It bugs me so much when people say that those black hole pictures “aren’t ‘real’ photographs, they’re composites created from reams of data and math.” All audiovisual media are like that!
reactordev 12/29/2025||
Maybe it’s just me but I took one look at the unprocessed photo (the first one) and immediately knew it was a skinny Christmas tree.
I’ve been staring at 16-bit HDR greyscale space for so long…
tylervigen 12/29/2025||
Related to the final photo: you might feel like those Christmas lights feel too blue compared to your nostalgic version of Christmas. This is because LEDs can easily achieve a brighter blue than old incandescent Christmas lights which used color filters on a white light.
For anyone that enjoyed this, pick up a book on digital image processing. The first chapters of most such books cover this, in almost step-by-step fashion. And then the books will usually start to venture into more classical machine learning stuff.
sturmen 12/29/2025|
Do you have any specific book recommendations for a layman?
ws404 12/29/2025||
Did you steal that tree from Charlie Brown?
excalibur 12/29/2025|
Surprised that nobody else commented on this, it is a very sad tree.
neoromantique 12/29/2025||
>No adblocker detected. Consider using an extension like uBlock Origin to save time and bandwidth. Click here to close.
So cute (I am running a DNS adblock only, on the work browser)
trashb 12/29/2025||
This post reminded me of the blog posts [0] regarding the "megapixels" camera app for the pinephone , written by Martijn Braam.
For those interested it dives quite deep into the color profiling and noise reduction and more to make the pinephone camera usefull.
> As a result of this, if the linear data is displayed directly, it will appear much darker then it should be.
Then -> than? (In case the author is reading comments here.)
Biganon 12/29/2025|
The author makes this error every single time, in both articles by him I've read today. For some reason, as a person whose native language is not English, this particular error pisses me off so much.
eru 12/30/2025||
We should blame English's crazy spelling system, not the author.
Biganon 12/30/2025||
Having two words that are spelled almost the same way is not a "crazy spelling system". Every language has that.
diffuse_l 12/29/2025||
Really enjoyed the article, thanks!
A small nit - I think you have a small mistake in the value range at the start - 136000 should probably be 13600?
emodendroket 12/28/2025|
This is actually really useful. A lot of people demand an "unprocessed" photo but don't understand what they're actually asking for.
Dylan16807 12/29/2025|
They probably do know what they're asking for, they're just using an ambiguous word.
Toutouxc 12/29/2025|||
My mirrorless camera shoots in RAW. When someone asks me if a certain photo was “edited”, I honestly don’t know what to answer. The files went through a RAW development suite that applied a bewildering amount of maths to transform them into a sRGB image. Some of the maths had sliders attached to it and I have moved some of the sliders, but their default positions were just what the software thought was appropriate. The camera isn’t even set to produce a JPEG + RAW combo, so there is literally no reference.
galleywest200 12/29/2025||
I just tell people it was “color corrected” and “color graded” by me if I do any development in a program like Affinity. I never let “AI” tools touch my photos though.
emodendroket 12/29/2025|||
I don't really think so! I think they imagine that if there were no processing applied to the image it would look pretty much like what they see IRL but that's not true.
Dylan16807 12/30/2025||
Some of them might literally want no color correction and still expect it to look like real life, and that expectation is wrong. Some of them might want the most accurate generic mapping, accepting the consequences, and that's reasonable enough. And I bet a lot of them mean they want no retouching, and that's a very valid demand.
emodendroket 12/30/2025||
Even if we reinterpret it into the more "reasonable" categories I'm not convinced they'd be happy with what they're asking for. I think users are generally very poor judges of what they actually want in cases like this.