Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/04/samsung-faked-a-smartphone-por.html
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[Insert stock photo of facepalm here.]
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Wait…you mean a large tech company that flouts their stuff as the best used cheap tricks and manipulation to advertise said superiority?
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Samsung did all that just to sell a phone…
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Setting aside what one thinks of Apple, they are smart enough to actually use their own devices to take the photos used for promoting how good the cameras in their devices are.
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I generally like Apple’s products just fine with some notable design choices (non upgradeable iMacs are still the bane of my existence). But I am sure even they have taken liberties with some things. And they certainly make ads that while pretty and nice…have zero to do with the actually features/functions of the devices they are pushing. They’ve started to do adverts like Perfume/Cologne commercials.
Case in point…
New Rule - Any time you get caught faking - everyone gets free product.
No more Faking
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Talk about an advanced phone! It’s portrait mode is so good it steals photos from the internet of people more attractive than you. I hope it will also replace the backgrounds in my vacation portraits so that the new me will be in fancier places.
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Your case in point is speaking directly to creative professionals, their primary market for high end Macs. It’s like the “think different” ad back in the late 90’s - totally irrelevant to anything they sell except that it’s in a way relevant to everything they sell.
The interesting thing about that ad is that it was staggeringly more expensive than a typical ad because they did all the backgrounds using actual miniatures, and then CGI’d only the characters. So it’s a nice little holiday themed fable with a moral that will appeal to creative professionals (share your creativity, don’t hide it away), but on another level it’s an ad that pulls out all the stops to put massive amounts of creativity, passion, and attention to detail on the screen. Which is exactly the ethos that Apple wears as its public face, and which is exactly the kind of ethos that their creative professional customers bring to their own work. It’s saying, “we are your kind of people, we care about the tools we have to sell you just as much as you care about the work you make with those tools.”
It may well be all a load of bollocks, but the point is that they know exactly what their public face is, how and why that face appeals to their core Mac customers, and how to evoke that appeal in a seemingly superficial holiday themed ad.
Meanwhile, companies like Samsung just do the industry standard thing, which is to hire an ad firm, give them money, and then walk away. The ad firm proceeds to make the promotional campaign for the next phone or whatever without much regard to whether the campaign has much authenticity to it. So you get promotional tweets from official Samsung accounts being made with Apple phones, and promotional photos purporting to demonstrate features of the camera on the new Samsung phones that are created in Photoshop instead of taken with a Samsung phone.
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Having worked in the design business, it wouldn’t surprise me if the creative soul tasked with the advertising was not given access to the camera, or did the design before the camera existed, expecting them to update the image when a real shot became available.
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Or not given the authority or budget for a photo shoot :-/
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I more than once heard from the billion dollar company- we don’t have a budget for that and we need the art before the next quarter when we can put in a request.
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I’m mildly surprised that Samsung didn’t double down and sue sue Ms. Djudic for infringing on its copyright. Faced with the likely ruinous expense of such a suit, most indies would fold.
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Clearly they didn’t learn from when Nokia tried these shenanigans a few years back.
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Somewhere out there, someone in a DSLR camera maker marketing department is rubbing his/her hands and saying “Thank you, Samsung!!”
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It’s an interesting philosophical point, though. If a cheapo bit of software can make your camera phone pics look like an expensive DSLR/Lens combination, what’s the difference between the cameraphone pics and the DSLR pics?
(I still like to shoot film using a 35 year old Nikon.)
Is this somehow related to pouring motor oil on a stack of pancakes to make them look syrupy?
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Don’t you mean a practical point? I would say that if you can get the image you want, it doesn’t matter what tool you use.
I think that’s why Samsung’s flub helps prop up DSLR makers, because it makes it seem like Samsung needed to fake the image when, in fact, doing so was likely more an art department/scheduling/budget screwup rather than a technical limitation of Samsung’s synthetic bokeh feature.
Increasingly cell phone cameras with synthetic lens blur can evoke the feeling of a wide aperture SLR portrait, without the bulk of carrying fast glass and a large sensor camera, and the control in post of the feature gives more versatility in editing than one has with a DSLR image (unless you painstakingly create a manual depth map and use the Photoshop lens blur filter). The synthetic lens blur effect in cell phones still isn’t perfect, and screws up with semi-transparent edges and such, but it is more than good enough for many applications.
Headline should maybe be something like
Samsung faked a fake fake DSLR portrait allegedly faked
with a smartphone with a stock photo taken with a DSLR
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