• 9point6@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    To play devil’s advocate, even traditional photography involves a lot of subjective/artistic decisions before you get a photo. The type of film used can massively affect the image reproduced, and then once the photos are being developed, there’s a load of choices made there which determine what the photo looks like.

    There’s obviously a line where a photo definitely becomes “edited”, but people often believe that an objective photo is something that exists, and I don’t think that’s ever been the case.

    • sab@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      Of course - there’s a huge difference between a “real photo” and “objective reality”, and there always has been. In the same way an impressionistic painting might capture reality accurately while not really looking like it that much.

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      It’s actually way worse. Modern smartphones do a LOT of postprocessing that is basically just AI, and have been for years. Noise reduction, upscaling, auto-HDR and bokeh are all achieved through “AI” and are way further removed from reality than a film print or a DSLR picture. Smartphone sensors aren’t nearly as good as a decent DSLR, they just make up for it with compute power and extremely advanced processing pipelines so we can’t tell the difference at a glance.

      Zoom into even a simple picture of a landscape, and you can obviously tell whether it was shot on smartphone. HDR artifacting and weird hallucinogenic blobs in low-light details are telltale signs, and not coincidentally rather similar to telltale sign of AI-generated photorealistic pictures.

      Anyway it’s still important to draw a line in the sand for what constitutes a “doctored” picture, but the line isn’t so obviously placed once you realize just how wildly different a “no filter” smartphone pic is from the raw image straight from the sensor.