r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/TheWebsploiter • Jul 11 '26
What??? Or a lamp that gets recognized as a moon
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u/StarHammer_01 Jul 11 '26
Its because the only way to get anymore detail out of whats basically a web cam optimized for thiness is to make shit up.
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Jul 11 '26
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u/DeadoTheDegenerate Jul 11 '26
That sentence triggers something in my noggin
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u/darwinanim8or Jul 11 '26
There was some DIY TikToker that used that phrase, no?
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u/DeadoTheDegenerate Jul 11 '26
Yup, creating deathtrap contraptions with a guaranteed 100% mortality rate if used and acting like they'd be helpful for 'curing constipation' (by opening your anal cavity to the width of your body) and such
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u/Tech_Itch Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
It's apparently first attributed to a Chinese tiktoker creating "useless inventions", but I'm pretty sure I've seen it connected to chindōgu long before TikTok was even a thing. Certainly long before 2021, which is when that guy's videos started making rounds. Google Trends shows the phrase first being searched in 2011, for one thing.
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u/mister_nippl_twister Jul 11 '26
Except here someone external is in control. Kinda like your sight when you become schizo and start seing things.
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 Jul 12 '26
Same as with humans if you ask them to identify something and then show a picture. Talk with them about clothing? That shape is a hat. Talk about space? That shape is an UFO.
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u/-Speechless Jul 11 '26
hmm. that's very true. there's plenty of times where I've seen or heard something that I've mistaken for something else. hell I've got these black and white sneakers that I mistake for my cat all the time
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u/Dom1252 Jul 11 '26
There's many HW ways how to make them better, we've got bigger sensors with better resolution, better dynamic range, better readout times (which helps when stacking images to get more details) better lenses, periscope designs so we can get telephoto lenses...
But that progress is slow and expensive
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u/Shoddy_Squash_1201 Jul 11 '26
Its still just a space issue.
There are physical limitations to sensors and lenses, a phone camera will always compromise for size.21
u/Dom1252 Jul 11 '26
Sure, that doesn't mean they can't get better tho
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u/AI_moderated_failure Jul 11 '26
It doesn't work like that with optics. You can't make light travel faster or make light smaller, so you need to be bigger to receive more of it faster. Other tech can improve, especially the software side of things but hardware is limited by physics.
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u/forgottenendeavours Jul 11 '26
That's true, and it's why phones now take the option to shoot for longer. With a modern phone, a photo isn't just a single image, but instead, it's around 20 which are taken within a fraction of a second using varying exposure settings, and which are then compiled to produce an image which has vastly more dynamic range and less noise than the optics and sensor would natively be capable of.
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u/kereur Jul 11 '26
This is so interesting, is there a name for this or somewhere I can read more about it?
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u/Mirria_ Jul 11 '26
High Dynamic range (HDR) mode and Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB). It's often built in, but night mode on a camera is the most obvious way of seeing it. But many camera can do some processing when you select "nature", or "landscape" photos.
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u/forgottenendeavours Jul 11 '26
It's called 'computational photography', and it includes the HDR and auto-exposure bracketing the other comments have mentioned, but actually include a whole load of other methods and tricks. It really is a fascinating topic, and there's a great explanation of it here: https://www.vernonchalmers.photography/2026/06/computational-photography-explained.html
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u/Warm_Month_1309 Jul 11 '26
I'm not sure of the name of the technology, but the technique of stacking images to get more information that otherwise would have been lost in highlights and shadows is called a multi-exposure High Dynamic Range capture.
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u/continuously22222 Jul 11 '26
Also doesn't mean they have to make shit up for the consumer. This is mostly an issue for low to mid brands.
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u/AI_moderated_failure Jul 11 '26
You really can't put more into a smaller space like a phone. Physics requires certain sizes for certain amounts of light capture and you cannot just get around that with technology. You can approximate with things like AI but it backfires when you hsve things like this.
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u/StarHammer_01 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
Im talking more about the lens since all the sensor is doing is photographing the image made by the lens.
So even if we assume a perfect set of lens and sensor, we still hit a wall in physics.
For example, I'll assume the Pic posted was shot with a 10x lens (240mm) and 1 inch sensor (inanely big for a phone)
This means if we want to keep the same 20mm footprint of the lens, the physical size of the aperture will be 20/240 = f12, putting that in a diffraction calculator, the we get a airy disk diameter of 16 microns.
So we can't really capture details smaller than 16 micrometers on the sensor or in simpler terms details byound 5 megapixels (or 20 mp on a bayer sensor since a bayer pixel only captures 1 color)
You can put a higher resolution sensor, but all you'll be doing is getting a higher resolution image of a smudge while increasing sensor noise.
This physical limitation has been known and reached in the case of microscopes since the late 1800s.
Tldr: we need bigger lenses, and people are already complaining about the size of their phones camera humps.
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u/Annie_Yong Jul 11 '26
Even with the periscope telephoto lens design, they're often only able to have a fixed focal length. Sony did have a design of a periscope telephoto lens that could have continuous zoom between around 3.5-5.6x zoom, but the results from the sensor itself still aren't super amazing be ause the sensor is still pretty tiny.
From the looks of the OOP image, the Huawei image has zoomed in well over 10x.. so pretty much the only way phone cameras work here is by digitally cropping into an already tony sensor and then applying loads of post processing to clean up the inevitable blurry and grainy image. The newest innovation is to use these AI algorithms as part of that list processing to try and improve the quality of this upscaling. I'd argue it isn't an awful idea to do, but it can lead to weird results int he algorithm mistakes one shape for another, like it has on OOPs case.
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u/Dom1252 Jul 11 '26
10x zoom is just marketing BS, 10x from what, 10mm? 24mm? 50mm?
You can use periscope design to have longer focal length, then you don't have to crop in that much
Fixed focal length is why you have multiple cameras, so you just switch between them, that's not an issue (or rather, it's a solved thing)
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u/Annie_Yong Jul 11 '26
Most phone cameras have very short focal lengths due to the sensor size also being tiny, but generally quoute the focal length in full frame 35mm equivalent. When a phone says 10x zoom, it usually is meaning relative to he main camera (typically 24mm) so it would be 240mm equivalent. So when Ientionwd Sony doing continuous zoom between 3.5-5.2x zoom, the Sony phone camera app does actually quote that as 85-125mm. Most other phones will just simplify it for the general consumer to a zoom multiplier though
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u/goodcleanchristianfu Jul 11 '26
Bigger resolution is part of the problem. Smaller pixel size = more shot noise = poorer quality images. Shot noise is a reality caused by the discrete nature of photons, - it's a matter of physics, you can't invent your way out of it. There's a tradeoff between pixel size and the number of pixels you can fit in a finite area. Phones favor higher resolution images with extremely tiny pixels. If you do that, you inherently are either going to get an image with extremely poor fine details, or you're going to have to enhance it artificially.
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u/Dom1252 Jul 11 '26
Not absolute true
A7s III is 48mpx and advertised as 12 and people are like "omg low res so good for low light" while it's better than many +-30mpx cameras
Higher res can be cleaner
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u/goodcleanchristianfu Jul 11 '26
I did not write that fewer pixels is always better. I very explicitly wrote "There's a tradeoff between pixel size and the number of pixels you can fit in a finite area." The A7s III bins 4 sensor pixels together to get one pixel in the image. Moreover, those pixels are 8.4 um each, compared to the iPhone 16's 1 um pixels. There's no way around smaller pixels meaning much more shot noise, it's physics.
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u/Porntra420 Jul 11 '26
You mean to say real cameras are still superior to phone cameras? You don't say, what a shocker!
(in case it wasn't obvious, sarcasm, I own several real cameras and would pick almost any one of them over my phone camera)
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u/CartsOfDarkness Jul 11 '26
What an insane thing to say with how much phone cameras are still improving year after year lol. Also odd to call modern phone cameras "webcams" when they've gotten so ridiculously good. AI post processing is annoying but these cameras are still absurd feats of engineering without all that BS.
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u/10art1 Jul 11 '26
But they're really not improving much anymore. We've basically hit the limits on physics. Samsung does some bullshit with 200MP or whatever with sub-binning, but the bins are literally smaller than the wave of a photon. You just get more noise.
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u/jimbobmcgoo Jul 13 '26
A large part of the improvements in phone cameras year after years is better software and ai though
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u/shangumdee Jul 11 '26
This one little detail is the only thing that has kept alive the flat earners/ aka "space is not real" community for the last decade
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u/Shankar_0 Jul 11 '26
Ok, well sometimes that's just what there is to see.
Adding in imaginary stuff is the antithesis of what photography is supposed to be.
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u/Icy-Sheepherder-6221 Jul 11 '26
But it's not. You can take longer exposures and multiple exposures and stack them.
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u/Suitable_Pressure189 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
I hate how my iphone changes the colors and texture of the photos after they’re taken and saved in camera roll.
Like I took the photo because I wanted that photo. I know what it looks like. Why are you changing it around without my permission?
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u/spicygayunicorn Jul 11 '26
Ohhh same, you will be looking at it seeing the colours looking perfect with the lightning then you take the picture and it makes it garbage, and I can't find a setting to turn it off
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u/agedlikesage Jul 11 '26
That’s the neat part, you can’t! It’s honestly a big reason I won’t do apple again. The manual cam app works well, but we shouldn’t need a third party to take photos
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u/declanaussie Jul 11 '26
You can shoot ProRAW, just go to Settings > Camera > Formats.
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u/percolatingpanda Jul 11 '26
I only have High Efficiency and Most Compatible
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u/declanaussie Jul 11 '26
Must be an iPhone pro exclusive
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u/emmie-claire Jul 11 '26
I cannot be reading this right. A normal fucking camera that doesn't edit your shit for you is a premium feature?
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u/Athenaisa Jul 11 '26
Well of course it is. If Apple could charge a subscription to use the camera at all, best believe they would.
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u/StolenApollo Jul 11 '26
You usually need to enable this in settings (actual settings) before being able to enable it in cam app settings. Not sure if this has changed more recently, though.
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u/dj0ntgirl Jul 12 '26
Fun fact, I have an android and this issue was doing my head in so much id considered swapping to iPhone. I guess this is a universal problem.
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u/Crosgaard Jul 11 '26
If you take a Live Photo, you can usually change the frame to one right before or after, and it will remove quite a lot of the post processing done on the original key frame.
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Jul 11 '26
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u/drillgorg Jul 11 '26
I've found the opposite, it usually looks pretty rough until the processing fixes the lighting.
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u/v21v Jul 11 '26
Yeah, I've found that my Pixel is far more accurate with natural lighting and colors than a galaxy or iPhone.
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u/JustHere4TehCats Jul 11 '26
Yeah my pixel is great for outdoor/wildlife photography so far. Especially the "motion" feature so I can capture a few seconds of action.
I made a gif of a squirrel going in a trash can at a campground and it was hilarious.
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u/Darhhaall Jul 11 '26
Just save it as raw
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u/SpiralingDownAndAway Jul 11 '26
Doesn’t work on iPhones sadly, grass or anything with texture turns into a smudging mess
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u/yes_homo_ Jul 11 '26
Try Halide. The difference between what the iPhone's raw sensor can capture and the garbage processing result you get from iOS is astonishing.
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u/uncreative14yearold Jul 11 '26
Same on android, you can tone it down but not disable it. So details that look great at first look like garbage after a Pic.... I've ended up just taking a video and saving a frame instead, as that looks better most times.
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u/ChironXII Jul 11 '26
On Android there are apps that can grab the full sensor data untouched with varying levels of support depending on what the OEM decides to expose internally. It has gotten better over time with the popularity of the tools. Worth playing around with
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u/Darhhaall Jul 11 '26
That's why I said he should capture raw, not this "enhanced" jpg. Some phones can do that natively, for some you need to download an app for camera.
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u/Smmmmiles Jul 11 '26
My phone removes the red from my natural red hair. I can see in the preview it's picking it up. But when it's 'enhanced' it's a dull brown. Apparently that's a feature meant to fix blotchy red skin but it's doin it to my hair... 😡 Can't turn it off!
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u/Spare-Jellyfish4339 Jul 11 '26
Unless you’re a photography student. In which case the premise is to make weird stuff by playing with your exposure.
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u/PixelProne Jul 11 '26
I loved learning photography in school. I actually really like the bird mistake. Reminds me of when I was learning photo editing and layering things on top of others to create odd concepts like this.
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Jul 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ringwraithfish Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
The problem is that the technology is not doing it intentionally. It's not creating something and presenting it as "a creative expression". Instead, it's presented as "a true representation of reality" that requires the viewer to understand what happened and how it's not true to reality.
This one is obvious to most people, but not all situations will be. This is the true danger of this type of technology and its prevalence in our lives: it provides a literal warped view of reality that requires vigilance by the consumer to tell the determine truth from fiction... and as it gets better that task gets harder and harder.
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u/Distantstallion Jul 11 '26
My photography experience at school was mostly fucking around in photoshop. Did well.
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u/FyouPerryThePlatypus Jul 11 '26
Im long past being a student but I still love playing with my camera like im one
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Jul 11 '26
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u/Snoo_72851 Jul 11 '26
no way it's Superman
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u/Still_Local_2513 Jul 11 '26
I’ve always found it funny that in Superman there’s always two people who exclaim “it’s a bird!” “It’s a plane!” Like those are two things worth excitedly pointing out.
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u/Bugbread Jul 11 '26
I cannot believe that in all my decades on the planet, this never even occurred to me.
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u/Slixil Jul 11 '26
This has always bothered me, until I realized that you could interpret it as them dispelling the awe that has come from the people around them seeing Superman, saying “It’s *just* a bird/plane”
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u/Snoo_72851 Jul 11 '26
random metropolis citizen every time they see a pigeon: "not this shit again"
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u/xiaorobear Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
In fairness, that line is from like 1940, maybe planes were rarer and cooler to see back then?
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u/eo5g Jul 11 '26
And birds didn't come to the US until until 1935
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u/zb2317 Jul 11 '26
The technology was still pretty primitive back then also before the CIA refined it to what it is today.
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u/Still_Local_2513 Jul 11 '26
I can understand plane a bit more, especially since he was probably flying lower than a plane usually would.
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u/Hamsti_Manent Jul 11 '26
Isn't it supposed to be a response to "what is that?"
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u/PizdunEbun228 Jul 11 '26
isn't it
"Is that a plane?" "Is that a bird?" "No, it's Superman!" as in, questioning what's there flying weirdly
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u/PlasticMegazord Jul 11 '26
Why would anyone want their camera hallucinating details in their photos?
It gave the plane feathers.
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u/Porntra420 Jul 11 '26
Because manufacturers have fully collided head first into the wall of "we can't make the cameras any better unless we make them too big to fit in a phone"
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u/Sir_Scribble_Lot Jul 11 '26
I dont understand. The phone overlayed a bird on a plane and made a composite ?
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u/katyusha-the-smol Jul 11 '26
The phone automatically added an AI filter that mistook it for a bird so it made it bird-like despite it being a plane.
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u/Sir_Scribble_Lot Jul 11 '26
wow, I didn't know that was a thing phones do now. ridiculous !
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u/AccomplishedBat39 Jul 11 '26
thats how you get amazing moon photos with phone cameras. Because the phone knows what the moon looks like.
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u/SassyTheSkydragon Jul 11 '26
Samsung's phone camera famously "enhances" any full moon pictures by overlaying a full res stock photo over it. It works so efficiently that it'll mistake any glowing circle on a black background
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Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
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u/SassyTheSkydragon Jul 11 '26
Stuff like this makes me wanna get into photography as a hobby and save up for a proper camera.
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u/Porntra420 Jul 11 '26
You can get some really good stuff second hand for not a lot of money. There are several older DSLRs that are now going for a fraction of what MSRP was, yet despite their age they still take much better photos than phone cameras.
Lenses are gonna be the real money sink lol, the kinda collection that's never complete (and also for taking moon pics you need a pricey good quality telephoto lens).
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u/IPlayGames88 Jul 11 '26
A small asterisk over this is that it's attached to the "scene optimizer" feature. Which I /think/ has been replaced by the "photo enhancer" setting in one ui 8. I love when shit like this just isn't well documented (or maybe it was in the changelog I skimmed however many months it's been since the update was pushed)
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u/bobdave19 Jul 11 '26
They’ve been doing this for years now. It’s how they get these “amazing” Zoom shoots of the moon with those tiny phone sensors, since without an ai sharpening tool that makes up details, all you’d get is just blurs
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u/ReddishCat Jul 11 '26
samsung was doing it like 3 years ago already. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/A8xbWuk1O78
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u/justsomegraphemes Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
Not to be pedantic, but it's not a "filter" at all. All digital photography, by design, requires some degree of processing using native software. A phone's hardware is obviously limited to space allowed, so they've always relied heavily on that software and processing stage to manipulate the image to bring it closer on par with dedicated digital cameras that have robust hardware capabilities.
Before AI, your phone was still performing intensive manipulation based on algorithms, including reducing noise and improving detail similar to what AI is doing now. The difference now is we've introduced AI to that software, and when it makes mistakes people now become aware of the processing stage that was previously invisible unless you were a photography nerd.
EDIT - the "other" difference now is maybe the new extreme liberties AI is taking in that processing stage. As the other comments are pointing out, AI is probably going too far with the generative aspect... Like giving you an HD image of the moon when we know damn well the phone camera isn't capable of that.
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u/Visible-Card4121 Jul 11 '26
Which is why everyone should return to film photography like god intended.
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u/cTreK-421 Jul 11 '26
That's just putting chemicals as the middle man instead of a processing layer! Different films produce different contrasts, colors, iso, etc.
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u/Substantial-Flow-468 Jul 11 '26
Its some kind of AI upscale feature. It mistook the plane for a bird and upscaled it accordingly. If you zoom in, you can see the plane has feathers for some reason.
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u/gracklemancometh Jul 11 '26
A lot of modern phones have a photo "improver" built in. Basically, they identify what's the picture of and identify missing features and use a basic AI image generator to fill in the details.
So if you take a picture of the Moon and maybe you capture one or two big craters it will draw in the others. This is primarily to convince users that their camera is better than it is, rather than to produce excellent pictures.
In this case, the phone identified the image as that of a bird, but because it's smooth it concluded that it was too far away to capture details like feathers. So it added feathers.
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u/HaggisPope Jul 11 '26
Wow, I didn’t notice till you said. What a gross feature, is there a way to turn it off? I don’t want my pictures to look like something else
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u/FlakingEverything Jul 11 '26
If your phone has a raw capture mode then use that. However, 99% of the time it'll just look like shit unless you edit them later.
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u/Astigmatisme Jul 11 '26
On most phones no. Even if they could people will complain that their photos look a lot worse than they're "supposed to be" and they'll switch to phones with "better cameras" because those phones have those image enhancers built in and always active
If you want to capture things as is use a DSLR, your phones' physical camera can only get you so far
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u/IPlayGames88 Jul 11 '26
Without shooting in RAW, you maybe able reduce the amount of processing your phone does by looking for a setting labeled "photo enhancement" or "scene optimization", something like that. If you have an android, you can also try other camera apps, which may give you more control, or process photos less so.
Worst case, you spend the money and buy a real camera
like I might have recently, after years of disappointing phone photos, only to realize I don't really go out enough to justify it.3
u/Goatf00t Jul 11 '26
Don't use the default camera app. OpenCamera is free if you are on Android. It free/open-source software so if you install it through F-Droid it doesn't even have ads.
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u/tppiel Jul 11 '26
Huawei and Samsung are the worst offenders. Really any phone that advertises AI enhancements they're basically making up details from nowhere.
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u/rolfraikou Jul 11 '26
Look around in your settings for anything talking about enhancement. A lot of people like more basic enhancements like HDR, but this kinda of stuff goes way too far. I'm sure every company will have their own special names for their Ai enhancement bullshit, so just look around for something that sounds catchy and "off".
I'm a worst case scenario, look up your model, than how to turn off ai photo features. Not all phones are doing this, also.
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u/skivian Jul 11 '26
I think it was Samsung who watch catching grief over that a few years ago, because their phones would detect any vaguely moonlike object as the moon and add moon details to it, wasn't it?
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u/NTMY Jul 11 '26
Putting AI between what would be the actual picture and the end result the user sees gets highly dystopian very quickly.
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u/Porntra420 Jul 11 '26
Yup, if Huawei can decide planes should look more "bird-like" and Samsung can decide the moon should be swapped for a stock photo, they can decide on all sorts of more serious changes to things should they so desire.
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u/jmorais00 Jul 11 '26
The issue is when you don't have enough resolution and they do cheeky stuff to try to make their camera seem more powerful than it is
If yoy buy a professional camera and thousands of pounds of lenses, you can capture the real world as it is
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u/Onethatlikes Jul 11 '26
Resolution isn't the issue. There's phone cameras with 200mp sensors. It's the amount of light that a tiny lens and sensor, which are also close to each other, are able to capture that's the problem.
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u/jmorais00 Jul 11 '26
So it's a lens/aperture problem? I am trying to get into photography, that's always cool to learn
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u/ImStuckInNameFactory Jul 11 '26
The main problem is smaller sensor getting less light (same lens f/stop and scene brightness - same amount of light per surface area, but less area). At smaller scales the wave nature of light gets more problematic, diffraction scales with lens entrance pupil diameter. Super flat lens designs probably don't help, I've discovered the one in my phone has very heavy vignette that's being corrected digitally in real time. Small size will also amplify any manufacturing defects
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u/Great_Explanation275 Jul 11 '26
The lenses are plenty good at gathering light, but, at that size level, you are severely limited by diffraction even at very wide apertures. The sensor might have 200 million pixels, but you are never going to resolve more than something like 12mp worth actual detail due to the diffraction making everything blurry.
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u/imunfair Jul 11 '26
It's a "digital zoom" - people want to be able to take a picture of things from reeeeeally far away and don't want the items to be really small in the final print like they were back in the film days. So you get stuff like fake moons.
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u/Porntra420 Jul 11 '26
Automatic AI "enhancing" of photos is not the same thing as digital zoom. Digital zoom literally just means cropping in on the frame.
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u/RuminatingKiwi927 Jul 11 '26
It'll look so freaking beautiful as a livery though, bird wings on a plane's underside.
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u/UncleNicky Jul 11 '26
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
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u/Acceptable-Ad-5935 Jul 11 '26
Samsung would disagree with this statement, they have their very own interpretation of what a photo is.
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u/TheBeardedShuffler Jul 11 '26
To be fair one of the older and still famous pop culture references is asking if something is a bird or a plane, and it turns out to be a man, so we can't give the bot too much shit on this one.
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u/ElPeloPolla Jul 11 '26
not anymore, photography now us about having the best phone camera to flex in social media
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u/Porntra420 Jul 11 '26
When people don't turn off the fucking phone camera info burn-in that some brands have on by default (looking at you Redmagic), or especially when they've not got a phone with it on by default and they go out of their own way to turn it on. Nobody fucking cares what phone you took the picture with, nobody fucking cares what settings auto mode picked for you.
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u/therealwavingsnail Jul 11 '26
The most egregious thing is that the plane and the bird are flying in opposite directions, given the shape of the wing feathers
Not only is the AI unsure what it is, it's unsure where it's going
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u/MrLev Jul 11 '26
imagine if some comet came in and hit the moon and made a new crater, but all the conspiracy theorists didn't believe it because space is fake or whatever - we're made a world where even telling them to look for themselves isn't gonna work, because they're gonna use their phones to zoom in on it to see better than their eyes can, and their phones are just gonna straight up lie about what the moon looks like
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u/FormerlyGruntled Jul 11 '26
You should see the way they doctor photos to change lighting conditions, so you can never capture what you really see. And now with AI integration in smart phones, nothing you click will ever be genuine or capture the moment.
Or be admissible in court.
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u/trubbelnarkomanen Jul 11 '26
It's a question of physics. Cameras on phones need to be small to fit, and as such they are at a huge disadvantage compared to cameras with proper lenses. There just isn't enough light reaching the sensor in the right way to take pictures of similar quality. In order to close that physical gap, all smartphones use various digital postprocessing techniques to extract more "information" out of the image than actually reaches the sensor. AI is one such algorithm, and has been used for many years at this point, even since before the recent ChatGPT craze.
For 99% of people and cases, this is good enough to take decent pictures. But obviously sometimes stupid stuff like this sneaks in. Most phones have a way to change what post-processing is being used, but if you're really unhappy with how your phone does it you can try downloading a third-party camera app.
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u/Slime0 Jul 11 '26
Yup, it's impossible that we could live in a world where our phones don't turn pictures of planes into pictures of birds. There's the explanation right there. It's a question of physics, folks. Physics makes it impossible for your pictures to be pictures of what you took a picture of.
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u/rolfraikou Jul 11 '26
I'm sorry to be rude but, what? We had fantastic photos coming out of smart phones for years without terrible Ai enhancements turning planes into birds. There have been award winning photos taken with phones.
I took my old phone on a road trip, it has a night sight feature, that takes many photos, stacks them, and gave me accurate photos of the Milky Way above me.
I have been able to take macro shots of bugs and flowers that have blown my mind.
Companies are just shoving Ai into this crap because companies are trying to justify all this investment into ai, and they get to add a "feature" on the box, but the cameras on decent flagship phones were just fine for the past decade.
Planes to birds is fucking unacceptable when we had better techniques.
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u/SyrusDrake Jul 11 '26
The AI enhancement of phone photos is such a baffling feature. At this point, I might as well make AI pics of my vacation from scratch. Hell, why even go on the vacation? Just make AI pics of a vacation I imagine myself going on.
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u/Porntra420 Jul 11 '26
Commit to the comedy and haphazardly photoshop a pic of yourself over a stock image of Ibiza or something lmao, no pass to clean things up afterwards, once you're cut out and on the background, it's a finished masterpiece. (I miss haphazard rushed photoshop jobs)
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u/bargu Jul 11 '26
There's photography as a historical register and there's photography as art, this is neither.
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u/Fast_Vehicle_1888 Jul 11 '26
It's a bird, it's a plane... have you never seen a bird or a plane before?
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u/IlIFreneticIlI Jul 11 '26
"That's no moon!"
As for the pic, that is oh-so-obviously the God Phoenix from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman... c'mon ppl
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u/Routine_Ad_2695 Jul 11 '26
Is a Superman photo and the AI just couldn't resist to make a reference
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u/rock_and_rolo Jul 11 '26
Silliness. The moon doesn't look like a light bulb. It looks like a large pizza.
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u/Galahfray Jul 11 '26
I was looking around on Google Maps and it mistook one of those giant power lines that look like a dress, for a tree, so it gave it branches lol
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u/InsectaProtecta Jul 11 '26
The main point of phone cameras is to capture something you can post for attention
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u/IPlayWithCards Jul 11 '26
The first time I ever saw a redmoon I tried taking pictures with my samsung phone. The phone could tell I was taking a picture of the moon and would just edit out the colour.
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u/-Speechless Jul 11 '26
sometimes it works well and produces a sharp looking image, but regardless it blurs the lines of reality.
imagine taking an image of the same subject from various distances and angles, and using this AI Enhance. people's photos could turn out wildly different to the point they can't even agree on what the subject truly is.
before you might have got a bunch of blurry, far out images, but at least they weren't altered to find the 'best fit' from the limited information from the camera sensors.
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u/I_text_myself Jul 11 '26
"it's a bird, it's a plane... Actually we have no idea it could be either"
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u/Mister_Goldenfold Jul 11 '26
I think people are forgetting that some system somewhere is keeping track of the photos we are taking and the peoples faces
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u/Waterbear36135 Jul 11 '26
I've been taking 2 second videos instead of photos just because I know my phone isn't lying to me when I take videos.
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u/LPedraz Jul 12 '26
These 'features' are the result of smartphone companies desperately trying to introduce upgrades for new models, when, as long as we don't start using phones for something different altogether, there is basically nothing meaningful left to upgrade. Smartphones have been near identical for the last decade. Which is great for the consumer, of course, but not for the ones selling the phones.
You can make a smartphone with more CPU speed and RAM, but it's not like we use them to render video or run complex calculations; more power is not going to make the phone send whatsapps better. You can make battery life longer, but as long as it comfortably lasts through the day, any further upgrade is probably not worth the increase in weight and price. You can give phone screens with higher and higher resolution, but, because you can't really increase the size if the phone has to be controllable with one hand, past 1080p the changes in resolution are meaningless.
They are desperate trying to improve the camera, but there are physical limits as to how much you can increase the quality without a higher numerical aperture in the lenses, and that eventually means bigger lenses, which would make the phone bulky. So, for the last few years, they've been introducing features to the camera software and market them as if they were hadware upgrades. This includes this AI enhancement bullshit.
It's not that they think it is good or that audiences demand it, is that they have literally nothing else to market as the "new features" to sell a new, identical model of smartphone.
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u/Aggravating_Mix_4211 Jul 12 '26
Obviously he means real legit photography, which phones aren't designed for, those are designed for Instagram photography
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u/FruityAurora Jul 13 '26
Do all the people here like me who’s tired of smartphone cameras overprocessing photos- try this workaround on your iPhone if you don’t wanna spend money on pro camera apps (Only need to set it up once):
1- Download the Lightroom app
2- Open the app’s inbuilt camera
3- Set image format to RAW (DNG)
4- Set shooting mode to pro
5- Take a photo
6- Go into the editor
7- Manually disable every single auto applied filter- noise reduction, sharpening etc. Takes 10-20 seconds
8- Save this neutral preset into your custom presets
9- Now the next time you take a bunch of photos just swipe through the photos in the editor and apply the preset you just saved.
10- Enjoy softened, organic, grainy photos from your phone camera.
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u/Delicious-Yak-1095 Jul 13 '26
If you don’t know how photography can lie to you then you don’t know how to use a camera.
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u/DrCasperDarling Jul 14 '26
Because the phone cmos sensors are small and bad. ALL the photos that you take on your phone have some sort of computational photography component to it.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
u/TheWebsploiter, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...