Samsung moon "enhancement".

[Thomas A. Fine]

No.  NO!

 

This is NOT photography.

 

The moon looks different every single night.  The shadows on the craters are different with the moon phase.  An AI-generated image won't get this nuance.

 

Fun fact about people who actually observe the moon: the full moon is the WORST time to observe the moon because there's nearly no shadows.  The best looking photos are along the terminator (line between the light and dark) where the shadows are long and crisp.  There is an actual image, which looks AMAZING, but is totally fake, which was assembled by building the moon in strips from strongly shadowed craters near the terminator taken from photos throughout the month (probably multiple months).  BUT THIS IS NOT A PHOTO. 

Even photos taken at the same phase in different months are different, because changes in viewing and lighting angles.

 

Editing to add: found the image I'm talking about:

https://www.livescience.com/terminator-moon-composite-image.html

[For Science!]

"fake" is a controversial term imo, its just a form of composite postprocessing. At least in the example you describe.

Not much difference imo between HDR, or focus stacking macrophotography, or stacked astrophotography, or arguably long-exposures with filters.

Photography has come a long way from a single exposure on film being the only thing considered a photo.

 

I do agree that however the line should be drawn when you bring in detail to an image that was never captured in the first place. You can't make up the signal and claim it was captured.

[Uttamattamakin]

17 minutes ago, Thomas A. Fine said:

No.  NO!

 

This is NOT photography.

.....

 

Editing to add: found the image I'm talking about:

https://www.livescience.com/terminator-moon-composite-image.html

100% agree.  Astrophotography could better be called astronomical imaging.  Astronomers produce various images, using various cameras and sensors.  What the Samsung phone is doing is about as true of a "photograph" of the moon as anyone has ever seen. 

Fun fact (not for you Thomas for casual readers)  Any image you see from say James Webb Space Telescope will be a false color image.   The goal of these images is to enable easier data analysis.  A fun Twitter feed to follow on that would be @JWSTPhotoBot  to see the more or less raw images. 

 

9 minutes ago, For Science! said:

"fake" is a controversial term imo, its just a form of composite postprocessing. At least in the example you describe.

Not much difference imo between HDR, or focus stacking macrophotography, or stacked astrophotography, or arguably long-exposures with filters.

Photography has come a long way from a single exposure on film being the only thing considered a photo.

 

I do agree that however the line should be drawn when you bring in detail to an image that was never captured in the first place. You can't make up the signal and claim it was captured.

Not fake just not a photograph.  Not an image created by focusing light onto a light sensitive medium or sensor in one event.  Astronomical images are often as Thomas said, a composite.  Another common option is data taken in monochrome in one wavelength.  Then overlaid on others, but color coded into RGB creating a "color" image out of wavelengths of light we don't even see.  

[For Science!]

31 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

100% agree.  Astrophotography could better be called astronomical imaging.  Astronomers produce various images, using various cameras and sensors.  What the Samsung phone is doing is about as true of a "photograph" of the moon as anyone has ever seen. 

Fun fact (not for you Thomas for casual readers)  Any image you see from say James Webb Space Telescope will be a false color image.   The goal of these images is to enable easier data analysis.  A fun Twitter feed to follow on that would be @JWSTPhotoBot  to see the more or less raw images. 

 

Not fake just not a photograph.  Not an image created by focusing light onto a light sensitive medium or sensor in one event.  Astronomical images are often as Thomas said, a composite.  Another common option is data taken in monochrome in one wavelength.  Then overlaid on others, but color coded into RGB creating a "color" image out of wavelengths of light we don't even see.  

Ultimately, each to their own definitions and to gate-keep what they consider a "photo". I would for example consider a panoramic photo to be a "photo", but you evidently would not - and that's fine. A weird line to draw for example a single long-exposure with a star tracker vs stacking aligned shorter exposures in post.

[Uttamattamakin]

34 minutes ago, For Science! said:

Ultimately, each to their own definitions and to gate-keep what they consider a "photo". I would for example consider a panoramic photo to be a "photo", but you evidently would not - and that's fine. A weird line to draw for example a single long-exposure with a star tracker vs stacking aligned shorter exposures in post.

IT's a matter of technicalities.  Given the forum is that really so strange? 

[mykeworthy]

My problem with this whole thing is all the advertising I saw with “space zoom” was “it’s a 100x zoom” and not “it’s AI machine learning based enhancement.” So I, as a consumer, have to look at it and go “it really zooms 100x?” 
 

now of course I know that’s not possible (or at least not possible in a way that gonna be good), but another consumer might think it’s real. 

this is ABSOLUTELY deceptive and for a channel that seems to call out “bad business practices” and how businesses can twist words, it’s disappointing to see a WAN show where the discussion was “meh it’s whatever, especially when it was brought up earlier in the same stream when Ryan Reynolds and TMobile were called out for their “meaningless words”

 

now I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt that maybe this was already a topic around the office and they didn’t want retread it, but…. I feel like if it was Apple who did this, Linus would be foaming at the mouth to call them out.

[For Science!]

I'll just grab my tin foil hat and say that Samsung has started developing a massive death-laser on the moon, and so want to make sure its details are never captured by "enhancing" the image and thereby wiping any images of the death laser.

[saintlouisbagels]

1 hour ago, dragonkyng said:

this is ABSOLUTELY deceptive and for a channel that seems to call out “bad business practices” and how businesses can twist words, it’s disappointing to see a WAN show where the discussion was “meh it’s whatever, especially when it was brought up earlier in the same stream when Ryan Reynolds and TMobile were called out for their “meaningless words”

I like to think this is just another example of both of them being out of touch and forgetting there are plenty of people who buy phones specifically for camera improvements. I also think they probably have the same opinion as me, and I think MKBHD and company shared the same sentiment - it's JUST a picture of the moon.  It's the most worthless hype feature. It's a white dot in the sky with zero surrounding terrain and no nuances that makes the photo unique to you.

[dilpickle]

11 hours ago, For Science! said:

Ultimately, each to their own definitions and to gate-keep what they consider a "photo". I would for example consider a panoramic photo to be a "photo", but you evidently would not - and that's fine. A weird line to draw for example a single long-exposure with a star tracker vs stacking aligned shorter exposures in post.

There is a very clear line between post processing and a fake image.

 

Imagine if you took a selfie but your phone decides it doesn't look good so it picks an older image from your photo album and overlays it on top of your face without telling you. Would you be ok with that? Because that's exactly what they are doing with the moon. 

[For Science!]

4 hours ago, dilpickle said:

There is a very clear line between post processing and a fake image.

 

Imagine if you took a selfie but your phone decides it doesn't look good so it picks an older image from your photo album and overlays it on top of your face without telling you. Would you be ok with that? Because that's exactly what they are doing with the moon. 

As I said:

16 hours ago, For Science! said:

I do agree that however the line should be drawn when you bring in detail to an image that was never captured in the first place. You can't make up the signal and claim it was captured.

So no, I am not okay with what is being done with the moon by Samsung.

The comment you quoted me on is specifically about whether only a true-single exposure is considered a photo or not.

[divito]

I wouldn't call this fake. Calling it fake calls into question many other photography techniques and editing, like panoramas. Real photographs were taken, and they were matched together to show a specific result. 

There is a large difference between this and actually fabricating images. All the pieces that are in the image shown are real photos of the real object, they just didn't occur at the same time.

[Erioch]

9 hours ago, dilpickle said:

Imagine if you took a selfie but your phone decides it doesn't look good so it picks an older image from your photo album and overlays it on top of your face without telling you. Would you be ok with that?

Where can I get such a feature!?!?!

[Fluph]

On 3/18/2023 at 6:00 PM, divito said:

I wouldn't call this fake. Calling it fake calls into question many other photography techniques and editing, like panoramas. Real photographs were taken, and they were matched together to show a specific result. 

There is a large difference between this and actually fabricating images. All the pieces that are in the image shown are real photos of the real object, they just didn't occur at the same time.

It is fake.  The phone did not take the image.
The image the phone took was not enhanced.
Another image was used.
It is fake in every sense of the word.

[divito]

8 hours ago, Fluph said:

It is fake.  The phone did not take the image.
The image the phone took was not enhanced.
Another image was used.
It is fake in every sense of the word.

What are you even referencing? What phone?

[LAwLz]

18 hours ago, Fluph said:

It is fake.  The phone did not take the image.
The image the phone took was not enhanced.
Another image was used.
It is fake in every sense of the word.

Are you talking about the Samsung moon photos? Because they are NOT overlaying anything. They are very much enhancing the image. There is no "second image" being added from an external source. 

 

It seems like people in this thread think that Samsung is overlaying a separate image on top of the captured image. This is how Huawei used to do it, but it is absolutely, 100% NOT AT ALL how Samsung does things.

[mykeworthy]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Are you talking about the Samsung moon photos? Because they are NOT overlaying anything. They are very much enhancing the image. There is no "second image" being added from an external source. 

 

It seems like people in this thread think that Samsung is overlaying a separate image on top of the captured image. This is how Huawei used to do it, but it is absolutely, 100% NOT AT ALL how Samsung does things.

They are though. People are testing this and it is not an image enhancing, at least not in the traditional sense. They are overlaying an additional image. Now that is technically an "enhancement," but not the way it seems you are implying.

 

And even if they weren't, we're still missing the real issue. Samsung never said this was an enhancement feature. They said this was a zoom feature. That's called being deceptive at best and lying at worst.

[LAwLz]

7 minutes ago, dragonkyng said:

They are though. People are testing this and it is not an image enhancing, at least not in the traditional sense. They are overlaying an additional image. Now that is technically an "enhancement," but not the way it seems you are implying.

 

And even if they weren't, we're still missing the real issue. Samsung never said this was an enhancement feature. They said this was a zoom feature. That's called being deceptive at best and lying at worst.

No, they are not overlaying an image. You have completely misunderstood what is actually happening if you think they are overlaying something, and so is everyone else who think they are overlaying an image. That is not what they are doing. And it is a very important distinction to make between AI enhancements vs overlaying external images.

 

I would also question Samsung saying this was a "zoom feature", and what that actually entails. Photography have gotten more and more "software based" as time goes on and I find it weird that people are all of a sudden realizing how much post-processing and tricks cameras actually use. I would also question your use of the word "traditional sense". This thing have been happening for like 5+ years already. 

[mykeworthy]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I would also question Samsung saying this was a "zoom feature", and what that actually entails. Photography have gotten more and more "software based" as time goes on and I find it weird that people are all of a sudden realizing how much post-processing and tricks cameras actually use. I would also question your use of the word "traditional sense". This thing have been happening for like 5+ years already. 

The commercials show a person zooming into the moon with the text 100x Space Zoom! and the moon is perfectly clear. And while yes, the phone does in fact "zoom in" 100x, it looks like ass, as any digital zoom trying to go from a 10x optical zoom to 100x would. But using the overlay/enhancement, it makes a standard consumer, who might not be aware of the limitations of digital zoom, think it actually zooms in and looks that good. That's why I'm "giving" them the benefit of a doubt and saying it could be mere deception and not just an outright lie

[LAwLz]

45 minutes ago, dragonkyng said:

The commercials show a person zooming into the moon with the text 100x Space Zoom! and the moon is perfectly clear. And while yes, the phone does in fact "zoom in" 100x, it looks like ass, as any digital zoom trying to go from a 10x optical zoom to 100x would. But using the overlay/enhancement, it makes a standard consumer, who might not be aware of the limitations of digital zoom, think it actually zooms in and looks that good. That's why I'm "giving" them the benefit of a doubt and saying it could be mere deception and not just an outright lie

But where do we draw the line between being "deceptive" and just doing a good job of what people actually expect?

If someone came up with a good algorithm (not AI based) to enhance details in digital zoom, would you say that was deceptive too? Is it deceptive when the iPhone lets you zoom in x3 when the actual optical zoom is only 2x or 2.5x (or whatever it is)?

 

Is using software to overcome hardware limitations always deceptive?

 

I don't think this story is as clear cut as some people have been lead to believe.

 

 

Also, it is not overlaying. You keep using that word which indicates to me that you haven't looked into the story enough. It is not overlaying anything. What it is doing is combining multiple shots and then "guessing" (based on training data) which parts of the image should be sharpened, have their colors slightly altered, and so on. It's the same thing cameras have been doing for years upon years already and that people usually praise because it makes pictures look better.

 

Photography is very rarely about accurately depicting what the camera sensor captured, because who cares about the sensor? Digital photography have always processed the raw data captured by the sensor because it looks like ass (ever seen a picture that haven't been debayered? It looks awful compared to a debayered one). Photography is usually about depicting what the human saw (or in the case of for example telephoto, depicting what a human eye could have seen), and our human eyes are usually far better than the cameras sensor. If we bridge the gap with software (which we have already been doing for ages) then I don't have any issue with that.

[mykeworthy]

23 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

But where do we draw the line between being "deceptive" and just doing a good job of what people actually expect?

When you aren't doing what you are implying you are doing, its decpetive

[Thomas A. Fine]

On 3/22/2023 at 4:24 AM, LAwLz said:

No, they are not overlaying an image. You have completely misunderstood what is actually happening if you think they are overlaying something, and so is everyone else who think they are overlaying an image. That is not what they are doing. And it is a very important distinction to make between AI enhancements vs overlaying external images.

 

I would also question Samsung saying this was a "zoom feature", and what that actually entails. Photography have gotten more and more "software based" as time goes on and I find it weird that people are all of a sudden realizing how much post-processing and tricks cameras actually use. I would also question your use of the word "traditional sense". This thing have been happening for like 5+ years already. 

Why do you keep claiming this?

People have taken photos of a blurry moon, and ended up with a moon that had details that did not exist at all in the original photo.

[crazzp]

2 hours ago, Thomas A. Fine said:

Why do you keep claiming this?

People have taken photos of a blurry moon, and ended up with a moon that had details that did not exist at all in the original photo.

Because the phone is able to recognise throug the zoom lens that the photo is a moon and is editing what is blurry (perhaps assumed by the phone to be human error) to be sharper and adding small details.

 

Try taking a streetlamp and see if it turns into a moon. Then I'll say it's fake.

 

I'll compare this to an photographer taking studio photos and beautifying the model by enlarging eyes, darkening tone, adding lipstick colour etc. Would this qualifies as a fake photo? I guess different people have different interpretation of 'fake'.

[Avocado Diaboli]

10 hours ago, Thomas A. Fine said:

Why do you keep claiming this?

People have taken photos of a blurry moon, and ended up with a moon that had details that did not exist at all in the original photo.

People have taken blurry photos of all sorts of things that didn't exist in the original photo that the post processing has added after the fact. As @LAwLz keeps pointing out, digital cameras are always processing something according to some algorithm to make the photo appear the way the camera manufacturer thinks the photographer intends it to look.

 

This instance of pictures of the moon is an extreme example and probably the first one many people have noticed, which is why we keep seeing the outrage over this but not the myriad other things that cameras have been doing for literal decades, because the way the sausage was made was unknown to most people who just casually point and shoot.

[HenrySalayne]

On 3/24/2023 at 12:17 AM, Thomas A. Fine said:

Why do you keep claiming this?

People have taken photos of a blurry moon, and ended up with a moon that had details that did not exist at all in the original photo.

This is a misconception.

There were no details added, the image was deblurred / unblurred. Blurring is just superimposing the information of a single pixel across several pixels.  Another redditt user showed this by using a "fake" moon which was "unblurred" correctly.

 

This already been discussed in this previous thread:

 

[Thomas A. Fine]

Yes, I know people claim this is simply "deblurring".

I think they're wrong.  There are details in the new image that are not in the original.

 

For example a notable streak coming out of Aristarchus crater is just a round blur in the original, but a clear streak with correct orientation in the "deblurred" version.  And the shape of Mare Serenitatis is changed in shape in a way that makes no sense in terms of deblurring, but makes perfect sense if an AI matrix was trained on a lot of images with a different libration than the original photo.

 

There's a youtube video where someone claims to prove it's deblurring, yet really just says a lot of words that mean "trust me".  But part of this video is that he overlays the two images to show how similar they are.  This is an absolutely horrible visualization, which will only reinforce similarities, and tend to obscure differences. A better approach would be a "blink" comparision where you switch rapidly between the two views.  You can do this in his video if you find the right spot where it crosses over between the two images and use the left and right arrows to alternate between the two.  It really highlights how the "deblurred" image has more detail than the original.

 

And note that I'm not saying no deblurring is happening.  But, just think about it... what would AI-based deblurring mean?  It means the AI has different expectations for how different parts of the moon should be deblurred.  And so what you end up with is a lot more creative than simple deblurring.  In the process of deblurring, it is putting in features that it knows exist, even if they are not in the original image at all.