[frogblast]

> In the end, this tech just takes control from you.

In these difficult scenarios, the alternative photo I'd get using such a small camera without this kind processing would be entirely unusable. I couldn't rescue those photos with hours of manual edits. That may be "in control", but it isn't useful.

[autoexec]

For decades people have had the ability to get great photos using cell phones that included useful features like automatically adjusting focus, or exposure, or flash all without their phones inventing total misrepresentations of what the camera was pointed at.

I mean, at a certain point taking a less than perfect photo is more important than getting a fake image that looks good. If I see a pretty flower and want to take a picture of it, the result might look a lot better if my phone just searched for online images of similar flowers, selected one, and saved that image to my icloud, but I wouldn't want that.

[nucleardog]

The case in the article is obviously one that any idiot could have taken without these tools.

But "in difficult scenarios", as the GP comment put it, your mistake is assuming people have been taking those photos all along no problem. They have not. People have been filling their photo albums and memory cards up with underexposed blurry photos that look more like abstract art than reality. That's where this sort of technology shines.

I'm pretty reasonable at getting what I want out of a camera. But at some point you just hit limitations of the hardware. In "difficult scenarios" like a fairly dark situation, I can open the lens on my Nikon DLSR up to f/1.4 (the depth of field is so shallow I can focus your eyes while your nose stays blurry, so it's basically impossible to focus), crank the ISO up to 6400 (basically more grain than photo at that point), and still not get the shutter speed up to something that I can shoot handheld. I'd need a tripod and a very still subject to get a reasonably sharp photo. The hardware cannot do what I want in this situation. I can throw a speedlight on top, but besides making the camera closer to a foot tall than not and upping the weight to like 4lbs, a flash isn't always appropriate or acceptable in every situation. And it's not exactly something I carry with me everywhere.

These photos _cannot_ be saved because there just isn't the data there to save. You can't pull data back out of a stream of zeros. You can't un-motion-blur a photo using basic corrections.

Or I can pull out my iPhone and press a button and it does an extremely passable job of it.

The right tool for the right job. These tools are very much the "right" tool in a lot of difficult scenarios.

[Toutouxc]

> For decades people have had the ability to get great photos using cell phones

Not in these light conditions. Simple as that. What iPhones are doing nowadays gives you the ability to take some photos you couldn’t have in the past. Try shooting a few photos with an iPhone and the app Halide. It can give you a single RAW of a single exposure. Try it in some mildly inconvenient light conditions, like in a forest. Where any big boy camera wouldn’t bat an eye, what the tiny phone sensor sees is a noisy pixel soup that, if it came from my big boy camera, I’d consider unsalvageable.

[bawolff]

> Are you saying that you're just bad at photography?

That is a bit harsh. The vast majority of all people are worse at photography than apple's algorithm.

[FalconSensei]

you can still install any other photo app on your phone and use that instead

[andrei_says_]

Is an argument about corner cases where computational improvement does make sense an argument in good faith when used as an excuse to take away control in all cases?

[jack_pp]

Afaik there are photo apps on the iphone that let you have all the control you want so you can use those when you want control and use the default when you just want a quick photo knowing the pros/cons.

[kaba0]

How is that different from a noise removal algorithm? Is it also taking away control from you!