"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?
Edited to add: I have a pixel 10 pro which has a better zoom lens, so I could be having a different experience than you...
Makes for a fine image if "looking good" is the objective (which it often is), but I wouldn't trust it to disambiguate anything uncertain.
So the ENHANCE is no longer just some lazy movie writing!
The biggest of the "sharpening with AI" models, if you let 'em go, they'll turn you into a celebrity on accident.
If you go to the Topaz AI forums on Facebook, you'll see examples of where the AI sharpening tool went off the rails and turned a blurry photo of someone (typically the user who bought the software, who is trying to clean up their own photos) into whichever celebrity that is in the AI model who resembles them.
IE, it might turn a photo of YOU into a photo of Robert Downey Jr.
Jory Miller?
Also wonder how how long until photos are no longer court-admissible evidence because they get overwhelmed with the burden of the amount (and the cost) of the "non-AI" certification?
The only solution I see is some kind of hardware-linked signature showing that the image was produced at a certain time, by a certain device. In theory, you could make this signature somewhat “provable” and anchored to a specific time by combining something like 1) the latest Bitcoin block hash, and 2) a blockchain anchor, thereby proving that the photo was taken within a certain time widow after the hash was known and before the anchor was published. But even that arrangement is highly susceptible to hardware attacks.
After 10x it's all over. Which is in itself quite insane. The camera is truly amazing, and complaining that this 10mm thick camera is no good at further than 10x seems utterly spoiled and ridiculous to me.
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.
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.
The math is surely more complex than aligning same-lens photography even when you consider the change in angle and perspective between two shots from the same lens.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ARGUS+pho...
The reborn Nokia/HMD was also doing multi-sensor image stacking back in 2019 on the Nokia 9 Pureview.
Google has some great blogs about their camera technology https://research.google/blog/night-sight-seeing-in-the-dark-...
From the authors of Halide.
Edit: actually I can't seem to find the setting that aligns them. I seem to remember it being able to do that but maybe it doesn't... which would be disappointing...
I agree, and I built it!
The app launched in 2019. Ideally I would have said ML, but it felt like AI had more recognition among non-technical users.
If I launched it in 2026, it would 100% say "ML" not only because it's more technically accurate, but to make it abundantly clear it doesn't generate slop.
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.
Subtle movement between shots can be used to create an image sharper than any of the inputs.
I’m guessing it has to do with how intensely focused / scared my brain was with the little guy