Consumer Technology Samsung phones fake their moon photos

[Kal-El814]

Pretty interesting post that has some receipts that show that when you snap zoomed pics of the moon with recent Samsung phones, the resulting image is bogus, adding detail that’s not actually captured by the sensor. 
 

A while back I’d seen really impressive moon photos taken with Samsungs, shown side by side with worse shots from iPhones. I’d wondered what kind of wizardry they were using but I didn’t assume it was just a bullshot generator. 

[Ghost_MH]

I'm pretty sure Samsung admitted as much a year or two ago. Then again, I can't even take a picture of my dog without it being processed through an AI filter. The easiest way to see this is take a picture of anything through the Samsung camera app and then again through like, the picture function of like Signal. Since Signal is built around keeping everything in the app self-contained it doesn't have access to Samsung AI and you get noticably worse pictures.

 

I will say, though, everybody does this even if Samsung is the only one that has a model built for the moon. How else are like Google and Apple getting better pictures off the same sensors year after year. It's all AI and machine learning "fixing" your pictures after the fact.

[unogueen]

Just get  a real camera. Megapixels on phones don't mean shit.

[Xbob42]

All digital cameras fake a bunch of shit for photos. It's how the process works. This is an extra step or two but who gives a shit?

[Kal-El814]

2 hours ago, Ghost_MH said:

I'm pretty sure Samsung admitted as much a year or two ago. Then again, I can't even take a picture of my dog without it being processed through an AI filter. The easiest way to see this is take a picture of anything through the Samsung camera app and then again through like, the picture function of like Signal. Since Signal is built around keeping everything in the app self-contained it doesn't have access to Samsung AI and you get noticably worse pictures.

 

I will say, though, everybody does this even if Samsung is the only one that has a model built for the moon. How else are like Google and Apple getting better pictures off the same sensors year after year. It's all AI and machine learning "fixing" your pictures after the fact.

As the post says though, there’s a difference between machine learning and AI being applied to image processing and software going, “oh that’s the moon? Here you go.”

 

 

[skillzdadirecta]

2 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

All digital cameras fake a bunch of shit for photos. It's how the process works. This is an extra step or two but who gives a shit?

 

[Ominous]

3 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

Pretty interesting post that has some receipts that show that when you snap zoomed pics of the moon with recent Samsung phones, the resulting image is bogus, adding detail that’s not actually captured by the sensor. 
 

A while back I’d seen really impressive moon photos taken with Samsungs, shown side by side with worse shots from iPhones. I’d wondered what kind of wizardry they were using but I didn’t assume it was just a bullshot generator. 

Well iPhone don't have nearly as long a telephoto lens as the Samsung phones.

[Ominous]

2 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

All digital cameras fake a bunch of shit for photos. It's how the process works. This is an extra step or two but who gives a shit?

Not really. Shoot RAW and edit later. Pretty sure you can guess which one is the phone pic.

 

 

 

View full screen and you can see bats and shit flying across the frame silhouetted by the moon.

 

Air pollution moon added for good measure.

 

[TheShader]

So it's finally confirmed they faked the moon landing using a Samsung phone?

[Ghost_MH]

57 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

As the post says though, there’s a difference between machine learning and AI being applied to image processing and software going, “oh that’s the moon? Here you go.”

 

It's not overlaying a texture, though. Samsung's photo AI has a model for the moon, so it's using what it knows about how the moon looks to create a "realistic" sharpening of the moon. If you did the same experiment the guy on Reddit did and point it at a blurry picture from 1902's A Trip to the Moon, it would keep the face there but sharpen it to make the eyes, nose, and mouth look more real and crater-y.

 

Is Samsung's Galaxy S21 Ultra using AI to fake detailed Moon photos?

WWW.INVERSE.COM

---

I never expected to go this deep down the rabbit hole. With so many conspiracy theories surrounding the Galaxy S21's 100x zoom, I found myself taking on the most unexpected investigation of my tech reviewing career.

 

There's an article from two years ago about this. This isn't anything new.

 

Actually, in your Reddit thread there's a link to another post on Reddit about the same thing from a couple of years back.

 

In this one the person put a smiley face on the moon and the camera's AI didn't wipe out the smiley face with a moon texture. It just turned the smiley face into something more resembling craters.

 

This is just more AI filtering. Apple, Google, and Samsung all model their cameras for facial and text recognition, so it can clean up faces and background text. I'm sure they also train them on things like bricks and leaves and grass. Samsung just took it a step further and trained theirs on the moon. Once phones have even more storage and CPU power, I'm willing to bet we'll see things like training on historic landmarks so you never get a grainy picture of like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.

[Guest]

I like the direction technology is taking image capture. At the end of the day they are creating a result that is better than the average person could do unassisted.
 

We also need a real paradigm shift in imager technology before some of the software solutions aren’t quite as necessary. From what I’ve gathered, that sort of leap is the “20 years away” of all kinda pipedreamy tech things.

[Xbob42]

51 minutes ago, Ominous said:

Not really. Shoot RAW and edit later.

Bro I got shit to do I ain't got time to edit no big city moon photos!

[unogueen]

24 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

I like the direction technology is taking image capture. At the end of the day they are creating a result that is better than the average person could do unassisted.
 

We also need a real paradigm shift in imager technology before some of the software solutions aren’t quite as necessary. From what I’ve gathered, that sort of leap is the “20 years away” of all kinda pipedreamy tech things.

You mean AI construction?

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, unogueen said:

You mean AI construction?

On the first part, I suppose that is a component, though not the whole. But the second piece has nothing to do with software. We haven’t moved the needle substantially in the basic hardware technology of image capture since literally the 1970s, just iterations on the same concepts that were in development in the 50s and 60s.

[unogueen]

I mean there's Imax. But visual fidelity is a hard thing to nail once you realize 20:20 vision is regressive.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, unogueen said:

I mean there's Imax. But visual fidelity is a hard thing to nail once you realize 20:20 vision is regressive.

IMAX is not new imaging technology. 70mm IMAX is even older tech, and digital IMAX certified cameras are all CMOS or CCD based, which are the technologies that have been around for over 50 years.

 

Display technology has similarly being stunted, with mostly iterative improvements. Which hey, I like improvements, but we are running up against the ceiling of where these things can go in terms of pixel quality gains. I want some really fresh ideas.

[unogueen]

Well. the next medium needs to be fluid. Like a drop, but it's a pixel. Can't replicate what life has otherwise.

[Ghost_MH]

46 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

IMAX is not new imaging technology. 70mm IMAX is even older tech, and digital IMAX certified cameras are all CMOS or CCD based, which are the technologies that have been around for over 50 years.

 

Display technology has similarly being stunted, with mostly iterative improvements. Which hey, I like improvements, but we are running up against the ceiling of where these things can go in terms of pixel quality gains. I want some really fresh ideas.

 

I'm not even sure where you go with imaging tech. The most interesting camera innovation I've seen in recent years are actual working light field cameras regular ass people. Even then, the only company making them, Lytro, went out of business several years ago. Even then, that was just a regular camera sensor with fancy software and a weirdo array of lenses.

 

Same goes for displays. Maybe we can one day get to OLED-sized displays without fixed resolutions. That's basically the biggest weakness of all displays since we mostly moved on from CRTs.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

I'm not even sure where you go with imaging tech. The most interesting camera innovation I've seen in recent years are actual working light field cameras regular ass people. Even then, the only company making them, Lytro, went out of business several years ago. Even then, that was just a regular camera sensor with fancy software and a weirdo array of lenses.

 

Same goes for displays. Maybe we can one day get to OLED-sized displays without fixed resolutions. That's basically the biggest weakness of all displays since we mostly moved on from CRTs.

Yeah, that’s why I’m saying it’s got to be a legit paradigm shift, something fundamentally different than what we have iterated on for more than any of our lifetimes. At some point you hit the limits of pixel design. We aren’t quite there, but I would argue the next 10 years of imager and display tech *hardware* innovation will be the smallest in the last 10 decades. Almost all subtle refinement.

 

Fortunately there continues to be areas where software can assist in further gains.

[Ghost_MH]

3 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

Fortunately there continues to be areas where software can assist in further gains.

 

And that's where these AI models come in. Eventually, the software will get to the point where a shitty camera sensor will "capture" a picture that is indistinguishable from a very high end full frame camera thanks to a ton of post processing.

 

It's weird, I was an art student, and I used to always carry my DSLR and a few lenses everywhere I went. I still don't own a backpack that doesn't have a camera pouch in it. Emotionally, I understand the idea that fully capturing an image isn't the same thing as artificially recreating any missing pieces, but logically...if I can't tell the difference between the two, why does it matter? The writer in the article I linked to earlier managed to get the S21 Ultra to easily capture a picture of the moon that he had to work hard to reproduce on a full frame Sony DSLR with a $2000 zoom lens. There's a reason I don't carry my DSLR around with me anymore.

[TheShader]

34 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 but logically...if I can't tell the difference between the two, why does it matter? The writer in the article I linked to earlier managed to get the S21 Ultra to easily capture a picture of the moon that he had to work hard to reproduce on a full frame Sony DSLR with a $2000 zoom lens. There's a reason I don't carry my DSLR around with me anymore.

I think there will always be a niche for the artists wanting the control that only comes with good old fashioned photography. Like how auto turn can never replace the live vocals of a talented musician on a live acoustic set. 

 

It's also all tools at the end of the day. For a lot of people this is just going to amount to them getting nice vacation photos that look extra nice, but you can't really replace the element of skill and knowledge an experienced photographer has. Photography is way more than "better camera = better photo" and that will remain true when phone AI gets to the point of being able to dump out a photo that looks on par with premium DSLR equipment even to a professional. 

[Ghost_MH]

6 minutes ago, TheShader said:

I think there will always be a niche for the artists wanting the control that only comes with good old fashioned photography. Like how auto turn can never replace the live vocals of a talented musician on a live acoustic set. 

 

It's also all tools at the end of the day. For a lot of people this is just going to amount to them getting nice vacation photos that look extra nice, but you can't really replace the element of skill and knowledge an experienced photographer has. Photography is way more than "better camera = better photo" and that will remain true when phone AI gets to the point of being able to dump out a photo that looks on par with premium DSLR equipment even to a professional. 

 

Of course. We still have musicians that love tube amps and scoustic guitars are never going away.

 

I've also seen awsome stuff like this...

 

 

Still, the best camera is the one you have on you and we're now documenting or lives in fashion that was never possible before. When my kids are in their twenties, there is a better than not chance that I'll have video of them for any given day of the year they could randomly choose on a calendar. That's more important to 99% of people out there and they'll happily accept anything that'll keep them from missing that moment.

 

I'm not really worried about traditional cameras going away. The more options there are for people, the better.

[TheShader]

11 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

I'm not really worried about traditional cameras going away. The more options there are for people, the better.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I mean, when I do professional jobs(Both photography and filmography) I use both my DSLR as well as my phone camera as it is. To me it's just another piece of equipment, and my clients are never aware during the final results. And yeah, most people really just want something nice to take photos of their kids/Vacation/couples photos/etc.

 

Ironically I would bet good money that even when AI gets to the point of outputting something that could genuinely fool even the most hardened and experienced photographer, you'll still have people thinking 'DSLR is expensive and therefore makes better photos'. I mean, we've already been there for a long time. People underestimate how much skill, knowledge, and talent go into photography. I've had people for more than a decade now tell me they wish they had a 'nicer camera' like mine so they could take photos like I do...and they have objectively better equipment(I'm admittedly fairly minimalist when it comes to my equipment 99% of the time). If I'm in an irritable enough mood I'll ask to see their equipment, then take an actual nice photo with it at which point they treat it like I just performed black magic instead of admitting they lack skill to take half-decent photos.

 

People, on the whole, think photography is an art that most people genuinely think more expensive equipment = better photos and will never be convinced otherwise.

[Ominous]

Slrs are dead shader.  :P

[DarkStar189]

I think it’s pretty lame. What’s next? A smart telescope that you point at the moon that just shows you an ai created moon. Look how clear it is!

[ort]

If Apple did this it would be front page news on every news site and the scandal would stick to them for decades.

[Bjomesphat]

Yeah don't care. I wish they would go even further. I just want my pictures to look like how they do in my mind's eye.

 

Basically this

[TheShader]

5 hours ago, Ominous said:

Slrs are dead shader.  :P

Your face. 

[stepee]

I love all of this

[CitizenVectron]

2 hours ago, TheShader said:

Your face. 

 

It's true. I'm a professional photographer, and the new hotness are mirrorless cameras. They outwardly look the same as SLRs (though typically 10-40% smaller), and are superior for 95% of use cases.

 

But others here are correct, there haven't been major advancements to actual optics tech in 50+ years because...well, it's just physics. A lens needs to absorb a certain amount of light in order to produce an image, so you need either a bigger lens or a greater length of time to do certain things. Software can help add details with informed guesswork, but we're realistically at our current limit for the fidelity of consumer optics, in terms of glass hardware.

[TheShader]

29 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

It's true. I'm a professional photographer, and the new hotness are mirrorless cameras. They outwardly look the same as SLRs (though typically 10-40% smaller), and are superior for 95% of use cases.

 

But others here are correct, there haven't been major advancements to actual optics tech in 50+ years because...well, it's just physics. A lens needs to absorb a certain amount of light in order to produce an image, so you need either a bigger lens or a greater length of time to do certain things. Software can help add details with informed guesswork, but we're realistically at our current limit for the fidelity of consumer optics, in terms of glass hardware.

I never disagreed with any of this, which is why I didn't really have much to say to Ominous cause I wasn't sure the point. People will largely go where the technology is, and for most general purposes people are fine with the outcome with the exception that most people will always think 'more expensive means better photos' 99% of the time as a general rule to excuse their lack of skill.

 

I even stated there will still be niche uses of photographers that don't want to give up their dslr cameras for specific reasons, just as there are still niche photographers who haven't given up 35mm. Particularly with AI driven output.

 

None of that translates to 'DSLRs will forever rule the land'. So I'm not sure why it needs to be stated as though it's what I said. 

[LazyPiranha]

Maybe I’m becoming old, but I don’t really see the need for a paradigm shift for optics when it comes to traditional consumer and professional level photography.  What’s the point?  We can already digitally reproduce images in qualities better than we can print or display them, what purpose does it serve to go beyond that?  

[TheShader]

12 minutes ago, LazyPiranha said:

Maybe I’m becoming old, but I don’t really see the need for a paradigm shift for optics when it comes to traditional consumer and professional level photography.  What’s the point?  We can already digitally reproduce images in qualities better than we can print or display them, what purpose does it serve to go beyond that?  

[Ominous]

2 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

It's true. I'm a professional photographer, and the new hotness are mirrorless cameras. They outwardly look the same as SLRs (though typically 10-40% smaller), and are superior for 95% of use cases.

 

But others here are correct, there haven't been major advancements to actual optics tech in 50+ years because...well, it's just physics. A lens needs to absorb a certain amount of light in order to produce an image, so you need either a bigger lens or a greater length of time to do certain things. Software can help add details with informed guesswork, but we're realistically at our current limit for the fidelity of consumer optics, in terms of glass hardware.

I was just being sassy. It does irk me every time someone says dslr when they are talking about a mirrorless though....but here it was just to be Ominous. 

[TheShader]

19 minutes ago, Ominous said:

but here it was just to be Ominous. 

This is also why I responded the way I did, I know you too well.