Updated: 3/15/2023:
Samsung comments on the moon photos
Samsung has reacted to this weekend’s moon discussion and would like to clarify how the technology works. In an official statement, they reiterate that the photos you take are not covered with other material.“Samsung is committed to delivering leading photography experiences in all conditions.
When a user takes a picture of the moon, the ai-based scene optimization technology senses that the moon is the main object and takes multiple pictures to compose multiple frames, then ain improves the details of the picture quality and colors. It doesn’t superimpose any image over your photo.
Users can turn off the ai-based Scene Optimizer, this disables automatic enhancements to the details of photos taken by users.”
You can read more details about the technology used for moon images in Samsung mobiles here.
Earlier:
Hot discussion this weekend: How “authentic” are Samsung’s moon pictures?
Since the launch of the Galaxy S20 mobile phones, Samsung has boasted the ability to get really sharp pictures of the moon thanks to the Space Zoom function. The company then did not boast about using artificial to improve the images. But how how much does the ai help? Photographers and enthusiasts have already argued about this for several years, and now new firewood is being thrown into the fire.
Galaxy S23 Ultra: That’s how good Samsung’s new flagship phone is
The Reddit user ibreakphotos edited images of the moon to blur them (Gaussian blur), to ensure that the information in the images would not be there. He then took the same pictures on his computer screen with a Samsung mobile phone. The resulting photo contains details that the user thought were simply not present in the object, i.e. something added by artificial intelligence. A discussion of dubious marketing quickly arose, with some even calling the AI-enhanced images “fake”.
Samsung has been reasonably open with them using an AI trained on hundreds of thousands of moon images to remove blur. However, the company has also claimed that the AI does not add any extra textures to the images, as it allegedly did in the Reddit example. In the thread, both AI experts and professional photographers come up with different arguments and explanations about how the technology works.
If you want to see how your moon pictures will turn out without any AI help, make sure to turn off the Scene Optimizer in the camera app on your Samsung mobile.
