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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

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'.

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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.

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