeline the images were circular and had to be warped to square. Also the edges of the circular image were darker than the middle, and needed to be brightened.

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card_zero a day ago | parent | prev [-]

"Distorted" makes me think of a fisheye effect or something similar. Unsure if that's what you meant.

	▲	seba_dos1 a day ago \| parent [-]
		That's just one kind of distortion you'll see. There will also be bad pixels, lens shading, excessive noise in low light, various electrical differences across rows and temperatures that need to be compensated... Some (most?) sensors will even correct some of these for you already before handing you "raw" data. Raw formats usually carry "Bayer-filtered linear (well, almost linear) light in device-specific color space", not necessarily "raw unprocessed readings from the sensor array", although some vendors move it slightly more towards the latter than others.

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Toutouxc 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In that case you can't reasonably do digital photography without "fake cosmetic bullshit" and no current digital camera will output anything even remotely close to no fake cosmetic bullshit.

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card_zero 14 hours ago | parent [-]

That sounds likely. I wonder what specific filters can't be turned off, though. I think you can usually turn off sharpening. Maybe noise removal is built-in somehow (I think somebody else said it's in the sensor).

	▲	Toutouxc 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think you’ll find that there is no clear line between what you call fake bullshit and the rest of the process. The entire signal path is optimized at every step to reduce and suppress noise. There’s actual light noise, there’s readout noise, ADC noise, often dozens or hundreds of abnormal pixels. Certain autofocus technologies even sacrifice image-producing pixels, and simply interpolate over the “holes” in data. Regarding sharpening and optical stuff, many modern camera lenses are built with the expectation that some of their optical properties will be easy to correct for in software, allowing the manufacturer to optimize for other properties.

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nospice a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I honestly don't understand what you're saying here.

	▲	card_zero a day ago \| parent [-]
		I can't see how to rephrase it. How about this: Removing dust and blemishes entails looking at more than one pixel at a time. Nothing in the basic processing described in the article does that.