I was flicking through a photo album at my grandma’s when I came across a picture of my mum as a child. I took a photo and sent it to her, but on my phone screen, it looked brighter and more vivid than the physical version in my hand.
Adding an Instagram filter is something I would now only do ironically. But is my phone increasing the contrast or making other tweaks without my knowledge? To find out, I downloaded an app with a “zero-processing” feature that claimed to take photos without any software alterations. When comparing the photos my camera takes automatically to the photos taken with this app, the results were shocking. The so-called “raw” photos that lack processing had subtle, muted colours, softer edges – a little grainy – while the processed photos were gorgeous and crisp like the inside of a marble. Why were they so different?
The answer to this, like everything else these days, is machine learning, used by virtually every major smartphone-maker to enhance the photos taken with their cameras. Professional photographers have been aware of it for years, as you can readily see on Reddit, YouTube or Facebook. On Aurora-Hunters UK, enthusiasts accuse one another of “cheating” by using phone cameras that “automatically brighten the picture”. But outside these niche circles, it’s rarely discussed. We communicate, build relationships, advertise ourselves through our pictures – and yet they are being heavily manipulated without our knowledge. I told my friend about this on a walk, showed them the two photos side by side, and on the train home they said they “couldn’t stop thinking about it”. Tech companies are making decisions on our behalf about what our photos, and therefore our lives, look like.
We’re used to being lied to, and for new technologies to encourage an increasingly smoothed and yassified reality. It’s a common experience, needing to actively go to our phone settings to turn off smoothing effects on our faces. My sister freaked out when her phone automatically tried out a “jawline enhancer” on her front-facing camera, that she had to turn off.
And while the newest phones always come with boasts about improved cameras, this is somewhat deceptive: due to “thinnovation”, phones are physically too thin for the hardware to change dramatically, so instead, it is often computer software that is improving our photos.
These decisions, made by expert teams who are designing and programming our phone software, are not taken because they have a specific “photo look” in mind that they want to impart on the rest of the world – in order to control us, leading to world domination etc – but because they are seriously, and religiously, studying what consumers want. As I take photos without processing, I come to prefer them to the lurid, creepily vibrant photos created by my phone’s permanent settings. I am not alone – everyone I ask, amateur and professional photographer alike, prefers photos taken on a film camera, or even digital camera, to photos taken on our phones. But do these musings and taste preferences matter when I need to capture something quickly? No.
Consumers apparently want these bright, lurid photos. They want to be able to capture quickly, and still get non-blurry images. Consumers want their faces to look nicer in the photos, because it will make them feel better about themselves – but not too nice, not too edited, because it will seem fake. Tech companies want us on our phones more, and so making our photos more appealing, in a magpie-shiny-objects-way, is going to do that. This is when it starts to feel like a trap.
Even before this kind of automatic processing, the way our photos looked was somewhat pre-decided. Sensors pick up light and behave in certain ways to create certain images. Lenses with specific traits inherent in them determine how colourful the picture comes out, so photos are, to a certain extent, cooked eggs, with huge amounts of processing involved already. The “look” of photos, even in the 1970s with Fujifilm, wasn’t necessarily in the control of the photographer.
But there are obvious flaws with tech companies deciding what the “majority” preference is – how do they even decide such things? Consumer research? Data collection? Letting consumer desire – or demand – become the be-all and end-all for our products isn’t ideal. The short-term satisfaction given to us by our tech products has tended to cause long-term problems.
My mum has recently been going through boxes of old photos that she hadn’t looked at in decades. There are a few that my grandad took in the 1960s – including one of my mum as a toddler, holding a tennis racket that is bigger than her own body, watched over by my grandma. I showed it to my grandma, who was overwhelmed that she had produced such a little “dote”, and couldn’t believe the young woman’s body in the foreground was hers. She told me how photos such as this are rare because it was typical of my grandad to take shots of views, rather than of his family – which made us laugh. My grandad was putting his personality into his photos – even if most of them were bad, or blurry, or failed to get his own wife in, at least they revealed a crucial element of him, some enthusiasm and eccentricity. Looking through these prints can tell a story about what he was like as a person.
Whoever designs the tech, designs the image. With higher levels of control from tech companies – including embedded auto-processing that we cannot turn off – we begin to get narrower limits for us to express ourselves through our photos. When I look at them side by side, it’s undeniable that the processed photos are closer to the vibrancy of what I perceive as real life. They add a light or a sharpness that feels like it reflects what I see in the world around me. But what if that’s not what I want from my photos? If my grandad had grown up with a smartphone, what a bounty of wonderful, ultra-HD, glowy, vibrant photos of birds and planes he would have been able to take – but still, I can’t help but feel that that would have been a shame.
Isabel Brooks is a freelance writer
