Here’s a clear example of how aggressive the image processing has become on newer iPhones. This is a comparison between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the iPhone 11 Pro Max, taking photos of distant text at equal magnification. Note how the 15 Pro Max’s image pipeline has made up all the details.
EDIT: I’m going to drop mentions of “AI” and “hallucinating” here because I think it’s conjuring up the wrong mental models in readers’ heads. What’s likely happening is over-eager noise reduction and sharpening (which may or may not have pattern matching) creating details where none exist. Every phone does some amount of NR and sharpening, but later iPhones are super aggressive in this regard, so much so that the results often depart from what we accept as “reality”.
@drahardja
For a long time I would say to people (who were not into photography) "why are you bothering with a camera? Your phone takes better pictures than that!"
I guess I may need to stop saying that. 😬
I'm assuming these AI filters can be turned off though?
@Gargron@drahardja I’m not seeing any more examples, and can’t recreate it myself.
And I don’t get the comments about the 14 Pro sensor being a physical 12MP sensor with 48MP actually being software upscale. Halide enabled full 48MP photos in RAW and so does the main camera, with minimal processing. I see noticeable detail improvements I wouldn’t attribute to software. 🧐
@drahardja Reminds me of the big stink a year or two ago with Samsung phones trying to improve moon shots by replacing any white disk on a dark background with a high-res stock photo of the Moon (but not too high-res because otherwise people might notice).
@uastronomer Huawei did that also, four years before Samsung. I thought it was only Huawei actually, but a quick web search reveals you are right also :)
@martincrownover It’s hard to tell, but there is some generative shenanigans going on. There is definitely subject recognition happening, which leads to different “enhancements” for different parts of the image, including the processing pipeline filling in “guessed” textures, which I suspect is what’s going on here.
@drahardja And if they already had optics good enough to capture that text on the 11, it’s totally unnecessary to do this now. If anything, optics and sensors got better over time.
@arroz Protip: The “48 megapixel” iPhone sensor is really a 12 megapixel sensor. Most of the fine detail beyond 12 megapixels are of questionable quality. The post-processing is there to compensate for it, I guess.
I use Halide to take 12 megapixel pictures with most of the processing disabled, unless I need some computational feature like Night Mode.
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