Scott Manley did a quite good video about "How The Red Skies From Fires Are Related To Blue Sunsets on Mars" in which he has this exact issue with his phone making the sky white instead of red- which he also discusses. If you aren't familiar with his channel, check it out:
Yes, this is the camera trying to figure out what "white" should be (e.g. "is this sunlight or are there clouds or is it a old street light or is it an indoor fluorescent...) and failing because its heuristics don't account for this sort of situation.
It has the exposure right, it's just trying to compensate for what it thinks is "bad lighting."
I found that bumping up the saturation and "warmth" got a more accurate color to what I was seeing. Other colors sucked but it was good enough to communicate to others what I was seeing.
I did the same. I held the phone up to the sky while moving the sliders around so I could match the color. It worked pretty well, but also made me realize my eyes are also trying to correct. Standing outside and looking up looks very different than standing inside and looking out, with some artificial lighting and white walls acting as a reference.
The way they describe the “correct” image seems to imply that it has something to do with the car also being orange, but I’m pretty sure this has more to do with the surrounding parts of the gas station being white. That allows the phone to pick the correct white balance, which then sets all the colors correctly.
> This was a moment for my Canon to prove that, despite its bulk, it can't always be replaced by a smartphone.
Such a naive statement. Once those phones' white balance is corrected, they should be able to capture the orange tinge. Even in a DSLR, if the white balance is set to auto, it would not capture the orange tinge. Cloudy might be a good starting point.
How would I do this on iOS, if I had just my phone and no CaptureOne on a laptop or the like? Are there apps that let me use a gray card to set the white balance of raw photos?
When you click Edit on a photo, you will have bunch of edit options. Warmth and Tint sliders represent white balance. You can increase the warmth until it matches what your eye perceives.
Essentially you are telling your camera post capture what the temperature of the source is.
Or, as briefly mentioned in the article, use Halide, which outputs RAW files, which you can then edit in your app of choice. (Nice thing about iOS: it outputs Adobe DNG files, which is a standardized format, and broadly readable by a bunch of applications.)
In the iOS camera you can point at something white, like white paper lit with white light, and long-press to get an auto focus and auto exposure lock. Then you can take a picture of the orange sky / landscape and it will use the locked white balance setting.
A white countertop lit with fluorescent light would work.
Sure, and when they do capture in RAW format the quality is horribly bad and quite soft because no tricks are applied there, and the softness of the lens as well as the low dynamic range of the small pixels really hurt.
Fair observation. I was talking about what photographer sees on the DSLR display immediately after capturing similar to how a mobile photographer sees.
While I agree that RAW capture will provide an improvement in the amount of data gathered from the sensor, and available for adjustments later on, if a user sets a custom white balance while taking a RAW picture, that setting will generally be accepted as a default rendering of the scene in most RAW processing software.
This is entirely besides the point because the issue stated here involves color interpretation based on a selected white point. Left to their own devices digital cameras will compensate for scene color on purpose, because 99% of the time people don't want color casts in their photos. The author is trying to blame the camera for people's ignorance of photography, which is just silliness.
Don't agree? Set your phone's white balance to daylight for a week and see how often you agree that the captured picture is what you actually wanted
And also lower sharpness, even big camera lenses (for phones) are limited to around 8MP of resolution due to diffraction, which is why cellphone cameras tend not to have much of a benefit beyond 8-12MP.
Whereas a very sharp lens for a DSLR might have a maximum sharpness of 90+MP.
A DSLR has, among many other settings, the ability to set white balance manually. Phones, or at least my phone, do not. Some of these settings may be able to be introduced via an update to the camera app, but many (eg manual focus, aperture, ISO) are limitations of the camera hardware.
This article is awful. It's about smartphone cameras not being able to capture, but the three photos included are all ones that at least somewhat worked. Seems like it would be better to include one that failed?
IKR, went in expecting a natural derivative off based on the title. Not to witness three "perfect" shots which came out okay. Wonder why it's here. It isn't thorough, doesn't provide examples either.
As someone with a professional photography background, this article was actually super upsetting.
The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result.
The thesis of the article "I don't understand white balance, so smartphone cameras are bad"
Unfortunately this reality applies to _all_ digital cameras, not just the oversimplified versions found on many smart phones.
Also, with smartphone sensor/lens quality improvements as well as computational photography enhancements, smartphones are for _all_ picture takers. Point and shoot cameras are no longer relevant.
A better version of your reply is: Expecting accurate results in photographs is not for people who are ignorant of general photographic principles and technology.
I think you're multiple steps ahead of the curve here. Most people think that an ideal camera captures things the same way you see them with your eyes, and any differences reflect a flaw in the camera. (I personally thought that was true until yesterday!)
Yeah, I can agree with that. Before I got into photography I believed the same thing. In fact I was driven to it by the disparities in my own images when compared to professional examples.
The reason this article is so frustrating to me is that instead of the author highlighting what has been true since the dawn of photography - that cameras never truly capture the scene as we view it - they chose to baselessly attack a specific set of devices which happen to have cameras attached to them.
If this were to happen 10 years ago to someone using a Nikon Coolpix 1234Whatever, they would be equally disappointed, and someone using an Olympus Stylus somethingorotherD may have been very pleased. The color representation in images has always been the property of the medium's manufacturer, from Kodak to Polaroid and so on.
It would have been nice to see the author share information instead of just ignorant disappointment
Could you please explain for those not in the know?
I realise that why I see is just one "interpretation" of the reality, but it seems sensible that one possible ideal for cameras would be to perfectly match my perception of the world.
Is it just impossible because the difference in perception is just so big between individuals that what would be perfect for me would be way off for someone else?
You can also create (at least theoretically, no idea how they compare currently) cameras that are better than human eyes at things like resolution, contrasts and so on, and that seems like another possible ideal; but which one is more relevant seems very context dependant.
The challenge here is that your perception of the world itself performs contextual color correction. If you've ever seen those optical illusions where you see two different colors but they're actually the same (https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/another-brain-frying-optical-i... is my favorite recent example), that's a demonstration of the effect. So a camera that's trying to match your perception of the world can't just identify the "true" color; it has to identify what color it should print on your screen to generate the same perception as if the contents of the picture were outside your window.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad ideal, though. Smartphone cameras do a very good job at automatically performing all the right corrections in most circumstances. It's just nontrivial, and thus unsurprising that the normal algorithms fail in weird edge cases like "the entire sky is deep red".
I know I should defend the common user…but c’mon, if you’re going to write an article like this, maybe spend like 5 minutes figuring out why the camera is “struggling”.
Broadly, the camera is doing the right thing here. Nobody developed these auto white balance algorithms to factor in the sky turning orange. The camera/imaging pipeline is seeing this crazy orange cast, assuming it’s deep incandescent light, and then trying to compensate, which is generally what you want it to do.
Exactly! You could measure the collective eye-rolling of all the electronics engineers who work in the photo industry on seismographs around the world. (hopefully overstating the reach of this garbage article)
Edit:
Not to mention that the auto WB algorithm out dates smartphones by more than a decade.
Also, before smartphones or even digital cameras, people sent camera rolls to laboratories, and got prints back.
If, in winter sport season, you sent your photos from the Sahara to be developed, chances were you got what looked like snow landscapes back. Conversely, sending winter sport photos in july/august might give you ‘beach with skiers’ photos back (I think that was because of operator error, not automation)
Most of my experience with film was long ago, and mainly through those execrable disposable cameras my family used when I was a kid. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_camera) I doubt there is a single indoor photo of me as a child with the proper white balance.
(Which is for the best. I was an extremely homely child. It's for the good of all we shot with slow, blurry film.)
One thing that I had to get through my head when I was learning photography was that there's no such thing as "no filter". Every image you take is an interpretation of the scene, either through digital signal processing or film chemistry or retouching.
When I spend time editing photos my dad would claim I was "lying" by editing them, he thought any modification to digital photos was wrong because the jpeg the camera produces is "reality."
But of course, as this article shows, the camera is adding its own interpretation to the scene. Since our eyes can adjust to many lighting situations, the camera has to try to compensate and reproduce what it thinks our eyes would see, but it has no way to know if it's right! So, sometimes it's necessary to go back to the raw data and recreate the image as you remember it, along with whatever emotions you want it to elicit, rather than taking what comes out of the camera as "gospel".
There is a science of color reproduction. It is quite tough because they way we perceive colors is amazingly complicated. But it is quite possible to make an effort.
Of course, most photography is not about color reproduction but about telling a story.
And automatic cameras (like the way phones are mostly used) take a way a lot of control when it comes to deciding how color look in the photo. On most phones you can frame the image, zoom a bit, and decide when to take the image. Other controls like aperture, shutter speed and color balance are automatic.
One note on the phones thing: some camera apps (on Android, dunno about iOS) provide additional settings. For example, the Samsung stock camera has a "pro" mode, which lets you adjust the white balance, exposure, metering, and "ISO". Third party apps will provide histograms, long exposure, time stamps, etc.
It's all similar to how many people used disposable film cameras (no options except aim and push the capture button) or cheap reusable cams (zoom, maybe exposure, etc) but film cameras that let you adjust everything existed at the same time
I draw the line at object recognition. If the processing involves semantic meaning (e.g. this is sky, this is a face) instead of geometric meaning (e.g. this is an edge, this is a Bayer filter artifact) then it's lying. It doesn't matter if the object recognition is done by AI (e.g. faking depth of field by blurring background) or by humans applying selective processing (e.g. painting out red-eye effect, or using a graduated neutral-density filter to enhance sky). Honest processing has no awareness of what objects are in the scene.
I don't really agree with this. I'm not sure what my definition of lying is but of course it entirely depends on the purpose of the photo. A photojournalist cropping out an important piece of context is definitely lying. Me cropping out another tourist of a photo I took of a friend is not lying.
If I'm editing photos and someone has a temporary blemish or a pimple, I'm more than likely to edit it out. We don't remember faces to the same level of detail as a camera can, so it feels more correct to touch up such blemishes.
>A photojournalist cropping out an important piece of context is definitely lying. Me cropping out another tourist of a photo I took of a friend is not lying.
Rules are even stricter than that for photojournalists. Photographers have lost jobs just for editing out extraneous objects (like a telephone pole "growing out" of someone's head) to make a photo look better. The thinking is likely along the lines of it's a slippery slope once you start editing out things.
> This phrase 'warts and all' is said to derive from Oliver Cromwell's instructions to the painter Sir Peter Lely, when commissioning a painting.
> At the time of the alleged instruction, Cromwell was Lord Protector of England. Lely had been portrait artist to Charles I and, following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he was appointed as Charles II's Principal Painter in Ordinary.
> Lely's painting style was, as was usual at the time, intended to flatter the sitter. Royalty in particular expected portraits to show them in the best possible light, if not to be outright fanciful. Lely's painting of Charles II shows what was expected of a painting of a head of state in the 17th century. It emphasizes the shapely royal calves - a prized fashion feature at that time.
> Cromwell did have a preference for being portrayed as a gentleman of military bearing, but was well-known as being opposed to all forms of personal vanity. This 'puritan Roundhead' versus 'dashing Cavalier' shorthand is often used to denote the differences in style of the two opposing camps in the English Commonwealth and subsequent Restoration. It is entirely plausible that he would have issued a 'warts and all' instruction when being painted and it is unlikely that Lely would have modified his style and produced the 'warts and all' portrait of Cromwell unless someone told him to.
Of course, the source of the phrase is, itself, unsourced, and Cromwell likely never said it.
The line is still very blurry. How about a camera using the depth information that is already necessary for AF to automatically crop out of process differently out of focus areas, thus detecting objects? How about a camera automatically focusing on an eye?
If there's no way to prove that semantic processing was used then the rule is unenforceable so you might as well permit it. Cropping the photograph is indistinguishable from using a different camera, and changing the focus is indistinguishable from getting the focus right by accident. Cropping and focus can both be used deceptively, but it's a different type of deception from selective editing of an image, e.g. changing somebody's skin texture.
Converting the full spectrum lights in nature into color filtered photons captured on a sensor with an artificial color profile, it's own resolution and pixel arrangement, its own lens specifics that is the camera, then converted to another limited color palette with another artificial color profile and it's own resolution and pixel arrangement that is the display, in order to simulate the colors of nature as detected by yet another set of filtered detectors with it's own color profile, resolution, neuron arrangement, and lens specifics that is the human eye, there is already no such thing as objective truth, every step involves heavy interpretation. Therefore there really is no such thing as honest processing either.
It's actually pretty interesting how much processing goes on in the brain for images. We do a sort of equivalent to the phone in compensating for the colour to make it 'right'. The orange car in the article image acted as kind of an 'anchor' for the colour compensation. The blue/white-black/gold dress [1] controversy kinda illustrates that 'anchoring'. The 'Checker Shadow Illusion' [2] is another instance where our brains 'adjust colours'.
> The orange car in the article image acted as kind of an 'anchor' for the colour compensation.
It's funny that you mention this because to me the car kind of looks like it's grey, lit by orange light from all sides except the top. Edit: after looking at it a bit more I think you're right and I'm wrong
I was surprised to see photojournalists using Photoshop. Isn't that unethical? But it's the same thing: you correct the image to match what your eyes see.
Of course journalists use Photoshop. Before digital cameras, journalists also pushed or pulled the film processing, dodged and burned parts of the image, exposed different parts of the photo paper by different amounts, used different processing chemicals for developing the photo paper. It's not about correcting the image to match what your eyes see, it's an artistic and creative act because a photograph can never represent what the eyes see, and photographers have to interpret the image to get their message across.
What I found interesting as a kid is... The front door of the house was half opened and I leaned against it so that my nose was against the edge.
So one of my eyes faced the inside of the house, the other eye faced the outside of the house. I waited a little bit and then pulled away from the door. One eye had adjusted to the brightness - and color - of the inside and the other hd done the same for outside.
Our eyes have white balance plus physical and chemical exposure. pretty cool.
This is the dark side of "smart" devices that replace high-quality physical sensors with clever algorithms. When something weird happens, they might misbehave in the most bizarre fashion. The general pattern will hold for AI. If you give too much control over things to software that you don't really understand or control, it will behave unpredictably when you need it the most and there might not be a way to correct or override it.
The fact that the sensors and lenses in phones are so small is why the software has so much less to work with and what allows so much more to go wrong.
Unless I missed something in the article, this has nothing to do with sensor or lens size. This is purely an artifact of default image processing settings and ignorance of white balance. Any user with any digital camera can perfectly capture the color of the scene by simply setting the white balance manually to daylight.
The top level comment was making a more general claim than just color balance. There are a lot of weird artifacts in phone pictures introduced by image processing overfitting.
I didn't really agree with the top level comment either. This isn't an artifact of sensor size or A/D conversion or any of that. You can encounter the exact same issue with a $40,000 medium format camera if you don't understand photography.
What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait garbage for the photographically and technologically ignorant. The replies to it are disappointingly similar.
In a competent camera, you actually wouldn't. You would take a picture in RAW format, and change the White Balance afterwards. Whereas in a tiny phone, the RAW images are of exceedingly low quality.
That's not generally how it works. Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process.
This is probably especially true for people like photojournalist, who shoot thousands of photos in a session and don't want to spend hours processing them afterward.
What about shooting in mixed light, where you have different color light sources inside and outside of a room? Do you think photographers are just saying "meh, this looks fine purple, I'll fix it in post"... or are they trying to capture the scene as close to accurate as possible (perhaps biasing exposure to compensate for limits in highlight or shadow detail capture)
Edit:
Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
> Although it's possible, I promise you professional photographers shooting in RAW are setting their white balance well ahead of importing the files into any photo editing software. You're not going to set up studio strobes, or go do some landscape photography in the evening and just completely ignore your image settings. That's a terribly inefficient workflow. If you want to get a preview of what your image actually looks like in camera, that's just part of the process.
Of course, but when issues arise, you can always change it in post. Also, you can batch set Auto WB in pretty much any competent image editor. But yes, in the vast majority of cases one would set a given WB.
> Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
I totaly understand that too, whenever I can I try to use vintage glass because it brings something enjoyable to the experience. But the photographers that shoot in JPEG typically do it in places where a missed shot isn't that big of a deal.
FWIW, every photojouranlist I've known shoots RAW+JPEG all the time or whenever the light gets fucky for this exact reason. And as someone who shoots multiple hundreds to a thousand images relatively often in a single day, it doesn't really add much issues to my workflow - I'm not going to be doing much anything with all but a few dozen images, and I'm going to be editing all of them even if it takes me two hours or so to make sure I'm getting the most out of my pictures. So if someday I forget to set my white balance, it doesn't make that huge of an issue to my workflow, main problem is that I'm not going to get as good af an impression of what they'll end up looking like when I press the shutter.
That said, in this particular situation, you'd be changing the WB in post.
"That said, in this particular situation, you'd be changing the WB in post."
I definitely would not be doing that lol. I would prefer to set up the camera so that I can get an idea of what I'm actually capturing before I go out. In this case you can take a moment to adjust WB and exposure and then just go out and focus on your images without worrying about too much changing in terms of exposure. I would be super annoyed shooting this type of scene if every time I looked down at the LCD I just saw a normalized scene.
You're completely missing the point. Many phones don't have a white balance setting in their default photo apps. They do so much post-processing to correct for various sensor issues it doesn't occur to them to give the user appropriate controls to correct for cases when the correction algorithm fails.
I've never come across a photo app without a WB setting. These people should discard their phones along with their notions that they are holding a camera that will always perfectly capture the scene as their eyes see it.
You can use the same receptacle to discard your notion that this article had any value.
No. A bigger lens (more light) would correct for gain errors. A bigger sensor would improve either spatial resolution or gain error or both. None of that has anything to do with color balance.
All digital color photography is computational because sensor physics, display physics, and human biology are distinct processes. Whenever you have multiple color channels you need to make assumptions about the relationships between them. This is color balance and it happens in software.
That's not how it actually works out in practice. Small lenses mean small apertures which means you get diffraction, and you get it pretty fast. With a 1-2mm aperture lens you get diffraction limiting resolution to around 8-10Mpx.
As for color balance, sure, but the parent wasn't limited to color balance.
Looking forward to reading the first conspiracy theories/Facebook memes about how the wildfire is a hoax, the photos of the orange sky were doctored and the gray photos are the real ones...
Even in the default camera app you can point at something white, like white paper lit with white light, and long-press to get an auto focus and auto exposure lock. Then you can get a picture of the orange sky / landscape and it will use the locked white balance setting.
it's understandable given our relative disempowerment on the matter, but it feels a little bread-and-circusy to focus on picture-taking rather than a real-life approximation of an airborne toxic event[0].
in LA, we had a bit of a clearing yesterday, but the bobcat fires (and others) have turned us hazy and slightly orange again. i can feel it in my airways. it's more worrisome than the corona everyone else seems to be fretting about, because it certainly will cause unseen damage to everyone's lungs in varying amounts. hundreds of thousands die every year from air pollution.
I don’t think this article is bread and circusy. I think it highlights how absurd this situation is. Our denial and assumptions about the world are so deep, they are encoded in our algorithms to the point where we can’t even record this event accurately.
sure, but that's because you've interpreted what is otherwise a pretty banal piece. you've said something more interesting in a sentence than that whole "article".
(i didn't even see the photos because google amp infests the site and i block it out of principle. not a fan of leading every paragraph with bold in an effort to be hard-punchingly pithy either.)
I went out to shoot with my Alpha99 yesterday. I used the daylight AWB settings. It did a decent job, but didn't capture the degree of saturation of the actual color.
I had to really boost the ISO, the camera thought it was so dark outside. In fact the light sensors for the man automatic light controls around our property, including some street lights, were still detecting that it was evening.
If you do statistical modeling, you have to watch your priors. Orange skies are very rare, so the priors in the camera image processing software are off.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOIBQIpdv10
It has the exposure right, it's just trying to compensate for what it thinks is "bad lighting."
Such a naive statement. Once those phones' white balance is corrected, they should be able to capture the orange tinge. Even in a DSLR, if the white balance is set to auto, it would not capture the orange tinge. Cloudy might be a good starting point.
Essentially you are telling your camera post capture what the temperature of the source is.
A white countertop lit with fluorescent light would work.
This is entirely besides the point because the issue stated here involves color interpretation based on a selected white point. Left to their own devices digital cameras will compensate for scene color on purpose, because 99% of the time people don't want color casts in their photos. The author is trying to blame the camera for people's ignorance of photography, which is just silliness.
Don't agree? Set your phone's white balance to daylight for a week and see how often you agree that the captured picture is what you actually wanted
(FWIW: My "dumb" camera is collecting dust. I rarely take it out, and never bring it on vacation.)
If you want the best of both worlds you can get a mirrorless which is less bulky, but still have a big sensor.
Whereas a very sharp lens for a DSLR might have a maximum sharpness of 90+MP.
The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result.
The thesis of the article "I don't understand white balance, so smartphone cameras are bad"
Also, with smartphone sensor/lens quality improvements as well as computational photography enhancements, smartphones are for _all_ picture takers. Point and shoot cameras are no longer relevant.
A better version of your reply is: Expecting accurate results in photographs is not for people who are ignorant of general photographic principles and technology.
The reason this article is so frustrating to me is that instead of the author highlighting what has been true since the dawn of photography - that cameras never truly capture the scene as we view it - they chose to baselessly attack a specific set of devices which happen to have cameras attached to them.
If this were to happen 10 years ago to someone using a Nikon Coolpix 1234Whatever, they would be equally disappointed, and someone using an Olympus Stylus somethingorotherD may have been very pleased. The color representation in images has always been the property of the medium's manufacturer, from Kodak to Polaroid and so on.
It would have been nice to see the author share information instead of just ignorant disappointment
I realise that why I see is just one "interpretation" of the reality, but it seems sensible that one possible ideal for cameras would be to perfectly match my perception of the world. Is it just impossible because the difference in perception is just so big between individuals that what would be perfect for me would be way off for someone else?
You can also create (at least theoretically, no idea how they compare currently) cameras that are better than human eyes at things like resolution, contrasts and so on, and that seems like another possible ideal; but which one is more relevant seems very context dependant.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad ideal, though. Smartphone cameras do a very good job at automatically performing all the right corrections in most circumstances. It's just nontrivial, and thus unsurprising that the normal algorithms fail in weird edge cases like "the entire sky is deep red".
Broadly, the camera is doing the right thing here. Nobody developed these auto white balance algorithms to factor in the sky turning orange. The camera/imaging pipeline is seeing this crazy orange cast, assuming it’s deep incandescent light, and then trying to compensate, which is generally what you want it to do.
Edit: Not to mention that the auto WB algorithm out dates smartphones by more than a decade.
If, in winter sport season, you sent your photos from the Sahara to be developed, chances were you got what looked like snow landscapes back. Conversely, sending winter sport photos in july/august might give you ‘beach with skiers’ photos back (I think that was because of operator error, not automation)
(Which is for the best. I was an extremely homely child. It's for the good of all we shot with slow, blurry film.)
When I spend time editing photos my dad would claim I was "lying" by editing them, he thought any modification to digital photos was wrong because the jpeg the camera produces is "reality."
But of course, as this article shows, the camera is adding its own interpretation to the scene. Since our eyes can adjust to many lighting situations, the camera has to try to compensate and reproduce what it thinks our eyes would see, but it has no way to know if it's right! So, sometimes it's necessary to go back to the raw data and recreate the image as you remember it, along with whatever emotions you want it to elicit, rather than taking what comes out of the camera as "gospel".
Of course, most photography is not about color reproduction but about telling a story.
And automatic cameras (like the way phones are mostly used) take a way a lot of control when it comes to deciding how color look in the photo. On most phones you can frame the image, zoom a bit, and decide when to take the image. Other controls like aperture, shutter speed and color balance are automatic.
It's all similar to how many people used disposable film cameras (no options except aim and push the capture button) or cheap reusable cams (zoom, maybe exposure, etc) but film cameras that let you adjust everything existed at the same time
What I haven't seen yet in this conversation is that back in the film days you changed your white balance setting by changing... your film.
[0] https://halide.cam
If I'm editing photos and someone has a temporary blemish or a pimple, I'm more than likely to edit it out. We don't remember faces to the same level of detail as a camera can, so it feels more correct to touch up such blemishes.
Rules are even stricter than that for photojournalists. Photographers have lost jobs just for editing out extraneous objects (like a telephone pole "growing out" of someone's head) to make a photo look better. The thinking is likely along the lines of it's a slippery slope once you start editing out things.
How Un-Cromwellian!
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/warts-and-all.html
> This phrase 'warts and all' is said to derive from Oliver Cromwell's instructions to the painter Sir Peter Lely, when commissioning a painting.
> At the time of the alleged instruction, Cromwell was Lord Protector of England. Lely had been portrait artist to Charles I and, following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he was appointed as Charles II's Principal Painter in Ordinary.
> Lely's painting style was, as was usual at the time, intended to flatter the sitter. Royalty in particular expected portraits to show them in the best possible light, if not to be outright fanciful. Lely's painting of Charles II shows what was expected of a painting of a head of state in the 17th century. It emphasizes the shapely royal calves - a prized fashion feature at that time.
> Cromwell did have a preference for being portrayed as a gentleman of military bearing, but was well-known as being opposed to all forms of personal vanity. This 'puritan Roundhead' versus 'dashing Cavalier' shorthand is often used to denote the differences in style of the two opposing camps in the English Commonwealth and subsequent Restoration. It is entirely plausible that he would have issued a 'warts and all' instruction when being painted and it is unlikely that Lely would have modified his style and produced the 'warts and all' portrait of Cromwell unless someone told him to.
Of course, the source of the phrase is, itself, unsourced, and Cromwell likely never said it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
It's funny that you mention this because to me the car kind of looks like it's grey, lit by orange light from all sides except the top. Edit: after looking at it a bit more I think you're right and I'm wrong
And then there's color blindness or tetrachromacy where some people see less/more colors than others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
So one of my eyes faced the inside of the house, the other eye faced the outside of the house. I waited a little bit and then pulled away from the door. One eye had adjusted to the brightness - and color - of the inside and the other hd done the same for outside.
Our eyes have white balance plus physical and chemical exposure. pretty cool.
What's worse, the article's author never mentions the settings used while taking pictures with his Canon DSLR. The entire article is poorly informed, detail starved, click-bait garbage for the photographically and technologically ignorant. The replies to it are disappointingly similar.
This is probably especially true for people like photojournalist, who shoot thousands of photos in a session and don't want to spend hours processing them afterward.
What about shooting in mixed light, where you have different color light sources inside and outside of a room? Do you think photographers are just saying "meh, this looks fine purple, I'll fix it in post"... or are they trying to capture the scene as close to accurate as possible (perhaps biasing exposure to compensate for limits in highlight or shadow detail capture)
Edit: Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
Of course, but when issues arise, you can always change it in post. Also, you can batch set Auto WB in pretty much any competent image editor. But yes, in the vast majority of cases one would set a given WB.
> Bonus points: some photographers actually shoot in jpeg purposely to better emulate the experience of shooting color slide film. Is it a flex? Most likely. Are they demanding from themselves that photography remain a skill? Yeah! It's a skill. People take pictures, not cameras... and contrary to that statement I'm a firm believer that better cameras take better pictures.
I totaly understand that too, whenever I can I try to use vintage glass because it brings something enjoyable to the experience. But the photographers that shoot in JPEG typically do it in places where a missed shot isn't that big of a deal.
FWIW, every photojouranlist I've known shoots RAW+JPEG all the time or whenever the light gets fucky for this exact reason. And as someone who shoots multiple hundreds to a thousand images relatively often in a single day, it doesn't really add much issues to my workflow - I'm not going to be doing much anything with all but a few dozen images, and I'm going to be editing all of them even if it takes me two hours or so to make sure I'm getting the most out of my pictures. So if someday I forget to set my white balance, it doesn't make that huge of an issue to my workflow, main problem is that I'm not going to get as good af an impression of what they'll end up looking like when I press the shutter.
That said, in this particular situation, you'd be changing the WB in post.
I definitely would not be doing that lol. I would prefer to set up the camera so that I can get an idea of what I'm actually capturing before I go out. In this case you can take a moment to adjust WB and exposure and then just go out and focus on your images without worrying about too much changing in terms of exposure. I would be super annoyed shooting this type of scene if every time I looked down at the LCD I just saw a normalized scene.
You're wrong OK, just deal with it lol
You can use the same receptacle to discard your notion that this article had any value.
All digital color photography is computational because sensor physics, display physics, and human biology are distinct processes. Whenever you have multiple color channels you need to make assumptions about the relationships between them. This is color balance and it happens in software.
As for color balance, sure, but the parent wasn't limited to color balance.
Auto white-balance vs manual, taken seconds apart. The second one is closer to reality (but still too bright).
Even in the default camera app you can point at something white, like white paper lit with white light, and long-press to get an auto focus and auto exposure lock. Then you can get a picture of the orange sky / landscape and it will use the locked white balance setting.
in LA, we had a bit of a clearing yesterday, but the bobcat fires (and others) have turned us hazy and slightly orange again. i can feel it in my airways. it's more worrisome than the corona everyone else seems to be fretting about, because it certainly will cause unseen damage to everyone's lungs in varying amounts. hundreds of thousands die every year from air pollution.
[0] delillo, white noise
(i didn't even see the photos because google amp infests the site and i block it out of principle. not a fan of leading every paragraph with bold in an effort to be hard-punchingly pithy either.)
I had to really boost the ISO, the camera thought it was so dark outside. In fact the light sensors for the man automatic light controls around our property, including some street lights, were still detecting that it was evening.