Collaboration
Neotropical Cormorant, Nannopterum brasilianum, in flight.
Our eminent Bird Hike leader nailed the ID from the profile, with wings amidships, ruling out the shorter-tailed Double-crested cormorant, which would have shown the wings farther back. Apple Photos AI ID offered a species from Australia. Artificial Stupidity, I guess, and not that uncommon. Maybe Natural Stupidity is involved in ignoring geotags recorded automatically by the camera, from my phone.
I kept them in the viewfinder during a burst, selected the best pose, cropped only to square at full height. Chose a barely sufficient shutter speed, which allowed low auto-ISO. Inadvertent underexposure was due to a single clumsy maladjustment very early in the day on my control-rich X-T5. Disappointed, still learning. That retained good color in the sky, but dark shadows on these dark birds.
Normal post-processing in Apple Photos on iPad: automatic lighting; followed by brilliance, highlight, and shadow adjustments to taste; optional sharpening and definition (clarity). Photos doesn’t make the same lighting adjustments every time, even for point & shoot images from the phone. Surely that is AI. Photoshop has offered such automatic improvements for decades, and I suppose most people at least try it on most photos, as a benchmark or starting point.
Photos on Mac offers more controls; e.g. levels and curves that are necessary to dig details out of shadows on photos like this. Often that works, probably would have tried it here. But …
Just got the super-sweet “Black Friday” deal from Skylum on Luminar Neo, and opted for the iPad version as well on a 7-day trial basis. Dug deeper into the shadows than I expected would work, and even recovers the golden cheek that confirms the Neo-tropical ID. Skylum calls some of its operations AI, haven’t played with it enough to be sure what’s generative vs. “Expert System”; i.e., extreme precision on combinations of parameters, which has been in practical use for at least 3 decades, admittedly based on different algorithms.
I trained my Natural Intelligence for aesthetic judgments on other people’s work, helped Flickr train an AI to add image quality to the Explore selection process. Nobody called either theft.
My current state of nuance is to be somewhat worried about words-to-images generative AI, which certainly has/will have commercial applications, but isn’t photography. Maybe I would have been able to dig this deep in the shadows with curves, but for convenience and results, Neo passed its trial.
Collaboration
Neotropical Cormorant, Nannopterum brasilianum, in flight.
Our eminent Bird Hike leader nailed the ID from the profile, with wings amidships, ruling out the shorter-tailed Double-crested cormorant, which would have shown the wings farther back. Apple Photos AI ID offered a species from Australia. Artificial Stupidity, I guess, and not that uncommon. Maybe Natural Stupidity is involved in ignoring geotags recorded automatically by the camera, from my phone.
I kept them in the viewfinder during a burst, selected the best pose, cropped only to square at full height. Chose a barely sufficient shutter speed, which allowed low auto-ISO. Inadvertent underexposure was due to a single clumsy maladjustment very early in the day on my control-rich X-T5. Disappointed, still learning. That retained good color in the sky, but dark shadows on these dark birds.
Normal post-processing in Apple Photos on iPad: automatic lighting; followed by brilliance, highlight, and shadow adjustments to taste; optional sharpening and definition (clarity). Photos doesn’t make the same lighting adjustments every time, even for point & shoot images from the phone. Surely that is AI. Photoshop has offered such automatic improvements for decades, and I suppose most people at least try it on most photos, as a benchmark or starting point.
Photos on Mac offers more controls; e.g. levels and curves that are necessary to dig details out of shadows on photos like this. Often that works, probably would have tried it here. But …
Just got the super-sweet “Black Friday” deal from Skylum on Luminar Neo, and opted for the iPad version as well on a 7-day trial basis. Dug deeper into the shadows than I expected would work, and even recovers the golden cheek that confirms the Neo-tropical ID. Skylum calls some of its operations AI, haven’t played with it enough to be sure what’s generative vs. “Expert System”; i.e., extreme precision on combinations of parameters, which has been in practical use for at least 3 decades, admittedly based on different algorithms.
I trained my Natural Intelligence for aesthetic judgments on other people’s work, helped Flickr train an AI to add image quality to the Explore selection process. Nobody called either theft.
My current state of nuance is to be somewhat worried about words-to-images generative AI, which certainly has/will have commercial applications, but isn’t photography. Maybe I would have been able to dig this deep in the shadows with curves, but for convenience and results, Neo passed its trial.