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jrfloyesterday at 7:24 PM11 repliesview on HN

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple isn't already doing this and just doesn't say so explicitly. There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone photo. Would be interesting to compare a photo taken with the native camera app and photosynthesis to compare. I'm assuming your demo images on your site are the raw and processed images from your app that don't go through Apple's "secret sauce" processing pipeline.


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101008yesterday at 8:19 PM

Hijacking this comment because of this line that reminded me of something:

"There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone"

I bought the Pixel 10 because it said it had great zooming capabilities. After 5X (that means 10X), it's completely stupid. Basically it takes a very blurred photo and then tries to reconstruct it with AI. The final results are completely awful and really distant from reality.

Any advice in how to improve that?

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sajomesyesterday at 7:57 PM

Yes exactly, the site shows photos all taken from within the app. I have done A/B tests against photos taken in Camera.app and the Photosynthesis composite does significantly beat the detail central area covered by the second lens in Photosynthesis.

Because of the limitations of capturing multiple lenses at once through isVirtualDeviceConstituentPhotoDeliveryEnabled, there is a second capture mode in the app for 'Quality' which takes a simultaneous capture then takes sequential shots from each lens which do benefit from Deep Fusion, then uses those for the stitch (as long as the Deep Fusion images outperform the simultaneous capture results). That's also what I do for our Night mode.

walrus01yesterday at 7:49 PM

Phones have been doing this for a LONG time, if you had a oneplus 7 pro (released may 2019) and took it into an extremely dark area, like where your eyes can't see anything at all, and take a 'night mode' photo, it asks you to hold it steady for about 4-5 seconds and is clearly taking a series of photos with long exposure time. Then it stacks them and uses data from the sensor of hand movement jitter to deblur.

The result when done outdoors (like, standing in a dark forest at midnight) will be a photo where you can actually see what's around you, and details show up as if it was a brightly full moon lit night.

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Modified3019today at 12:22 AM

I use iPhones (paid for by work) as a tool for my agronomy job. I take a large amount of photos throughout the day to help document what I find in the field.

Since at least the iPhone 12, holding the phone still and letting scene sit for a few seconds will result in a sharper photo. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle version focus stacking or a sharpening algorithm, but it’s definitely there.

On my 16e, immediately looking at a photo just taken can result in the image noticeably sharpening after a second or 2, so this may be a post processing step as well.

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numpad0today at 8:03 AM

Reading title and this ^ comment before loading the page made my brain assume that this is about combining front and rear image sensors, and additionally using eye/facial tracking to infer user intention + satisfaction to help with stabilization/framing/post-processing. I'm glad(?) we aren't there yet.

selectodudeyesterday at 7:28 PM

I think this is just Deep Fusion.

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00kevnyesterday at 11:20 PM

One time I took a photo of a snake in the road with my iphone in low light. When I looked at the photo afterwards the snake was removed by the AI enhancement

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dbbktoday at 7:15 AM

But they do do this? They talk about it? It's not a secret

kndidneidyesterday at 11:38 PM

It is part of Apple’s “secret sauce”, yes.

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Melatonictoday at 2:38 AM

Don't they do this with the "macro" setting already ?

stavrosyesterday at 7:54 PM

This should be easy to check. In these photos, the center of the image has higher detail than the edges.

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