(objects springing)
- Well, I was wrong, so, time to own it.
What is a photo?
That's a real question
that I'm not sure has a straightforward answer anymore
in this age of smartphone cameras that we live in.
Case in point, the latest questions with Samsung.
Now, this is a bit of a part two
to a video I've already made
called "What's Happening With the iPhone's Camera,"
but that's about the broader topic
of smartphone cameras and computational photography
and the more interesting thing,
which is taking pictures of people.
I'll link that below the like button.
This one is more of a side quest
of the specific edge case of phones with zoom at night
zooming all the way in and taking pictures of the moon.
So first, I'd like to admit I was wrong.
I made a short about a month or so ago.
I'm not gonna delete it, but it's
of me zooming all the way into 100X space zoom
on the Galaxy S23 Ultra and taking a picture of the moon
that looks really impressive,
and I said, "I guess it's not doing the AI fakery
that Huawei got caught doing years ago."
But to be fair, that's not what I should've done.
What I should've done is actually tested it,
done some AB experiment type stuff.
I should've tested it and ran an experiment
like Reddit user, ibreakphotos actually did
this past weekend,
and well, as you can probably tell,
the findings were kinda interesting.
So let me show you.
So basically, when you point a camera
in the sky and zoom all the way into the moon,
it recognizes the moon as a subject of the photo,
and it locks the electronic stabilization on the target,
sets the focus distance to infinity
and fires up a detail improvement engine
to make the moon look much clearer
than it would normally be.
The easiest way to prove this
is exactly how the Reddit experiment went.
If you load up a full resolution picture of the moon
and point the camera at it,
it triggers all these systems and the same set of processes.
But then if you pull up a blurred photo of the moon
with many of these details obscured
and do the exact same thing,
zoom all the way in, point the camera at it,
what happens is it still runs all the same improvements
and processes because it recognizes a moon,
and then it turns out, the camera will spit out a clearer,
more detailed photo of the moon with all sorts
of sharp detail that wasn't even in the source image.
It feels weird.
It feels fake.
Like, the fact that it's getting a bunch
of detail out of the shot that wasn't in front
of your camera in the first place just feels wrong.
To be fair, it's not exactly doing
what Huawei was accused of doing.
Huawei is accused of doing this brute force, like,
overlay fakery, where okay, you point theirs at the moon,
it recognizes the moon,
and then it just drops an overlay on top of the moon
to get that detail out of nowhere
'cause that's what our brains assumed that was happening.
Huawei denies this, but to be fair, this would work
with moon photography because the moon, as you know,
is tidally locked and the same side always faces earth,
so the overlay would always be perfectly accurate.
But what's actually happening with Samsung's
is a little more complicated than that.
So like I said, you point that camera at the moon.
Once you get past 25X zoom, if the sky is clear enough
and the moon is recognized as the target,
the camera app turns the exposure all the way down
to take it from a glowing white orb
to an actually somewhat detailed object.
Then, like I said, it sets the focus
to its furthest distance,
it locks the electronic stabilization on the target object,
and then it runs a series of noise reduction
and detail enhancement processes
that basically AI sharpen what you see in the viewfinder
towards what it knows the moon is supposed to look like.
So yes, everyone who has this phone that takes a picture
of the same moon is gonna get, like,
basically the same looking image at 100X,
but, you know, if it's got some color to it,
if the moon is red to you, then it will keep that intact.
If something flies in front of it,
theoretically that should stay intact.
And then it matches the phase of the moon,
so it'll work on any phase,
half moon, gibbous, crescent, whatever.
That's fine too.
Now, you might be asking,
"Marques, how do you know all of this?"
Well, one, because we actually ran these experiments
on pictures of the moon like the Reddit user did,
but also two, there is an entire post on a Samsung forum.
There's a Samsung community forum,
and there's a post that details all of this,
like how it works, what phones it works on,
and the step-by-step process that it goes through
when it recognizes the moon in the sky.
It's in Korean, so you may have to run it through translate
to read it yourself, but yeah, it's out there.
So you can disable this feature
just by turning off the Scene optimizer setting
in the camera app, whose description right now
on my phone says it, "Makes dark scenes look brighter,
food look tastier, and landscapes look more vivid."
They should also add, "also makes the moon look extra crispy
and bright and detailed so you can flex
on all your iPhone friends who don't have 100X zoom."
But to me, this is just one of many types of photos
that our smartphones are already editing for us.
I've said it in a previous video, the stuff that comes out
of a smartphone camera isn't so much reality
as much as it's this computer's interpretation
of what it thinks you'd like reality to look like.
So, of course, anytime there's a full moon,
everyone with an S23 Ultra is super tempted
to zoom all the way in and take the same picture of the moon
'cause it looks super impressive and it's visually cool,
but also then the headlines are gonna say,
"Hey, that's kinda fake."
But these phones will continue to recognize the landscape
and turn the grass more green or recognize a wide angle shot
with the sky in it and turn the sky more blue.
It'll recognize a photo of food
and boost the most saturated colors.
Of course, the one with the moon
is the most visually impressive
and easy to pay attention to, but
what is a photo?
Moon mode magic makes the media mad,
but many more manipulated megapixels have their merit.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace.
(bright mellow music)