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iPhone XS Users Complain About Skin-Smoothing Selfie Camera
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Just software, they're applying too much noise reduction on the image. If it was an hardware problem you'd look the same on a FaceTime call.
I'd like a switch for this beautifier filter, I'd leave it off as I prefer more details but I can see it can appeal to some customers.
virtual cosmetics for the virtual world.
would be nice if ios adds a front camera option for lipstick, along with choice of color, and likewise for some eyeliner/eyeshadow option. light vs heavy makeup selectable through a slider.
no need to wear makeup anymore if all one is doing is a video chat or selfie! the savings in makeup alone would allow them to price the next iphone at $2000.
Next up, virtual haircut, virtual shave, virtual wardrobe, ...
would be nice if ios adds a front camera option for lipstick, along with choice of color, and likewise for some eyeliner/eyeshadow option. light vs heavy makeup selectable through a slider.
no need to wear makeup anymore if all one is doing is a video chat or selfie! the savings in makeup alone would allow them to price the next iphone at $2000.
Next up, virtual haircut, virtual shave, virtual wardrobe, ...
Ding ding ding. We have a compelling argument here folks.
Although personally I tend to use "Face" cameras for getting a look into hard to reach spaces, like behind desks or under furniture. So having a "smoothing" effect like this would be externally annoying when I'm trying to resolve as much detail as possible.
--> Now a further question is if this "beauty" smoothing is applied in 3rd Party Photo Apps that call Apple's camera APIs or if its just in Apple's Camera App?
Because loss of details is a bad thing.
How is it a non issue, if people have problems with it? Believe it or not, some people actually want to have a picutre of themselves like they are, and not like they just applied a snapchat filter.
Samsung has had this now since the Note 5. I think in European regions you could turn this "Beauty mode" off for the front facing camera but in North America you were stuck with it. Mildy annoying I guess, but the pinnacle of first world problems.
Haha the Irony, this is what we complain about now about apple, prices of phones other stuff.
It was the same way back when only with software lol.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/no-more-iphoto-or-imovie-downloads.53980/page-11
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It was the same way back when only with software lol.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/no-more-iphoto-or-imovie-downloads.53980/page-11
t
Should be optional. Not everyone may want smoothing. All pictures, front or rear facing, should be as natural as possible prior to filtering or editing.
Over the course of the last week, the front-facing camera in the iPhone XS and XS Max has been receiving a lot of attention because the selfies captured on the new devices are drastically different from those captured with the iPhone X or earlier iPhone models.
In a MacRumors forum thread and on Reddit, Apple has been accused of using a skin-smoothing feature or a "beauty filter" for prettier selfies from the front-facing camera. The effect was demoed by a Reddit user in the image below:
We covered the issue in our recent iPhone XS Max vs. iPhone X camera comparison, where we did see the smoothing effect, but the front-facing camera's performance has garnered so much attention since then that we wanted to more prominently highlight the problem.
When taking a selfie in a situation where lighting is less than ideal, such as indoors or outdoors in areas with lower lighting, the iPhone XS Max appears to be applying a drastic smoothing effect that can hide freckles, blemishes, and other issues.
In full outdoor lighting the problem is less apparent, which has led to speculation that the skin smoothing is actually a result of some heavy-handed noise reduction techniques.
You can test the new camera yourself with an iPhone XS or XS Max and an older iPhone like an iPhone X model by taking selfies indoors and outdoors and comparing the differences between the two. In almost all cases where the lighting is low or uneven, photos captured with an iPhone XS Max look dramatically different.
It makes sense that we'd see differences between the iPhone XS and say, an iPhone 8 because the front-facing cameras are different, but as far as we know, the iPhone X and XS are using the same 7-megapixel front-facing camera. Apple detailed several changes to the rear-facing camera in the iPhone XS models, but beyond a new Neural Engine, there were no announced changes to the TrueDepth camera system.
Because the camera is the same, Apple is doing something different with the way photos are processed after being captured, which could be related to the new HDR features that have been implemented. Apple has a new A12 chip and next-generation Neural Engine that are aiding in photo processing to enable a Smart HDR feature that applies to both the rear and front-facing cameras.
Turning off HDR does not remove the smoothing effect, nor does tweaking any other camera setting, so if the ultra skin smoothing is a result of something like unintentional excessive noise reduction, it needs to be tweaked on Apple's end through a software update. YouTuber Unbox Therapy recently demoed the issue with a series of selfies.
While it's mostly the front-facing camera that's been under scrutiny, this is a problem that affects both the front-facing and rear-facing cameras and it's not entirely limited to skin. Excessive smoothing can be seen affecting other images as well.
There has been speculation that Apple intentionally implemented the skin smoothing feature to mimic the beauty mode that's popular in Asia and common on some other smartphones, but it's not clear if that was Apple's intention.
Many MacRumors readers and Reddit users have reported the issue to Apple, and given that this issue has received so much attention, we may see front-facing camera tweaks in a future iOS update.
Article Link: iPhone XS Users Complain About Skin-Smoothing Selfie Camera
Has anyone tried turning off "HDR"?
I think it's mostly happening in high contrast scenes. All you need do to see this is open up the camera on a sunny day and watch the sky turn from blown out to a vivid blue. It works best if you point it at you face and directly up to the sky. It's almost like a sky replacement filter. I suspect apple is doing all kinds of AI and multi-exposure layering tricks to keep up with googles efforts but it looks super weird in many cases. My skin looks weird and the sky is like an LCD trip as it flicks back and forth from white to super blue! I hope apple offers some options as this ISN'T limited to just faces at all!
If this was some kind of ‘beauty’ filter you wouldn’t be seeing it on other images, unless you want to claim that Apple created the filter and F’d it so it can’t actually tell what’s a face so it’s accidentally ruining other photos
But the F’d up notion fails when you consider that this is supposedly on the front facing camera taking selfies and only noted on the phones that have Face ID so yeah it knows what’s a face and what’s not
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There are already 3rd party apps that try to do this. You can bet those companies are already trying to rework their apps to use these new cameras to do it even better