Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Dave Rahardja

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”.

Original video: facebook.com/watch?v=885196069

13 comments
remote procedure chris

@drahardja i'm glad to see more people are talking about the unreasonable overprocessing applied by modern phones

Miguel Arroz

@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.

Dave Rahardja

@arroz 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. But optically, the 48 MP phones aren’t that much better at resolving detail than the 12 MP ones.

I use Halide to take 12 megapixel pictures with most of the processing disabled, unless I need some computational feature like Night Mode.

Steve 🇨🇦🇺🇦

@drahardja I can’t re-create that behaviour with my 15 Pro Max. I wonder if I have a turned off somewhere? Or have they re-tuned it?

Dave Rahardja

@tewha My friends have definitely seen it on their iPhone 15s. Maybe the secret is to make the text oblique enough that the phone doesn’t *realize* that it’s text, and thus choose a different enhancement technique.

Steve 🇨🇦🇺🇦

@drahardja I was at quite an angle. I’ll look for something else to photograph without personal info on it.

Ulrik Nyman ⬡

@drahardja @tewha the text is upside down. Maybe that is part of the reason?

Steve 🇨🇦🇺🇦

@UlrikNyman @drahardja Yes, when I put the flyer fully upside down I get the distortion in most shots at 5x.

Photo rotated after capture.

Steve 🇨🇦🇺🇦

@UlrikNyman @drahardja You know, I think the problem isn’t that it recognizes it as text and distorted at slide angles. I think the problem is it’s still recognizing upside-down as text and is trying to coerce it to right-side up letters. I’m not sure how you would prove that, but that’s the impression I get when I look at each letter.

Steve 🇨🇦🇺🇦

@drahardja Oh! Did these go past optical zoom? I never use digital zoom, I just assume it’s not going to work. It never has, really. I wish I could turn it off entirely.

this is maximum optical room. I tap focussed on the bottom right coupon, I think.

Dave Rahardja

@tewha I don’t think so. The video used 5x zoom, which is the maximum 15 Pro Max optical range, though it is beyond the 11 Pro Max optical range.

Григорий Клюшников

At this point it's a misnomer to call this "photography". It's not photography if the post-processing pipeline makes its own artistic decisions like performing object segmentation to treat different parts of the scene differently, or using any AI whatsoever to influence the output. I'm fine with things like stacking multiple exposures (to reduce noise) or local tone mapping (to improve dynamic range), but this shit?..

Go Up