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Comment by itg | Hacker News Reader

The Verge also mentioned that Apple goes overboard when it comes to noise reduction lately with their phones. It becomes really obvious when you compare an iPhone 13 with say a Pixel phone and there have been many complaints about it. Instead it looks like they continued to double down with it on the iPhone 14. It's a shame since they have such good hardware and ruin the pics with their photo processing pipeline.

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Is that why my wife has been complaining all her pictures make her look like she has a smooth/filter-applied face? She just switched from Android to Iphone 13. I tried playing around with the settings but couldn't make it look 'normal'.

It's certainly a part of it. A comment I left 4 months ago[0]:

"After watching far too many videos comparing the iPhone 13 Pro Max, Samsung S22 Ultra, and Pixel 6 Pro, I decided against the iPhone because of the automatic skin smoothing.[1]

The iPhone 13 Pro Max removed wrinkles, sun spots, moles, hair, etc to the point where the results looked like overprocessed, manually edited photos. This wasn't subtle -- the reviewers commented on it as well.[...]"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30754912

[1] A responder in that thread took issue with my calling this skin smoothing. Whether this is intentional skin smoothing or overly aggressive noise reduction, the impact on the image is noticeable.

They probably run a bilateral filter [0] to get rid of sensor noise, but the settings are way too aggressive. Bilateral filters aren't there to explicitly smooth out skin, but they do this very well by being edge preserving and noise removing.

0: https://answers.opencv.org/question/557/face-lifting-on-ios/...

The article actually offers a solution that you can try:

> I do feel many of the images I’ve shot are a bit too processed and/or over-sharpened. When this happens, I’ve been bringing the ProRAW files into Lightroom CC and adjusting the “Apple ProRAW” profile slider to the left to reduce the HDR/sharp look if it’s too much for me.

Now you have to explain what exactly ProRAW files are, how to import them to Lightroom, and how to find the right slider to reduce that effect. What happened to the It Just Works™ simplicity?

Do you really think that the intersection of folks who are going to notice that images they've shot are over-processed/sharpened and folks who know how to get ProRAW files into Lightroom isn't a circle?

Not necessarily. Mostly. But people are sensitively to the result (too smooth) without knowing how to. Now you have. Solution some basic idea like how to access raw (specific apps or a setting in iphone) and which stage to turn to the left (camera raw I presume).

Please. Do not be too harsh.

I've noticed the pictures from my iPhone look awful compared to my old pixel, and I know nothing about photo editing and there's zero chance I'd be willing to manually edit photos when the pixel is point-and-shoot

ha, so true, I often get so disappointed because my wife comes out looking like a wax model or something in many of our photos. It's not all the time but I wish I knew in advance or had some signal that filtering was being applied so I could at least react and change the settings or the lighting or something. Some kind of AR overlay would be nice, or even an after the fact overlay in the info settings like how you can view scanned text on an image, etc.

There is no setting to disable this (not an iPhone user)?

If she's using a third party camera app, it has completely different processing from the official app.

…And vice versa, so either way it's a possible fix.

You can shoot RAW and skip all the processing if you think it ruins the picture

Isn't that with 3rd party apps only?

No. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/take-apple-proraw-pho...

ProRAW doesn't disable image processing, in fact it even says as much in the link you provided.

> Apple ProRAW combines the information of a standard RAW format along with iPhone image processing to offer additional creative control when you make adjustments to exposure, color, and white balance.

ProRAW is regular DNG raw files. In the DNG format you can store metadata like tonemapping masks etc but those are non destructive adjustments, it’s like a layer on top of the raw data. You can open the ProRAW files on any app that reads RAW files and undo any processing without loss of information and do your own processing.

I still think has denoise, and sharpening added as well as some magic from the other camera sensors. I would like to see a true raw from a single sensor.

You can get that with a third party app like Halide.

They are DNG files, but I don't think they're truly raw like one might expect from other cameras[1]. I just downloaded the DNG posted in the article and took a look in Photoshop with all post-processing turned off. Definitely looks a bit processed in some of the background details, but I could be wrong.

Specifically, the out-of-focus shadow details look like a smoothing or denoising algorithm has been applied. Maybe it's just something about the optics Apple is using (e.g. different lenses can have distinct characteristics in bokeh, softening, color, distortion, etc) vs other dedicated cameras, but it's something I see in almost all photos coming from an iPhone.

[1] https://kirkville.com/apples-new-proraw-photo-format-is-neit...

are they regular DNG files, or linear DNG files? I remember Apple explicitly mentioning linear DNG, which means they at least have demosaicked the image, probably a lot more

You are right that they are demosaiced raw files but that’s about it

> Instead, ProRAW stores results of computational photography right inside the RAW. This is another reason they need to store demosaiced data, as these algorithms operate on color, not RAW data. Once you demosaic, there’s no going back. I mean, what would you even call that, remosaic?

> Smart HDR does this in the least destructive way. Apple worked with Adobe to introduce a new type of tag into the DNG standard, called a “Profile Gain Table Map.” This data gives your editor everything it needs to know to tone map your photo image and end up with results identical to the first party camera. Because it’s separate data, you can turn down its strength, or turn it off completely.

source https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/

Don’t you still need a 3rd party to dial back the smoothing applied by Apple? This was mentioned in the article.

this confirms all the lousy bizarre looking photos I create at times. I suspected possibly some strange post processing was going on but couldn't confirm it. I assumed I was driving the phone in awkward lighting or some other condition where the post processing salvaged my photo from a blurry mess, but there's no way to tell because like others identified there's no way to turn it off.

I remember telling someone about this great image sensor on the old OnePlus One a friend gave me years outside of its lifecycle and how it takes pretty amazing photos. I wonder if it was just a function of no image processing, and my steady hand from years of photography and breath-holding practice to manually stabilize my photos.

It’s possible it’s an enhancement for the masses where a smill minority of experienced photographers are just pooped on. Apple is known to shove a decision in your face at times only to add a setting later to disable that. I still accidentally enable live photos by accident and I wish I could remove that altogether in the settings. Im still on the old SE and luckily photos aren’t post processed

All modern smartphones use computational photography to enhance and process your images. The sensor is too small and the lens just not good enough to not do it.

It's not just noise reduction but the sharpening of the photos is really crazy. I took a picture of my carpet and it looks nothing like it does in person or up close. Like my carpet is just fuzzy and bland colored, not deep grand canyon crevasses with lots of contrast that show in the iPhone photo.

Cameras don't know how much brightness or contrast something is supposed to have; if you take a picture with only the carpet in frame, on auto AWB and everything else, it's going to be an overly contrasty picture lit as if it's the noontime sun.

That's when you have to switch to something with manual controls.

I've been noticing this issue with many smartphones lately, I've been looking at smartphone camera reviews a bunch and none of them look particularly good.

Because space is at a premium and a nice large camera is a hard tradeoff against just some extra processing algorithms.

Pixel 6 photos are dramatically over processed. You can shoot RAW on them too, but that looks even worse.

no, iPhone is far more overprocessed. see dpreview or any other legitimate camera review site. iPhone cameras/software are just lackluster compared to the competition. things like HDR on iPhone have been bad for years.

The Pixel 6 camera is still terrible, and unless you want to edit every single picture you take, the colors are incredibly unrealistic. From what I've seen online, iPhone is not nearly as bad

this is patently false. look at the Twitter user that compares pictures to SLR shots of what he sees. pixels are always the most color accurate

They have been doing this since iPhone X. Somewhere along the line "Computational Photography" took over. And the old iPhone where they value true to life photo style turns to HDR high contrast smooth looking Instagram photos.

I remember the old Apple guards used to trash the Samsung / Android photo as being unrealistic. How the tide has turned.

The new Apple resembles very little of the old Apple.

I’ve noticed the same. New iPhones would always look better in the past up until the iPhone 8/X.

I find that the camera of iPhone 8/X looks better than that of iPhone 7. But iPhone XS looks worse to me due to overprocessing, and every iteration after processes more. :(

I just really like the night mode that computational photography brings in, but in every other area it’s a poison pill we’re forced to swallow.

I noticed extreme DNR as far back as the iPhone5. There isn’t really anything they can do about it, the camera sensor is tiny

This is quite visible on the grassy ridge picture, the trail looks smudged over.

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