With the rise of AI-generated content I would actually love a camera with no post-processing by default and a watermarking system that proves the picture is authentic. I can see Apple going that way eventually.

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Gigachad 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Every dedicated camera is like this, more so if you shoot in raw.

There's also a lot of confusion around the processing here. The iPhone is mostly just taking multiple pictures and stacking them on top of each other to make up for the poor performance of the small hardware, denoising, and then applying a mask to subjects to lift shadows and adjust skin tones. This is the same kind of edit a photographer would do in Lightroom. It's not straight up AI generating content in the image.

Sadly Android phones are willing to pull cheap tricks to show better numbers or look better in some comparative youtube video so they pull this stuff.

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jazzyjackson 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Leica and Sony offer this as “Content Credentials” and anti-forgery digital signatures done on camera. It’s also been standard for many years for digital cameras used in criminal evidence procedures, Olympus tough series IIRC.

Me I just switched back to film. It’s about a buck a picture but I like the results I get, I’d rather have 30 photos than 300 to look through anyway.

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thih9 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I can see Apple going that way eventually.

I can’t.

Historically Apple is a late adopter of the mainstream. And they implement it as default, with little to no customization options.

Not to mention that iPhone cameras already perform heavy photo post-processing.

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Retr0id 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple is apparently working on the latter, although it'll be opt-in and it's unclear whether it will also reduce the processing (I hope it does!): https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/10/ios-27-apple-reference-...

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Gigachad 10 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a feature a lot of companies are looking in to right now. It's less about reducing processing and more about proving something is real and not AI generated. The iphone processing doesn't straight up generate things that aren't real.

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Retr0id 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It's also something I've been looking into. I've completely broken Google's implementation and I can sign any file as if it were real, more details will be public in the coming weeks.

Signatures are nice, but the contents of the image still matter. Any signs of manipulation should still be treated with suspicion, even if they're "legitimate" edits. The best way to avoid such signs is to have the bare minimum processing.

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Gigachad 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The technology is fundamentally flawed. It's essentially DRM that relies on making the signing key hard to access.

	▲	Retr0id 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is also my opinion. However, I still think it's worth raising the bar for plausible fakes. Minimising processing is another way to raise that bar (or at least, lower the floor). It's also not something you can do by default, because consumers demand image processing.

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amelius 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How does that watermark feature work if you can just point the camera at an AI-generated image?

	▲	Gigachad 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One of the proposals I saw was using the lidar to capture a depth map. You could also embed the GPS location.

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epihelix 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On Android, you can use OpenCamera. Optionally save in RAW and process in desktop RAW software.

Alternatively, buy a mirrorless or DSLR with some decent lenses.

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dTal 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it's watermarked then it's by definition inauthentic. Watermarking is in-band signal manipulation.

	▲	amelius 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Instead of watermarking you could add a cryptographic signature.

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IvanK_net 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Telling if a photo or a video is "true" is the same as telling if the written text is "true". You can not tell it by analyzing characters / words in a text, or pixels in a video.

You should analyze the subject who is providing that text / video and decide for yourself, whether you trust that subject or not.

E.g. "Elon Musk is 10 feet tall" - are you reading it on an anonymous X account or on a Business Insider social account? An attached photo of Elon Musk being 10 feet tall does not make a difference.

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hutattedonmyarm 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, there are plenty of third party camera apps which do that (See: Halide and their Prozess Zero). I doubt a built-in one will go that way.

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swiftcoder 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, they do their best, they don't do any userspace post-processing. They can't really help whatever the firmware in the camera and/or the camera driver are already doing.

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Gigachad 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not really possible to have zero processing of an image. At some point you have to interpret the sensor data and turn it in to a JPEG. The line people decide an image is "processed" is pretty subjective though. It's somewhere between the camera deciding what the white balance / exposure is, and AI replacing the sun with a moon.

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mrob 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The line I draw is at semantic editing. Manipulating images based on abstract geometric or statistical features like edges or color histograms is acceptable. Attempting to guess what those features mean is not. Traditional sharpening, color balance correction, focus stacking, lens distortion correction, etc. is fine. Red eye removal, skin tone correction, traditional dodging and burning, replacing a detected moon with a higher resolution photo, etc. is not. Unlabeled semantic editing is dishonest. AI image processing does not distinguish between geometric and semantic features, so it's always unacceptable, even for simple tasks like sharpening.

The one exception I make is cropping, because photographers have always had the ability to choose where to point the camera. Cropping based on meaning is not dishonest because it's inherent in the process of photography.

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dTal 7 hours ago | parent [-]

That doesn't seem like a very sharp line (hah). "Abstract geometrical or statistical features like edges" have semantic meaning. An "edge" is just an area of the image with a high derivative, but as soon as you use that information to process it in some way, you are making some implicit assumption about what this statistical feature means - the boundary of an object, a discontinuity in depth, etc.

There is no dividing line between syntax and semantics - semantics is just syntax scaled. Godel proved it, LLMs exploit it.

	▲	mrob 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If I run an unsharp mask filter I'm not making any decision about what individual edges mean. I might look at the result and decide to apply more or less sharpening, but that's still not "semantic editing", because the edit itself only sees derivatives.

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austinthetaco 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

raw images exist

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Gigachad 10 hours ago | parent [-]

You can't see a raw image though. Any time you look at an image, decisions had to be made about how to interpret that raw image.

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austinthetaco 9 hours ago | parent [-]

It's still not a jpeg

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Gigachad 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Any file format or data structure you can display on the screen is processed. The whole point is the debate around phone processing is not as clear cut as photos being processed vs unprocessed.

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austinthetaco 8 hours ago | parent [-]

only because you're arguing in bad faith. The layperson does not consider the result of standard sensor debayering to be "processed".

	▲	dTal 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The layperson also doesn't really consider the result of their smartphone app to be "processed", until they get slapped in the face with it. The layperson's intuition isn't reliable.
	▲	Gigachad 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The layperson doesn’t have any idea what they are talking about so it’s hard to pull a coherent statement out of it. People claim they want unprocessed photos but it’s not clear what they even mean by that. I think we can rule things like ai replacing the sun with a moon as obviously too far, but most phones like the iPhone aren’t AI generating or filtering things. Someone manually selecting an exposure, white balance, and tint in Lightroom isn’t any less real than letting the camera do that automatically because the camera doesn’t know which values are real either.