CS 178 Digital Photography

This course takes a deep look at techniques that optimize digital photography tools. It covers exposure, angles, lighting, chromaticity and more. Students who complete this course will be equipped to take high-quality photographs in a wide range of settings.

( 0 Reviews )

Created by: Marc Levoy

Produced in 2016

Quality Score

Content Quality

Video Quality

Qualified Instructor

Course Pace

Course Depth & Coverage

Overall Score : 0 / 100

Live Chat with CourseDuck's Co-Founder for Help

Need help deciding on a photography course? Or looking for more detail on Marc Levoy's CS 178 Digital Photography? Feel free to chat below.

Join CourseDuck's Online Learning Discord Community

Course Description

photography Awards Best Free Course

An introduction to the scientific, artistic, and computing aspects of digital photography. Topics include lenses and optics, light and sensors, optical effects in nature, perspective and depth of field, sampling and noise, the camera as a computing platform, image processing and editing, and computational photography. We will also survey the history of photography, look at the work of famous photographers, and talk about composing strong photographs.

This course is based on CS 178 (Digital Photography), which I taught at Stanford from 2009 through 2014. I revised and taught the course again at Google in Spring of 2016, and these web pages are from the Google version. The course consists of 18 lectures. The topics, with dates, are given in the course schedule. The lectures were delivered live on Google's Mountain View campus, broadcast live to Google offices around the world, and recorded for later playback. The videos linked into these web pages are from those recordings, edited slightly to remove discussion of Google internal projects. Keynote slides from these lectures were converted to PDF files and linked into the schedule after each lecture.

I am making these materials freely available, but some of the photographs included in the lectures are individually copyrighted. It should be fine for teachers to re-use this material under fair use, but other uses may be protected. If you re-use the material in substantially the same form it is given here, I would appreciate an acknowledgement.

Beginner Level

Time: 22h

Pros

Cons

- Teaches timeless techniques to capturing great photographs.
- Assignments give students real-world practice at taking the pictures.
- The tapestry of knowledge allows students to explore their own ideas in advancing their photography skills.
- Course has not been changed since it was designed in 2016. While some concepts are universal, photographic technology is progressing quickly.
- Course seriously neglects photographic software, considering its a digital class.
- Course spends time on equipment that is in some cases dated.

Instructor Details

Marc Levoy

0.0 Rating
0 Reviews

Marc Levoy is the VMware Founders Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus) at Stanford University and until 2021 a Distinguished Engineer in Google Research. In previous lives he worked on computer-assisted cartoon animation (1970s), volume rendering (1980s), 3D scanning (1990s), light field imaging (2000s), and computational photography (2010s). At Stanford he taught computer graphics, digital photography, and the science of art. At Google he launched Street View, co-designed the library book scanner, and led the Google Research team that created HDR+, Portrait Mode, and Night Sight for Pixel smartphones. Awards: Cornell University Charles Goodwin Sands Medal for best undergraduate thesis (1976), National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator (1991), ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (1996), ACM Fellow (2007). His Google team's software for Pixel phones won DP Review Innovation of the Year (2017 and 2018) and Smartphone Camera of the Year (2019), Mobile World Congress Disruptive Device Innovation Award (2019), and other awards.