Software and Photography


Once upon a time, a good photograph was a combo of the skill of the photographer + the lens quality. And while those factors still matter, there’s now a 3rd parameter in that equation, writes Ben Evans:
“Most of the advances in smartphone cameras now happen in software.”
The software helps “get a better picture out of the raw data coming from the hardware”.

A while back, Apple launched “a dual-lens system but uses software to assemble that data into a single refocused image”. And today, both Google and Apple offer the capability with a single-lens system! Don’t ask me how, but machine learning algorithms are able to do it… Welcome to the age where:
“The technical quality of the picture you see gets better because of new software as much as because of new hardware.”

For example, today’s portrait mode in smartphones does “face detection as well as depth mapping to work out what to focus on”. Exposure, color-balance, you name it: the software can deal with it:
“When you take a photo on a ski slope it will come out perfectly exposed and colour-balanced because the camera knows this is snow and adjusts correctly.”
And is the day far, muses Evans, when “it will know which of the faces in the frame is your child and set the focus on them”?!

Machine learning algorithms already classify every pic based on what it contains. Want to find a pic? Just ask the phone!
“You can ask for ‘all pictures of my son at the beach’ or ‘every picture of a dog’.”

Whatever next?!

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