#648 overall
CS 178: Digital Photography (Marc Levoy)
Stanford University
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2025 · score 0.7
CS 178 is Stanford's digital photography course taught by Marc Levoy, covering how digital cameras capture and process images, including optics, sensors, and computational techniques like HDR. The lectures are published on YouTube.
One commenter calls Levoy's Stanford lectures a more serious introduction to digital photography than a short HDR video, after learning how cameras work as a physicist.
Science & Engineeringintermediatefreevideo lectures#digital photography#computational photography#hdr#levoy#optics
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20062026
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 . 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY... . 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).