With Computational Photography, 95% of what you shoot is no longer captured but generated

Apple Keynote, Sept 10 2019, Steve Jobs theater

iPhone 11 and its « Deep Fusion » mode leave no doubt that photography is now software.

Everybody in techdom has noticed that Apple Sept 10, 2019 keynote was still deeply focused on the iPhone, and more precisely on what the company calls its « camera system ». The company insisted almost dramatically on the « extraordinary » capabilities of the new product line when it comes to photo and video.

I will focus on the iPhone Pro that brings the most radically (3+ optics are no longer new though) but also seem to cater, in the keynote at least, to the category of « Pro photographers ». Its relies on 3 cameras, that boast « exceptional » features in Apple’s usual jargon, yet the real revolution is in what you can do with them : 6 pro photographers examples were displayed on the screen as a proof. Same with the « totally redesigned » Photos app. Capturing light was one thing, it is now eclipsed by processing pixels.

Still, the most prominent features advocated yesterday were « Night Mode », « Deep Fusion », video shooting modes that all rely on the 2 or 3 cameras and that « pre shoot » before the A13 bionic chip combines and optimizes everything for final rendering.

Capturing was one thing, it is now eclipsed by processing.

In the case of « Deep Fusion » — that will come, interestingly, as a software update later in November — details unveiled in the keynote mentioned 8 shots being taken just before the button is pressed, then combined with the photo and processed by the A13 bionic chip neural engine to generate, in almost real time, an optimized picture that has been calculated pixel by pixel.

Apple is always scarce on figures ; the tech Kommentariat got frustrated by the absence of mW in the battery life, or the very bizarre chart with no axis that supported the idea that the new in-house A13 bionic chip was the best ever included in any smartphone. Googling deeper across the web does not bring much though : for instance, a similar « 1 Trillion operations per second » claim was already made at the previous iPhoneXS launch, relating the to the previous A12 chip (even if A13 is supposed to have more transistors, deliver more, and consume less though). Setting this aside, and just dividing 1 trillion (as 10^12) by 12 million pixels results in a whopping 83.000 operations per pixel in a second.

Computational photography delivers post-processed images recreated from pre-processed shots, according to an AI « taste ».

Photography has therefore entered a new era where you now take a picture (if the word still has a meaning) first, and manage parameters afterwards such as focus, exposure, depth of field. As a result you do not get « one shot » but are offered an optimized computation among tons of others. In the case of « Deep Fusion », what you receive is a post-processed image that has been totally recreated from pre-processed shots, all of this according to an Artificial Intelligence « taste ».

Now (even) « Pro » photographers will start trading freedom of choice for convenience. Pictures have become shots and I start missing my Ilford rolls. Sometimes.

Disclosure : I modestly contributed to this 10 years ago as I joined imsense, bringing single picture Dynamic Range Processing to the iPhone, and later bringing Apple’s HDR mode to decency. We honestly just wanted to rebalance the light by recovering « eye-fidelity ».

Group YASSP, French Alps

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Shot in late afternoon with an iPhone4S in HDR mode, using a b&w « Ansel Adams » effect thanks to (now defunct) Path App. This one is the first attempt using a group: actually, my 2 boys and several friends of theirs.

Cameraphones morphed into Smartphones in the mid 2000s. It took a few more years before video calling services such as Apple’s FaceTime added a front camera.

Soon, this additional, low resolution piece of optics would be used for a much more « Warholic » purpose than saying hello to GrandPa : the selfie addiction was born.

A planetary, compulsory, maslowic exhibition need of oneself took over the planet and created a (chinese) new industry : the selfie stick.

The « me on the picture with » replaced the autograph and added the « smile different » module to the media training skillset catalog.

This posed an interesting challenge to those who wanted to show their image processing capabilities while still using the back camera and keeping their ego at acceptable levels so that fools could enjoy the moon without being distracted by the finger.

Shooting an interesting shadow of yourself mostly happens on difficult light situations, where imsense’s eye-fidelity magic could reveal itself as it was all about « relighting » especially in dark areas of photographs.

I started Yassps as a sales and marketing tool (selling eye-fidelity , not myself, which is another reason for taking my shadow), and realised one day that such collection of photographs could be framed as derivative work.

This is how « Yet Another Self Shadow Portrait » was born, and became a photo category by itself : a selection is available on Burbanx, thanks to Fabien Baunay.

An extended YASSP gallery was available on (now defunct) ZangZing service.

Now you can follow the #yassp hashtag on Instagram.

Monitoring and Optimizing your iPhoto folder size

I noticed recently that my hard drive had shrunk by several, if not a dozen GB. The phenomenon shortly followed a smooth upgrade to OSX Lion who became suspect #1 shortly. And in vain.

Then I turned towards the other usual suspects, namely caches. For these, a simple restart does most of the cleanup and reclaims several GB if your machine has been up and running for a long while (several days if not weeks).

Focus really came to iPhoto when I realized that some changes made to pictures within iPhoto did not reflect on my iPad2: pics were preserved, but did not show up in their latest version.

So I opened the iPhoto packet (Ctrl-click) in my Images folder, sorted content by size, and found that the iPod Photo Cache was 19.6 GB = 25% of my total iPhoto library size

This folder holds all the resized versions of pictures you sync with your various iDevices: in my case, many of the iPhones I had used in my former business lives along with two iPads and a now old iPod Photo… Even if it sits in the iPhoto packet, the iPod Photo Cache content is actually manipulated by iTunes at each synchronization session.

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So I quit iPhoto, trashed the folder, and went for 2 long sync sessions (iPhone and iPad) as the whole cache had to be regenerated. Now my pics are in sync again, and the new cache folder is 85% smaller.

Tell me about yours.

Interview par Richard Menneveux — FrenchWeb

Le 9 Mars 2010, au Salon Le Mobile 2.0 qui se tient à la Cité de l’Industrie, je suis interviewé par Richard Menneveux pour Frenchweb.

« Cofondateur de Wanadoo, Philippe Dewost est aujourd’hui le CEO de IMsense une société spécialisée dans le traitement numérique de photo. Apres avoir développé un applicatif de traitement sur PC, IMsense a lancé en décembre 2009, une application iPhone qui améliore sensiblement la qualité des photos prises avec son mobile.« 

imPhoto for iPhone demo movie

In late October 2009, we have achieved the port of imsense’s eyeFidelity™ technology to iOS and released the first version of our imPhoto app.

Now it is showtime so that people will realise how they can expand their iPhone camera capabilities. This movie was shot in Cambridge to illustrate imsense’s eye-fidelity™ dynamic range processing technology.

Cambridge, Nov 26th, 2009 — Soundtrack courtesy from Frederick Rousseau