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A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
(appleinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It should be. All computational photography has zero business being used in court
We might be exaggerating the issue here. Fallibility has always been an issue with court evidence. Analog photos can be doctored too.
Sure, but smartphones now automatically doctor every photo you take. Someone who took the photo could not even know it was doctored and think it represents truth.
Fair point, but I still think we're exaggerating the amount of doctoring that's being done by the phones. There's always been some level of discrepancy between real life subjects and the images taken of them.
It's just a tool creating media from sensor data. Those sensors aren't the same as our eyes, and their processors don't hold a candle to our own brains.
In the interest of not rambling, let's look back at early black and white cameras. When people looked at those photos, did they assume the world was black and white? Or did they acknowledge this as a characteristic of the camera?
All digital photography is computational. I think the word you're looking for is composite, not computational.
Unless the dude is saying only film should be admissible, which doesn't sound all that bad.
Film is also subject to manipulation in the development stage, even if you avoid compositing e.g. dodging and burning. Photographic honesty is an open and active philosophic debate that has been going on since its inception. It's not like you can really draw a line in the sand and blanketly say admissible or not. Although I'm sure established guidelines would help. Ultimately, it's an argument about the validity of evidence that needs to be made on a case by case basis. The manipulations involved need to be fully identified and accounted for in those discussions.
With all the image manipulation and generation tools available to even amateurs, I'm not sure how any photography is admissible as evidence these days.
At some point there's going to have to be a whole bunch of digital signing (and timestamp signatures) going on inside the camera for things to be even considered.