Marc Levoy
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2019–2026
1:15:21 · 513K views · Aug 28, 2016
The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.
HN recommends it as a free, serious introduction to digital and computational photography from a professor who helped build the early Pixel cameras.
5 comments from Hacker News
I did my PhD in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics, and despite "optical" being part of that I realized midway that I didn't know enough about how regular cameras worked! It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be extremely important in the work I did during the early days at Waymo and later at Motional. I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that discusses HDR: [LINK] . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers. Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: this video . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).
The star tracking feature of the astrophotography mode definitely has me interested. I'm disappointed to see the continued lack of battery capacity on the smaller phone though. While I'd love a larger battery, I'm one of the unfortunate ones whose small hands can already barely reach across my Pixel 2's phone screen -- much less the top section. I'm also incredibly excited about the face unlocking feature -- I owned a Pixel Xs for about a week before returning it, and face unlock was my absolute favorite feature. It's very seamless especially compared to fingerprint unlock. As an aside, Marc Levoy, who spoke at the Google event today is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, and has a great series titled "Lectures on Digital Photography" available for free on Youtube: this video
> No google pixel / iOS quality level HDR & night sight modes Marc Levoy (the brains behind Google's amazing Computational Photography technology), said that he had gone to the Camera companies before and they rejected his proposals. Camera companies were too afraid that someone was going to take a photo, and it would end up looking bad, and result in people returning their camera. Source: Somewhere in this excellent course shared by Google: this video
To expand on the HDR example: There’s this interesting lecture series about computational photography by Marc Levoy, who worked on the earlier Pixel cameras: this video From what I remember, the core thesis is “take a lot of pictures and take the best parts”, which works for a surprising number of cases.
Marc Levoy's Lectures on Digital Photography: this video >This is one of 18 videos representing lectures on digital photography, from a version of my Stanford course CS 178 that was recorded at Google in Spring 2016.