Why your photos are now better than reality

The phrase “the camera never lies” has never been so wrong. Artificially intelligent smartphones are now editing pictures in real time to create images that can’t be produced by conventional cameras. These enhancements, known as computational photography, are changing the way we view the world.

The goal of digital photography was once to approximate what our eyes see. Computational photography goes beyond this, automatically making skin smoother, colours richer and pictures less grainy.


These photos may look better, but they raise concerns about authenticity and trust in an era of fakeable information. “The photos of the future will not be recorded, they’ll be computed,” says Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab.

Early computational photography efforts focused on improving bulkier professional cameras, says Raskar. But as sales of smartphones started outpacing those of standalone cameras, more energy went into using digital enhancements to compensate for the poor quality of phone photos.

Phone companies have given their cameras multiple lenses and more advanced hardware. At last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia released its 9 PureView with five cameras that can produce photos up to 240 megapixels in resolution.

Many of these AI-equipped smartphone cameras take bursts of photos, using multiple lenses. AI algorithms can then combine the best of these images, or create new images that no single camera captured.

The growing popularity of instantediting cameras raises concerns about authenticity, particularly as photographs are used in news reports or as evidence in courts of law.

These technologies also introduce the social temptation to continuously beautify one’s image. “It’s become a necessity of contemporary social life, typically for younger people, to have to have their face and their photograph circulating,” says Michelle Henning, a cultural historian at the University of West London.

Chinese company Meitu, best known for its photo ‘beautification’ apps with some 350 million active monthly users, has recently introduced AI-powered photo editing. Take a selfie with a Meitu phone and it locates facial landmarks, builds a virtual mesh over your face, and segments the skin so it can adjust features accordingly, removing imperfections like dark circles and pimples. It moulds your face to aesthetic proportions, widening your eyes or slimming your jaw.

Such alterations might be doing more than just prettying up your Instagram feed. Tijion Esho, a London doctor who performs cosmetic procedures, says he has seen a rise in people requesting treatments based on edited photographs of themselves.

“People were creating very chiselled jaw lines, ones that couldn’t be created [in reality] because it wouldn’t be possible to move your head,” he says. “In some cases, people wanted their eyes widened in a way that some filters do.”