Fake background blur on camera-phones

[steve30]

What's the deal with these camera-phones which attempt to fake a shallow depth of field? I'm seeing a lot of photos on the internet where there is fake background blur and it is usually quite obvious that it is faked in software and is not achieved by the lens.

Someone on IRC linked me to a major manufacturer's product page (I forget which) where they were promoting their shallow depth of field phone camera, and gave loads of example pictures. Some were actually quite good, but I'd say on half of them, it was blindingly obvious that it was faked.

[magic]

What's the deal with these camera-phones, period?

They are completely rubbish (with rare exception of somebody bypassing the vendor software pipe and developing raws, if even possible on given model). They look worse than late 2000s era point and shoots with similarly sized sensors, despite a whole decade of sensor progress.

The answer is simple:
1. It's sold to proles who have never seen the real thing, so it doesn't need to look real.
2. The proles justify buying new phones every two years by thinking about all the things the phone replaces. Ergo, there is a strong marketing reason to make the proles believe that it replaces a camera too.
3. (By the same token, proles are lead to think it replaces a computer, but I'm digressing now )

Mobile phones are peak consumer technology.

[Mechatrommer]

You know china style want to imitate real bokeh of dslr with expensive telephoto lens? through AI recognition. This is it. Its been going on for years even on brand like samsung and iphone, what took you so long? There are many more! Immitate 3d view, engorge eye like grasshopper and shrink lips like shit... what do you know? The ultimatum to this AI madness is deepfake or should i call... deepshit... but to be frank its kind of cool when you on vacation you dont want to bring big heavy dslr to spoil the mood, so you still can get coolish wannabe pics even though faked and visibly imperfect to pro eyes..

[sleemanj]

Wouldn't it just be for privacy?

Now that video call meetings and so forth are common, blurring the background to prevent unintentionally showing things you don't want to show.

[Berni]

Most people take all there photos on there phone, then also do all the photo editing on the same phone before using the same phone to post it on social media.

Some of this AI image enhancement tech can be very impressive when it works. It just doesn't tend to consistently give a good result in every situation.

Phone cameras have certainly gotten impressively good too. Sure you can't compare it to a big DSLR that costs 5 times as much as the entire phone that happens to have a camera built in. It is also much bigger and heavier than a phone, making it unreasonable to carry with you unless you know you want to take a photo there. Yet photos taken by modern phones look plenty good enough to get the job done. They don't look fuzzy or dull or noisy.

[dave j]

Wouldn't it just be for privacy?

Now that video call meetings and so forth are common, blurring the background to prevent unintentionally showing things you don't want to show.

Taking photos of someone/thing with the background blurred focuses the viewers attention on the subject. It's very common in portrait photography for that reason. It's usually for aesthetic reasons rather than anything else.

[M0HZH]

What's the deal with these camera-phones, period?

They are completely rubbish (with rare exception of somebody bypassing the vendor software pipe and developing raws, if even possible on given model). They look worse than late 2000s era point and shoots with similarly sized sensors, despite a whole decade of sensor progress.

The answer is simple:
1. It's sold to proles who have never seen the real thing, so it doesn't need to look real.
2. The proles justify buying new phones every two years by thinking about all the things the phone replaces. Ergo, there is a strong marketing reason to make the proles believe that it replaces a camera too.
3. (By the same token, proles are lead to think it replaces a computer, but I'm digressing now )

Mobile phones are peak consumer technology.

Are you sure you've seen how well a decent phone camera from the last decade works?

They are "good enough" for most practical needs like taking a picture to show someone something, to post on social media or for city break snaps. People use high end mobile phone cameras even for some entry-level professional work now, with good lighting they're not that bad and they output RAW files.

I stopped taking my digital camera to most things, it only comes out for product photography or exotic holidays now. And it's a decent Sony APS-C with proper lens, certainly better than the phone camera; but it's better in areas where it doesn't really make a difference anymore.

[magic]

Yeah, sure. Go here and tell me that this is how clouds are supposed to look like. Taken in daylight with a fairly recent TOTL phone from a supposedly cloud-savvy company

This is the price you pay for

They don't look fuzzy or dull or noisy.

and noisy in particular.

[sokoloff]

What's the deal with these camera-phones, period?

They are completely rubbish (with rare exception of somebody bypassing the vendor software pipe and developing raws, if even possible on given model). They look worse than late 2000s era point and shoots with similarly sized sensors, despite a whole decade of sensor progress.

The answer is simple:
1. It's sold to proles who have never seen the real thing, so it doesn't need to look real.
2. The proles justify buying new phones every two years by thinking about all the things the phone replaces. Ergo, there is a strong marketing reason to make the proles believe that it replaces a camera too.
3. (By the same token, proles are lead to think it replaces a computer, but I'm digressing now )

I think the answer is quite a bit simpler than that: the camera that you have on you takes vastly more pictures than the camera that you don't have on you.

I have a higher quality dSLR than the camera on my phone. Yet 98+% of my pictures are taken on the camera on my phone. And it's almost always perfectly sufficient.

[Berni]

Yeah, sure. Go here and tell me that this is how clouds are supposed to look like. Taken in daylight with a fairly recent TOTL phone from a supposedly cloud-savvy company

This is the price you pay for

They don't look fuzzy or dull or noisy.

and noisy in particular.

Then just don't use your phone for taking photos if it doesn't work out for you. Nobody is preventing you from using a DSLR instead.

I got a Samsung A52s so it is far from being a flagship phone where the best phone camera tech is. But the camera is more than good enough for whatever i need to do. You can turn off the image enhancement stuff, it has a "pro" mode that gives you manual control over all the usual parameters. Pictures don't look noisy and there is plenty of detail in them. So much detail that i used it as a microscope to read tiny markings off chips (even while having the entire board in shot) or even used it as binoculars to see something that was too far for me to discern. Id don't think i could buy a brand new standalone camera that undoubtedly outperforms it for the ~300€ i shelled out for the phone brand new. And yet the camera can't make phone calls.

Maybe i am just a blind photography slob who can't tell apart a crappy potato photo apart from a good one. In any case i am satisfied with the photos my reasonably modern phone can make so i keep using it. Even if i did have a nice 3 grand DSLR i wouldn't have it with me all the time, and so a crappy photo is still better than no photo.

[golden_labels]

What's the deal with these camera-phones which attempt to fake a shallow depth of field? I'm seeing a lot of photos on the internet where there is fake background blur and it is usually quite obvious that it is faked in software and is not achieved by the lens.

The same as with people making “black-and-white” photos and various automatic, smart improvements to photos. Making photos more attractive and resembling those made by professional/artist photographers, without making any effort or having the gear.

What's the deal with these camera-phones, period?

Should I assume that to take photos of people in low-light conditions on a party you take a DSLR, “because larger more better”?

No, this doesn’t work that way. Unless we are talking about bottom tier, which is poor because it is bottom tier, each kind of gear has its specific characteristics. Some are useful in different situations, some are having detrimental effect. As it happens, any decent smartphone camera is much better for the aforementioned scenario than anything that is not a recent flagship DSLR. Aside from the latter being cumbersome for its size and energy consumption, smartphone’s smaller lens are a serious advantage. They provide longer depth of field at the same f-number. That is poor choice for some artistic uses, in particular portrait; but a massive advantage, if you take a quick photo of people from a short distance and there is no chance to keep them properly contained in DoF. Much quicker focusing is another gain.

And that’s only the technical side of the problem. Cost per quality is another one. Getting decent lens with AF and stabilization below the price of a smartphone is not that easy. No, Yangnuo is not meeting the criteria.

[coppice]

With phone cameras the selfie is king. What is the perfect selfie? One that focusses on the subject, and leaves just enough of the background discernible so the viewer can tell the subject was somewhere interesting. A controllably fuzzy background is perfect. Just add a mode that puts lipstick on a pig for the subject themselves, and you have a winner.

[magic]

Not sure why everybody is telling me to use a DSLR when I'm comparing phones to 15 year old point and shoots with similar sensor size and resolution

This has nothing to do with optics, which are approximately equal in this case, and everything to do with software processing.

Maybe there are some exceptions and I'm sure it can be bypassed by shooting raw. But phone images really aren't that great and there is at least one major phone vendor whose images are simply disgusting out of the box, see my link and just look at any part of the sky there.

[Someone]

This has nothing to do with optics, which are approximately equal in this case, and everything to do with software processing.

Really? I don't recall any "point and shoot" cameras with lenses as small in diameter and packaged in short depths like contemporary smartphones (consider Galaxy S4 zoom).

[Mechatrommer]

Not sure why everybody is telling me to use a DSLR when I'm comparing phones to 15 year old point and shoots with similar sensor size and resolution

whats your point? noise reduction? afaik noise reduction tech started to take place about 5-10 years back, 15yrs old camera you will see the green and magenta noise. today, even top notch full frame sensor will implement noise reduction just so you can snap at ISO 800K, virtually you dont need any artificial lighting in normally lit room. and nobody with selfie in mind will give a rat arse about how the sky looks, they will be more happier if noise reduction can flatten out their pimples. and RAW is nothing else than what the sensor captured. you'll need to apply noise reduction in PC anyway to deal with the ugly truth of what a small sensor can give you in RAW. you apply noise reduction, you'll get flat sky, thats what the current tech can give you, like it or not. you dont apply noise reduction, then you'll get the classic green and magenta noise, or even worse.

[Someone]

and RAW is nothing else than what the sensor captured.

Yeah, no. There is a lot of processing ahead of "raw" in the camera including noise reduction (varies by brand and model) but it tends to be a light touch leaving decisions for the human in post.

[Mechatrommer]

So thats not raw in its true meaning.. thats a 'cheated' or 'doctored' raw.. i guess manufacturer doesnt want you to know the ugly truth..

[wilfred]

Depth of field is determined by the inverse of the focal length squared, the distance to the subject (the plane of sharp focus) the aperture of the lens and an arbitrarily agreed upon circle-of-confusion or spot on the image that is not in focus but is not so blurry that it does not appear sharp in the final image ie sharp enough to be called sharp.

With tiny image sensors and very short focal length lenses and no (or very limited) ability to vary the aperture, everything that makes a camera phone so convenient works against producing images with pleasing background and foreground blur that can produce the desired effect in the final image. Cameras with much larger sensors and in particular full-frame sensors have the physics of the optics available to exploit in a way camera-phones do not.

Clever software image processing is used to overcome the inherent limitations of cameras built into phones.

Even back in the day lenses were often characterised as having pleasing "Bokeh" in the out-of-focus areas and lenses with more nearly circular aperture diaphrams tended to excel in this regard. Six bladed diaphrams would make blurred highlights appear as hexagons.

So there is very little possibility for a camera-phone to produce real background blur.

[Berni]

Maybe i just struck it lucky with my particular phone that i never ran into processing artifacts. Then again the camera on this phone did jump onto the megapixel pissing contest bandwagon with a 64MP sensor, so it gives any noise reduction post processing more pixels to work with. That's likely the only use for the ridiculous megapixel numbers since the optics probably can't make proper use of it.

One way you can really make the post processing show up is to use the night shot mode and take a photo at night. It can actually produce a impressively bright looking photo even in very dark scenes. However any fine detail is completely smeared out into solid colored blotches, it really does look ugly. However the original pixel data from the camera sensor was likely way way worse, probably mostly static with a faint representation of the actual scene behind it. So while the post processed night shot image does look ugly they are still a lot better than the unusable noisy garbage the sensor actually produced.

But in normal lightning conditions the decent modern phones produce perfectly fine images to me. All i see is JPEG compression artifacts if i zoom way in(Even that takes a lot of zooming in on a 10MB jpeg).

[Mechatrommer]

They look worse than late 2000s era point and shoots with similarly sized sensors, despite a whole decade of sensor progress.

Then again the camera on this phone did jump onto the megapixel pissing contest bandwagon with a 64MP sensor, so it gives any noise reduction post processing more pixels to work with. That's likely the only use for the ridiculous megapixel numbers since the optics probably can't make proper use of it.

this.. even though similar sensor size.. P&S cameras 15 years back have only like 2-4MP, todays sensor is 24-64MP size. so per pixel size is really small on modern sensor hence more noise. we dont expect too much from noise reduction technology yet... so give and take.

[AndyBeez]

@Steve30 - one of my pet peeves! It's not a light gaussian glur but a total distracting fuzz. It could be justified as a bandwidth saver by removing complex backgrounds from the algorithm? But no, it's there on F2F calls so people don't show what a shite collection of ornaments and books they have on the shelf behind them. Personally, I've only ever seen gaussian blur used to good effect on tilt-shift imaging. Okay, not quite as irritating as the teeth whitening mode on Samsung phones, but agreed, a CRAP FX.

You'll note this selective depth of focus effect creeping into news reports. Back in my day as a camera operator, focus had to be this >|< sharp. Always. And if the subject moved, the opo' had to pull the focus - hence the Focus Puller on movie credits. Now, it's used to 'drift attention' to the action, often by the news reporter who went to a five minute film school on Youtube. Again, a CRAP FX.

[steve30]

You'll note this selective depth of focus effect creeping into news reports. Back in my day as a camera operator, focus had to be this >|< sharp. Always. And if the subject moved, the opo' had to pull the focus - hence the Focus Puller on movie credits. Now, it's used to 'drift attention' to the action, often by the news reporter who went to a five minute film school on Youtube. Again, a CRAP FX.

I do some video journalism as a hobby these days and I find smaller sensor cameras best as just about everything is always in focus. I find with interviews, it can be quite pleasing to have a smidgen of background blur, which can be achieved by moving the camera further back and zooming in; this can help emphasise the person who is talking, but usually the background is important, as there is often something happening there which is relevant.

Larger sensor cameras are much better in low light; in fact the 0.4" camera which I recently spent over £1000 on is rather crap in low light. So I can see the appeal of larger sensors. I also notice amongst hobbyists, that quite a few people use DSLRs. I consider these not very good for anything which might be considered "news", but for hobbyists/low budget business it may be the best option, especially if you do a lot of still photos, or need the low light sensitivity. But even if a DSLR news report has excessive background blur, at least it is proper lens blurring and not that faked stuff!

The issue with the fake DOF is that the camera often doesn't know the actual distances involved, so in a portrait, the face will be in focus, but the ears will be blurred, and will be blurred by the same amount as the wall behind them.

There was one good example on a manufacturers website where the person was stood on a bridge. The railings (which were probably a few meters away from the camera) were blurred, but the background in between the railings was pin sharp, but the [same] background above the railings was blurred!

[TimFox]

Another way of looking at depth of field is that it depends directly on the "film" or "sensor" size.
A "full-frame" DSLR sensor is 24 by 36 mm, just like a frame in a 35 mm film SLR, and will have a shallower depth of field than, say, 4.2 by 5.6 mm (IPhone 14) at a given f-number.
The exposure depends on that f number, the exposure time, and the actual speed (ASA/ISO) of the film or sensor.
When I started using an 8 x 10 inch camera to photograph flowers, I immediately noticed the shallow depth of field at a given f-number.
(The actual image quality, when the damn flowers quit blowing in the breeze, blows any cell phone out of the water.
I was photographing buildings down by the Chicago River when a tourist asked me how many megapixels I had with the 8x10.
I did a quick back-of-the envelope mental calculation, and replied, honestly, "about 500".)

[Mechatrommer]

photo/video graphy is 10% tools and 90% technique (art). technique including manipulating lights and reflectors and art about subject matter and background story telling, framing and know what/where/why to emphasize or de-emphasize. all-sharp picture is property of pin-hole camera you can even diy, but real bokeh/blur (to de-emphasize) need some price. you can get all-sharp with dslr and kit cheap (slow) lens, set to highest f-stop (smallest aperture) that the light level can allow and shot away your video, but its quite tricky (or limited condition) if not impossible to get bokeh with pin-hole grade camera like phone camera. current artificial blurring of smartphone is not yet near perfection and as good as real deal big camera and "fast" lens... today dslr only if you want to make some money, if you want to make money with smartphone camera forget it, everybody have it now they can make their own, unless you have the special 90% of technique and art mastery or youtube paybill creating fool in foreground commenting game in the background with $5 ring led as artificial light..

[AndyBeez]

Fake DOF just looks wrong. This and other clunky effects might be on trend, but there is no excuse for them being on air. As you say, step back and zoom in makes not only for a more natural DOF feel but also, it flattens the perspective on the subject. A short telephoto lens always makes for a good portrait. Smart phones do zoom by cropping away a few mega pixels - the perspective and focus stuff is done by silicon guesswork.