I remember several years back people were mad that a phone brand (can’t remember which one, I think it was Samsung?) was claiming to be able to take superzoom photos of the moon, but were actually just replacing the very fuzzy moon with a clear image. Nowadays, you have phone brands (all of them, not just the one) actively promoting adding people into image, removing people from images, hell, even changing the entire SKY, with little to no reaction from most people. What happened, why doesn’t anyone care anymore?
Of note, I do not feel particularly strongly for or against artificially enhanced smartphone photographs. I’m just wondering why no one is talking about any of this…
It was Samsung and they were just ahead of the time. Consider that in the field of photography we’ve gone from a photograph being a big and often expensive black and white deal to snapping pictures willy nilly on a device everybody carries around in their pockets. We had already accepted retouching of photos even before Photoshop. Photoshop or similar applications are now also available to more people on the same devices they carry around to snap ask these pictures. Photographs today are an artifice of human intervention and/or computer processing. No image is just what happened. The RAW data has probably been heavily edited by the photographer to get the final effect they wanted. Even before so-called AI they have gone in and changed shit around. And they’ve become so masterful at it that most of us cannot tell the difference. They have probably, on occasion, replaced a whole sky or the moon on shots before they ended up in a brochure. This is nothing new. So if these tricks get automated now, that shows me more how widespread they already were. And I think we are not talking about this as much because we as a society like being cheated like that because it looks good.
There’s a huge difference between adjusting the color mapping of the RAW data and using Photoshop or AI. It’s really hard to get an “objective truth” color mapping, and that certainly doesn’t come by default.
When I take a photo, I want to see the photo I took. If I decide to photoshop something with it, that’s my decision, and it’s no longer a real photo, and I would be a liar if I were to present it as such.
We should not start accepting manipulated images as a replacement for real images, and it’s unacceptable that Samsung didn’t give its users a choice in whether to use the real image or a manipulated one.
My point was that it is already too late for that. I understand how your feel. I also think that you’ll be part of a minority.
There is no such thing as a real image.