Denoising

Anxiety, alternate facts, high speed film, artificial intelligence

Late night dreams have it all. When you wake up at 3, probably because of anxiety, and remember that there was a dream with someone close to you dying, a rat in the swimming pool, and a car chase, you know you really lived. Some dreams are exhausting. You wake up tired. Not pleasant. At least, this time there was no lost or missing tooth. Dental dreams are sure signs  of worries about mortality. Dreams about death, rats and being pursued are usually something else.

But I am no dream expert. I just know that I was asleep, then awake with dim memories. Trying to decide what coats I would take from the dearly departed’s coats closet. Then the half-awake state rolled in, where you remember interactions from the previous day, but without the veneer of consciousness - expressions revealed in their true form. The microsecond expression on someone’s face that you block out instantly in daily life. Shit, it sounds like I’m writing this in my sleep. If only I were so lucky.

I’ll pop into bed in a minute. A doctor’s appointment looms up in the morning and I’d like to give myself half a chance at appearing healthy. Even though I ate some more salad and exercised a bit more this last week, it still won’t make up for a year’s worth of pizza and driving. Naps are not aerobic. Such is life.

You can’t train for a doctor’s visit, but you can try to cut back on the bad stuff for a while. Is pizza bad? Existential question. What is the nature of good and bad? Am I placing value judgements on food? Does the hard chemistry of grease and salt negate the joy of a good meal? Am I speaking like a dope fiend?

I was editing photos yesterday. Chipping away some more at the book. It’s either a meticulous editing process or I’m getting too anal, too perfectionistic about it, but I don’t think that’s the case. I’m not there yet and there’s no need to second guess myself. When I edit words, a clear point will come when I realize the edits have become hair-splitting and that it’s best to put it down and declare I’m done.

Not so the case with this photo editing. Not yet. It’s a lot of photos for one book. That’s the point. Most were shot in digital. A few were on film. Some were with primitive, early digital. A really glossy, high-quality print job would reveal more about each photo, but this run will be on Amazon and their quality is just good enough.

Digital has gotten so good that you can shoot really dark scenes now. And you can even do it handheld, no tripod involved. You generally have to bump up the ISO - the equivalent to changing the speed of the film, in order to do it. That’s one way, at least. The tradeoff is graininess. And even that is NOTHING compared to the graininess of shooting fast film in the old days.

Yes, you could get film that was 1600 ASA, and acronym that’s sort of equivalent to “ISO” now. Even 800 ASA was grainy as hell, though. It had a certain look and you could argue that it was dramatic, but you had no choice about the way it looked, so you had to come up with some way to justify it. High speed film was grainy, ghostly, spectral. You knew it when you saw it.

You can shoot 10 times faster than that now on a digital camera and it’ll look better. And, for years, you could use any number of digital darkroom tricks to reduce the grain further. There were built-in tools in the digital developing software and there were third-party plugins. A lot of money went into these tools and people have had long discussions and arguments online about the relative virtues and faults of all this software.

Some plugins worked like magic, but many would dull down a photo or introduce strange artifacts into a processed file, a bit like a rat in the dream swimming pool. I know that I’ve lost all but photo geeks by this point, but I’ll continue in spite of that.

The latest version of Adobe Photoshop has introduced what they call “AI denoising” or something like that. I’m not a huge fan of AI as the salvation to all things. I think the tech industry feels like the next gold rush is on and they are claiming that AI is a living, breathing entity, something capable of producing work better than humans could produce. They are acting like they just gave birth to the new Messiah. I could go on about AI, but I’ll save that for another day. My fingers are tired and I want to get to bed. I have a doctor’s appointment in  5 hours, remember?

So, I tested this AI denoising on a few of my most egregious photos, the ones shot at the outer limits of handheld night photography, where the sky is dark, you have a few bright lights, you’re moving quickly and the there is a lot of digital noise. Why digital? Because nothing is real anymore - it’s a representation of something that was real. Just like the state of the news landscape.

Ever wonder how you and a friend could each go to their own news sources and come up with completely different versions of an actual event? “Uh, dude…one of us must be wrong here.” Well, I digress because a digital photo with lots of grain is not like a conspiracy theory, but it would be a fun riff to also develop.

So I tried this denoising engine and, you know what? It did a pretty good job. Almost too good. The sky suddenly looked clean, as well as other details, and it didn’t change the mood or the look and feel of the photo. Is this a good thing? Is it pleasing? Does it distract from the content? I have been pondering these questions. Not struggling, but pondering.

I tend to like the tool, if used judiciously. And this is the question du jour. Because part of me, probably the old junkie part of me - or is it the old perfectionist part of me? Sometimes I can’t tell - thinks about going and correcting every photo in this book. Every photo that needs it, at least. And I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

Corrections are one thing. Most photos, except in the strict journalism world, have had some form of editing, and this goes back to the earliest days of wet darkrooms. But I’m not sure that this would be wise here. Possibly for a photo where the grain truly distracts from my original intent, then it might be a good thing, but for all others, probably not. AI on its own doesn’t know what it’s doing. It can’t feel anything, can’t remember its own experience unless you’re using sophistry and applying it to the words “remember” or “experience.”

AI can crunch lots of data quickly and may be useful if you apply it in a narrow way. I know many will disagree with me here. That’s okay. It’s good to be able to hold different opinions on things and to discuss them with no rancor. But AI does not know what my eyes said to my brain when I clicked that shutter for a fraction of a second.

So, I’m NOT wrestling with this now, but it has entered the equation when I examine every photo in this book. I have cleaned up two out of over 300 and I’ll  probably leave it at that. I think they’re better photos for it. That’s a good thing. Let me teeter totter back to bed. I’m including two versions of the same photo here - not from the book and not truly dark, but taken on a bright night. One has this AI denoising applied and the other does not. Let’s talk soon. I’m having fun working through this series. Maybe too much fun?

I love you all.