This is an accurate assessment IMHO. And the problem goes beyond contrast and shadow adjustments. On a few occasions, I've had recent iPhones blend the bodies of two people in a group photo into single, weirdly fused 'body blob'. Which is a shame, because iPhones have such amazingly good hardware. Apple, please fix this!
You can’t not post-process a photo, because you can’t use/view the RAW file captured by the sensor, or better, only the company who build the RAW/DAC conversion can issue the “codec” to open the RAW file.
The issue is “how many interpolations/adjustments are these companies making when converting the RAW to an image file?” Too much according to the article.
I think it's important to distinguish between signal processing techniques like debayering, auto-leveling etc and "we're using machine learning to identify humans in a picture and adjust their contrast". We can have the former without the latter, they're not all just "post-processing".
It seems like an oversimplification to imply all processing exists on a gradient with no significant lines we can draw between one type and another. E.g. content identification has a pretty clear qualitative difference from whatever "dumb" mappings do to get from RAW to values in some color space. One isn't just "more processing" and the other "less processing", colloquially.
I'm a little shocked that you can't turn "Smart HDR" and these other enhancements off. I would have assumed it was a toggle, so getting to the end of the article and seeing "Apple should let us turn it off" in reference to photo-ruining enhancements is wild to me - I've always considered Apple the brand you go to if you want a phone with a good camera but it sounds like that may not be true anymore if they stick to this?
It seems that not all iPhones do have this setting available. Not sure if this is related with the availability of RAW images, which is only supported on iPhone 14 Pro.
I may have missed something and had the impression that this was a "new" feature for iPhone 14 Pro only. But as the linked support documents mention, it is available on iPhone 12 Pro and later Pro models since iOS 14.3.
Both those switches were removed between iPhone 12 and 13 models. Which is sad, because they’d go a long way to avoid the issues described in the article.
Why is Apple, the worlds richest and most valuable company, so bad at A.I? Everything, from awful keyboard predictions/autocorrect to poor computational photography. Is it because Tim Cook doesn’t provide enough funding to empower the A.I. divisions?
I would challenge the assertion that they’re so bad at computational photography, over processing notwithstanding. They’ve been at the forefront of computational photography for some time, and issues notwithstanding, the iPhone cameras do spit out some excellent results at times. I just want more control of that processing pipeline.
As for the overarching reasons for poor AI implementations in their other product lines, my pet theory is that Apple’s pace of progress is what you get when constrained by their stated privacy goals.
I have little doubt that they’d be at the top of this game if they leveraged user data the way Google/Meta do.
Setting aside that Apple is not a product, tradeoffs are the name of the game regardless of vendor.
I use apps like Halide to fill in the gaps in the stock camera app, and shoot with a standalone camera when I want full creative control.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a wishlist.
The funny part is that the primary theme of my comment is about the control Apple gives you over your data - control you do not have when picking other products - and arguable a more important thing to allow me to control.
Nitpicks about sentence structure aside (sorry, that was needlessly snarky on my part), that wasn't really the point of my comment.
I've decided that Apple products are, indeed, for me. Wishing they would provide certain features doesn't change that.
Apple has shown repeatedly that they are continuing to invest in camera controls. The "RAW" button, support for ProRes, etc. are a few examples of this. Giving "creators" access to more creative modes in the camera is hardly an idea that is so opposite Apple's norms to imagine they might include it someday, or to conclude that I should abandon the ecosystem because they don't have it today.
You have misaligned expectations, whole Apple approach since forever to anything is to dumb things down so few power users are unhappy but rest doesn't care and appreciates lack of choices, or more like hopes best possible choices are done for them because they paid premium. Which sometimes works OK, sometimes less so.
I mean underlying a lot of Apple stuff is linux. Do you feel you have linux device and its might and endless configurability when working with iphone? My wife can't force that f!@#!@ device to allow her pattern unlock of her phone without losing warranty, Apple rather prefers her having no safety at all (since face ID simply doesn't work for her line of work, and typing minimum 6 digits code 100x a day is extremely annoying... no other choices on 13 mini).
Which expectations would those be and how are they misaligned? I have no allusions about what using Apple products entail. That doesn't mean I can't want things.
But my comment was more about the state of AI than anything.
also, the minimum is actually 4 digits. you can tap "passcode options" when setting/changing passcode. not sure how much better that would be though. i generally like face id but i do hope they add in-display touch id sometime.
Siri is incredibly stupid (ChatGPT also is, but at least it has a whole order of magnitude better at understanding; unlike Siri, which randomly fails at the most basic requests to the extent it's just about useful for "Hey Siri, turn bedroom lights off" - but even that doesn't always work as expected), and while they don't have photo retouching AI, Dall-E is quite renown in for working with images, so surely if they'd dabbled in that space they would be successful.
The autocorrect is impressively awful. I’d much prefer a simple autocorrect over what they have now, which will “fix” correctly spelled words with something that doesn’t even make sense. I’ve had a few times where it learns something from a typo I made a few times and it simply would not unlearn it without a complete reset of the keyboard.
One of the most confusing examples I have of the terrible autocorrect is that anytime I wrote “20”, it would always get replaced with “2.0” and “50” would always get replaced with “5-0”. I finally realized it was because I had two apps on my phone, one which had “2.0” in the name and the other “5-0”. Once I deleted those apps, it stopped replacing those numbers. It’s really baffling to me their autocorrect would work that way.
Similarly, I’ve resorted to using a 3rd party camera app to avoid the occasional picture coming out looking like an oil painting. I’ve been using halide mark ii, which works quite well, although I can’t recommend it anymore due to their new business model being a very pricey subscription. Luckily I got grandfathered in, so the app still works for me.
The Apple keyboard is junk, especially if you use it in swiping mode.
Swype on Android (and briefly on iOS) - RIP - was simply better in every imaginable way, but whoever bought it just buried it. Far better prediction (once they fixed the bug that interpreted a common swipe as "nee", which I almost never use, instead of "me", which I use constantly) and a host of useful features. Need to capitalize a word? Just Swype above the keyboard once during the motion. Need a double letter? Squiggle a bit on that letter as you move through the word. Swype-X, C, V for cut, copy, and paste. Swype-spacebar to bring up an editing keyboard that offered single-character cursor movement. Want to curse? Feel free, it won't forget it with the next version upgrade. Keyboard learned a typo? Delete it from your user dictionary and it won't appear anymore.
That was a startup. Apple could buy out any patents they had with pocket change. But they didn't, and I can't figure out why.
Especially frustrating is the slow animation on the autocorrect suggestions. It significantly slows my typing speed and annoys me every time I have to use it and there's no way to turn it off.
This alone pushes me towards Android phones since the keyboard experience there is in a completely different class.
I recently visited an art gallery, where during a tour of the facility the owner shared that he has art appraisal clients worldwide, with whom he works remotely. I asked, "So do you send a photographer to capture high quality images of the artwork?" He simply took out his phone and shared that smartphone images have gotten so good that it's the only equipment they need for the appraisal. Secretly, I was aghast that the professional appraisal of works worth tens of thousands of dollars might rely on a device that opaquely alters raw images. I didn't say anything, but I left hoping that not all art appraisal rested on post-processed smartphone images.
Every camera and software pipeline for a photograph alters the raw images. You're just more aware of it.
The iPhone can shoot raw and avoid these issues, it's how I use mine. The complaints people would have if the iPhone didn't post-process for the average consumer... Every camera phone I've ever used has horrible defaults for JPG processing -- avoid it by shooting raw and using something like Darkroom to finesse.
> Every camera and software pipeline for a photograph alters the raw images. You're just more aware of it.
No, you use a half decent professional camera and you can even opt for RAW format, the only processing your getting is the averaging algorithm for your exposure and ISO settings. Even without that all you are getting is some JPG compression, not half baked ML trying to move people's faces around, that's bonkers. Also pretty sure you are not getting RAW on any phone unless you are running some very custom OS/software, even then seems pretty pointless considering how noisy it's going to be.
Sorry, your no is a little confident -- and you're entirely wrong. A camera generating a RAW file for you is doing much more than just sending you the data from the binned pixels. Where you want to step in on that line determines how much control you have.
It's the reason some still pick RED vs Alexa. Your RAW File & Colour Science aren't just up to you, they're carefully mastered with an ODT -- On Device Transform.
Also, let's see how Nikon go in the near future with Snapdragon.
My Sigma FP isn’t using a deep learning model to enhance the image like an iPhone is (in iPhones case, deep field has added faces to photos, and all sort of other crazy stuff.)
It’s dishonest to try compare color profiles with AI image manipulation .
What is your point? are you merely trying to argue your original comment was somehow correct based on a technicality?
Sure I forgot about colour correction, congrats... It's pretty absurd to argue uniform pixel data manipulation for colour processing is somehow comparable to ML based full image manipulation. One is for the purpose of trying to improve accuracy, the other is doing the exact opposite.
I appreciate technically accurate, we all do that's why were here - I might suggest a little more context awareness though, lest you miss the point. Tangents are also fun, just not like this:
> and you're entirely wrong
But i'm not perfect either: I was being pushy in the tone of my previous comments.. I was focused on the high level differences but too impatient in my delivery - Had I been more nuanced and respectful you might have been more receptive to it, sorry.
> Secretly, I was aghast that the professional appraisal of works worth tens of thousands of dollars might rely on a device that opaquely alters raw images.
I'm not sure if you mean "raw" in RAW sense, but FWIW this critique applies to Smart HDR specifically. If you shoot and share RAW images with an iPhone Smart HDR is not used, and you will reliably see something closely resembling reality.¹ I shoot everything in RAW, trained by the regret of not doing this for special shots earlier in my life.
¹ "You can, of course, take a RAW photo using apps like Halide (it’s worth noting that ProRAW photos are still post-processed), but then you’ll have a much larger image file just to get a more natural result."
Any camera or photo only gives you a version of reality. Exposure, white balance, 35mm vs 50mm vs 120mm, etc., can all affect the image subtly. So even with "pro tools", your RAW images are getting doctored by photographer choices.
To some degree there is no such thing as the true image. However many devices, especially some smartphones are really going past "representing reality" and into enhancing what the viewer wants.
This is really my point. I'm not arguing that the appraiser should only look at the artwork with their own eyes. Rather, the degree to which phones are enhancing photos is not transparent to the average end user and therefore is risky to use in an application that relies on the details of an image being scrutinized.
Just use a third party camera app and it’s available on any iPhone.
I promise all dedicated cameras are also doing (almost all of) this kind of processing though. It’s needed to develop raw images at all. The specific tuning is just up to taste.
Yeah to extend your point, this struggle with how to even define objectivity has been present at the core of science and journalism throughout modernity.
The drawings in old field guides are curated to a supposed "idealized" form based on their use case (i.e., to be recognized in the wild by other researchers). Those specific idealized versions don't actually exist, though.
There was a famous instance of a ww1 phototographer (dont remember his name) who would allegedly move dead bodies around in his shots to better capture what he thought was the emotional reality through the resulting image rather than what the literal scene was.
We can have all the computerized scanning of the universe at our disposal but ultimately there's always the analog hole of our judgement in its interpretation
You're also missing gp's point. The photographer should be in control of interpretation, because she knows the intended use of the photo. Phones assume everything is a selfie.
The idea that "reality is the goal" is the product of not bothering to think at all. Choosing what to make an image of, and framing the image, will always be in service of a story or "emotional reality". It always was, from cave-wall paintings onwards.
To a very real extent, the lighting and its spectra wherein the photo was taken, for example, has far more an effect on the perception of the photo subject than any default post-processing.
Until you start doing AI magic to mess around with exactly that.
I was driving down the 99 towards Seattle last week, and the foggy sky took on this wonderful warm glow. But my phone did what it always does with the sky: change the color balance of the sky so that it looks blue. I wish it'd just left it alone.
Picking a white point is not "AI", no matter what the marketing will have you believe! The camera simply takes the average grey value grabs a temperature from it.
You can likely stick your photograph into some basic editing software and set your own white balance. I even think the built-in Windows photo viewer can do WB adjustment these days
Even worse, our perception of the image is deeply colored by the visual cortex and bio-optics of our eyes, all of which can vary person to person. None of us will ever see anything the way it “really is.”
> So even with "pro tools", your RAW images are getting doctored by photographer choices.
Exactly the point and exactly what is needed. Photographer choices, not camera choices. A pro[1] photographer knows what to do for different subjects, light, and goals, but phone software has no clue. Every image is a selfie for instagram.
1. Or an amateur who bothers to learn and experiment.
Anecdotally, this seems to line up with the migration from iPhone 11 -> 12. I notice that in photos of anything including the sun, it would throw off the sensor/software stack. The even funnier/frustrating thing is that, because the HDR post-processing is done after when the photo is taken usually the end result is much different than what you see in the viewfinder.
That's not what MKBHD said in the video at all. He said that Apple has recently bumped the megapixels of their camera system, and that probably they haven't adjusted their post-processing pipeline to account for that. e.g. they need to tone it down a bit because now they actually do have more details/photons to work with.
It seems like the author of this article is trying to use MKBHD's cachet to help champion his own point ("I don't like this AI post-processing much at all") which I doubt is one Marques would agree with, given that the phone which won his blind test is one that does just as much (if not more) post-processing than the iPhone, the Pixel 6A.
Totally agree, nothing in the video supports the assertion that "Apple should give users the option to take natural photos." I would go as far as to say the video essentially says the idea that there is such thing as "natural photos" is not an objective thing, that ultimately every company has to make choices on lighting/contrast/wb/sharpness/etc, and "natural" is a matter of taste.
Indeed. If you read between the lines, there are some hints that internal design / engineering issues + supply chain snafus left Apple with a mismatch between their new camera system and the SoC that supports it.
To me, the clearest signal of this is what Halide can and can’t do with the new Pro sensor. In ideal lighting, the Halide-processed 48MP JPEG shots look insanely good, with strand-of-hair-level detail. It’s hard to imagine Apple wouldn’t have wanted to show off the ability for ordinary users to take these shots. But capture speed is several seconds, and if conditions aren’t ideal, even that isn’t enough to get a clean shot.
Like MKBHD said about Google & the Pixel: Apple needs a generation or two for computation to be optimized for the capabilities of their new sensor.
I have the same problem with the Google pixel phone, my photos are post-processed to such a degree that I don't find them pleasing, especially portraits. Fortunately, I can choose to get the RAW files
True - however I have found that even the RAW files aren't quite as raw as I'd like them to be, especially in terms of dynamic range. Best bet so far has been too use Open Camera if I feel like I'll want to be doing manual edits. Guess I'm a bit spoiled coming from a Sony Xperia with a camera that's great at being rather true to life, but the processing GCam does has ruined a whole bunch of photos for me.
It blends multiple shots for better dynamic range, but doesn’t do any heavy processing. If you want a pure single exposure RAW file you can get that using third party apps such as Halide.
It used to be that iPhones made great, tasteful photos by default. That was why people bought them.
If I wanted to spend time processing every snapshot I take with my phone, I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T and get pictures that are much better than anything the phone can do.
> I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T
That’s what I’m actually doing. My Pixel 3 died suddenly in November 2021. Since it was an emergency, I bought a cheap phone with a horrible camera, intending to upgrade it quickly and taking photos with my X100T in the meantime. A year later and I’m still using that setup. The camera is portable enough to take it everywhere, the processing presets are good enough for me, and I have the RAW files available just in case. I’m probably in the minority of people who would do something like this, but I’m pretty happy so far.
I have Sony A7III and basically learned how to take pictures so that jpg files out of the camera looks good. I shoot jpg + RAW but I almost never touch RAW files. And people are really surprised when I'm telling them that (especially photographers). I like taking pictures, not editing them. It's definitely minority of people and I heard from many new photographers I meet that I'm wasting my camera abilities. Almost as if I'm not editing pictured from camera then I'm not "real" photographer. Thankfully I don't care anymore about it and I'm happy with my pictures (and my family, friends and other photographers that got used to me :P).
> It used to be that iPhones made great, tasteful photos by default. That was why people bought them.
I think most people buy iPhones because it's a status symbol or because it's what they are accustomed to. Certainly not because of feature A or B, and most definitely not if that feature is "tasteful photos", whatever that means (whose taste?).
But there is a small vocal minority which cares about picture quality, that is true. Totally irrelevant to apple's bottom line though.
I work in IT. I manage our mobile devices, and I was shocked to recently find out that iPads (and I assume iPhones), have no option to choose the resolution of the resulting pictures.
Why is Apple like this? I dont always need a 9 MB or whatever photo size, it would be nice to be able to take lower res images to save space.
I discovered this issue just last month trying to take a good photo of my partner sat next to our Christmas tree. No matter what I did, the iPhone kept brightening the image and losing the darkened look I was going for. Even after disabling every "smart" feature I could, it still uniformly brightened everything and reduced the contrast.
What was perhaps the most infuriating thing was that what I was seeing in the viewfinder preview looked great. I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.
I had a right laugh with this one. Taking sweet shots in the moonlight, that sort of ethereal white blue glow over everything.
Phone took 5 seconds or so to take each picture and it came out looking like it was just daylight. The only way you could tell I took it at night was the creation time of the file. The photo had things visible that I couldn't even see with my naked eye!
Technologically impressive, sure. What I was taking a picture of? Not at all.
I would assume you would turn it off if you knew so you could take the type of night photo you wanted, but this feature can be disabled https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211306.
Cameras don’t know what time of day it is and can’t see in the dark like we can. Usually you want night mode on, because the alternative isn’t “nice dark picture”, it’s “you can’t see anything”.
If you want to reproduce a complicated scene like that, use a full manual app like Halide and then edit the raw back to what you remember. Or get an a7s.
On the other hand the iphone knows what time it is, your location, the location of the moon, the weather - it could probably guess if you're outside or inside - so it seems like a bit of a waste it can't do a better job at anticipating the scene...
Indeed that's true. But since people already complain that it does too much post processing, it seems like a dangerous road to try and do even more of it.
Cameras do know if you're inside or outside though - at least, they know if you're shooting a landscape and if the scene is lit by natural or artificial light. That matters for boring but important things like auto white balance / auto ISO / if it should focus to infinity.
Well, you can - record a video instead and press the button that takes a photo during video. It looks terrible, so it's better to switch to a 3rd party camera app instead. I think the main use case for those is women using beauty filters though.
You can get real single shot RAW files very easily using third party apps like Halide. I usually prefer the results of ProRAW, though (which doesn’t include beauty filters or anything like that).
I don't know about "very easily," and chances are I don't want to deal with RAW or ProRAW or whatever. I'm fine with plain old .JPG most of the time. But selectively altering the appearance of subjects in an unavoidable manner is beyond the line that almost any photographer I've ever known will draw.
If I can't turn that off, then the OEM camera app is simply broken. Telling me to spend money on a third-party app is just carrying water for two corporations that aren't paying you. Don't do that, at least not for free.
>Telling me to spend money on a third-party app is just carrying water for two corporations that aren't paying you
The built in camera app has to cater to a lot of different kinds of user. I, like you, would be happy if it offered more controls, but this might make it less usable for the majority. The cost of one of these third party apps is pretty trivial compared to the cost of a new iPhone (or a 'real' camera), so it doesn't bother me overly – but you can obviously spend your money how you wish.
Usually what I see in the preview on my damn screen is more or less exactly what I want captured unless I muck with the exposure settings. More often than not, iphone gets clever and takes a completely different picture.
I’ve downloaded the app that the Moment lens folks put out, which lets you do things like set ISO and shutter speed, etc. Generally I’m suspicious of camera apps because it seems like a low-effort way of getting access to a user’s photo reel and other personal info (oh yah sure we need to constantly track your location to help tag the photos!), but I figure they have a business model (selling lenses) and a reputation so maybe they aren’t so creepy.
OTOH I don’t really have anything interesting on my phone in the first place, so it all really is a bit academic to me.
Yeah, I’m just generally suspicious of these kinds of apps. I put them in the category of free apps that I don’t understand the business model of. While it is possible to use the privacy features of the phone to limit the app’s access, I don’t really want to be running apps where I think I need to do that, if I can avoid it. I’m sure lots of them are fine, but I’m not able to distinguish between the fine and not-fine ones.
On my S21 Ultra the viewfinder will sometimes show a brightened image, to what I would prefer.
A long hold on the focus point brings up an exposure slider, which lets you easily darken the image. It works really well, but the Samsung doesn't quite have the "flatten everything" feature that Marques talked about though (https://youtu.be/88kd9tVwkH8 - recommend watching this).
Also the stronger AI enhancements (auto scene detect) can be turned off with a single toggle; it's useful having the control.
And if that's not enough, there's the Pro mode - everything can be made manual.
I'm ashamed to say I'm generally getting better photos with my S21U than my old full frame D70s, with decent fixed lenses (35+50). Mainly it's down to the sensor; I often go for the hand held, low light kind of look, and the Samsung results are more often than not simply excellent.
I intend to get a mirrorless Nikon Z6II body and a lens adapter this year (my lenses still have decent value), but nonetheless, taking the time to fully explore the tool in your hand is probably one of the best things you can do.
What was perhaps the most infuriating thing was that what I was seeing in the viewfinder preview looked great. I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.
A silly low-res solution would be to screen shot the camera app.
- people who use “proper” cameras and thus have expectations about what a photo should look like
- people who want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene.
The iPhone camera app is configured for the second group, as it probably should be, but as a member of the first group I’d love an opt out button (without having to shoot in raw).
I don't think they're trying to please the first group at all. Iphone pictures come fried to hell, but since that's what people want, that's what we get.
That’s not too bad for the oob default camera app. I think it shows some awareness that how Apple is processing in the “standard” style may not match what everyone wants.
IIUC, Halide and other 3rd party camera apps can largely deliver on further post processing customization of non-raw photos.
Presumably these apps start with a RAW image in capture though and only pipeline it down to some save as some smaller, processed image.
>want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene. //
It seems more about how people wish they perceived the scene. Like, over-saturated and with "beautification" filters; there's a recognition that this is not how the image maker [the person] actually perceives things. It's a dream of reality, a fairy tale.
Honestly, some Facebook photos ... all people on my Facebook are people I know in person, the filters some use are frankly ridiculous; like, I know what you actually look like and it's not a manga cartoon with massive eyes and completely smooth skin.
The problem with Apple has always been about relinquishing control to the user - they have a tunnel vision about finding an "Apple way" of doing something, sticking with it obstinately and not caring about power-users.
I always prefer shooting in highest bitrate and/or lossless, but I'd love to have the option to easily compress the files in-place later in Photos, without having to do some weird export and re-import dance.
Personally I don't care for phone photos, they always suck for me. I use my phone camera to do stuff like send photo of a document when needed, or take a photo of a package as proof it arrived intact or something like that.
The reason is that phones for years been screwing the photos no matter what you do, at one point both me and my dad bought a Motorola phone where they promised it would have an "eco-system" of accessories, with existing ones including more advanced cameras, game controllers and so on. We went to a place full of beautiful animals, took a ton of photos, but when we checked his photos, all of them were horribly screwed, like everything was pink, or even literally sheared, I found out the reason is that when you use the viewfinder, the phone skips some processing, as soon you take the photo, it mandatorily does some processing, in Motorola's case with a very buggy chip that would inevitably ruin your photos. Poking in the photo files it looked like the algorithm was managing to misalign the file in memory before doing the calculations. Something similar to mixing endianess.
This feels like it should be fixable with a firmware update, except this probably was at the time when firmware updates on phones required proprietary equipment and software more often than not.
I learned a long time ago that software cannot overcome the faults of hardware when it comes to image capture. Only try to obscure those faults. Many phones have apertures that are too wide, sensors that are too small, and barrels that are far too shallow. The result is that without extremely long exposures, the image is too dark due to the aperture. Or that without a denoising algorithm like OptiX the image has so much noise that it's like looking at something made in Deluxe Paint on an Apple II. Or that due to the small sensor size a "4K" image is actually eight separate 2K images stitched together and downscaled to obscure artifacting and blurry edges.
The truth is that you cannot put the necessary hardware into a smartphone to take DSLR quality pictures. Not with the current form factor, and especially not if you're trying to be cost effective. They've tried getting around this by selling add-ons that socket into the body, or using three, four, even five cameras, more than one light sensor, and all of this damaging software. But manufacturers are trying to polish a dirt floor. There will always be imperfections simply because the materials weren't made for that level of quality.
As someone who (so very excitedly) upgraded from an iPhone X to an iPhone 14 Pro, I was and still am so disappointed sometimes by how artificial the photos on the new phone looks. I thought it was just me, now I see why it's a more general thing.
I’m in the same boat, also upgraded from the X to 14 Pro just like you. It’s infuriating the amount of alterations it performs without my asking. Also equally infuriating is how buggy the whole camera app has become. Changing lenses uncontrollably, weird glitchy artefacts outside of the main canvas, live photos stutter, the additional “step” it does when showing a photo after it loads which ruins the whole looks. It’s a fall from grace and I don’t understand how Apple thinks it’s acceptable to ship this.
There are some other cases (like if you have your finger over one camera it might switch) but that’s the really noticeable one. You’ll usually regret changing it though.
I recently found and bought https://camerapixels.app/ which I love and it seems (to a hobbyist photographer) to give me a lot of control. The exposure and focus bracketing is really neat and pairs up with Affinity Photo 2 (and I'm sure many others). It has replaced the default camera app for me.
This f’n additional step it does kills me every time. Like the first iteration looks really good and then a fraction of a second later I know it’s going to change it and make it look much worse. :( (God those washed our blown out backgrounds.)
The sensor in the 14 pro is very impressive but at this point I take all my photos with Halide because otherwise it seems like a lot of that capability just goes to waste.
Could you please share your workflow for using it? I tried halide for about a week, but I found it awkward to use and I didn’t really want to keep editing each individual file.
Sure! For most point and shoot situations, I just leave Halide in HEIC mode and treat it just about exactly the same as the camera app. The controls are largely similar - you tap and hold to get an exposure slider, you tap the icon indicating the current lens to switch lenses, etc.
If I want 48 megapixel resolution and/or the added capture detail from ProRAW I'll turn on RAW+HEIC. That gives you a ProRaw you can edit after, as well as an "instant exposure" that basically just converts it to what you'd expect from HEIC mode. There is a tremendous amount of detail captured in the ProRaw shots that is processed away by the default app. As far as I know, you can't actually take 48 megapixel photos in the default camera app.
I seldom ever need to edit an individual file, because even if I'm shooting in 48mpx Halide will cook off an instagram-friendly edited version right away automatically. If I ever do want to tinker with the raw exposure, it's an option. The rest of the UI did take some fiddling to get used to, but I started out switching to Halide whenever I wanted to take a particularly good photo and before long I found myself using Halide for everything, because otherwise I'd be reviewing pictures and realize how much better one could have come out if I hadn't used the default app.
We circled back from replacing everything with our smartphone to realizing that phone cameras don't perform as well as purpose built photography gear.
This was always going to be the case because no matter how good your software is, phone cameras will never have the optics, and probably not the sensors too, of a DSLR camera.
To cover this, manufacturers employ all sorts of clever post processing, which in turn make it so that your final image is different from the preview you're seeing (which is also heavily altered from what the sensor is seeing, probably).
With new tools such as AI introduced into post processing, we are just seeing more artifacts in what has been a fairly extensive process already. You can only push the tiny sensors and lenses so far but every manufacturer still wants the public to perceive their latest release as if a lot of progress has been made.
My argument to people that ask was always that there were things I do (specifically for fast action) that a phone will never be able to do due to physics. This article is just more ammo for me - you can't trust phone manufacturers not to manipulate. Today, Apple, but tomorrow Google, Samsung, etc. Even if you shoot RAW on a camera, there's no guarantee manufacturers won't mess with them somehow in the future.
I don’t know what you meant by messing with a RAW image. At that point it’s baked, and the only that would change is the algorithms that handle the raw file, but everything this article is referring to is already done. Raw camera sensors in phones are terrible and extremely noisy because there are few photons actually making it inside - what’s largely improved over time is the processing of these files. Every company that ships a phone post processes the images otherwise they’d be unusable. I also guarantee that while this make quite things where one manufacturer is worse than another in a specific situation, there will be situations where the opposite is true as well.
I wouldn’t call this “manipulation” however. It suggests some nefarious deed when instead it’s just about balancing color, skin tone, denoising, etc.
95% of phone users will never notice this stuff. They are the same people who were happy with point-n-shoot cameras 20 years ago. They just want focused, clear photos, and image-stabilized video that will maybe be shared on social media and then forgotten.
In my experience, regular users not only notice, but they want more of this sort of thing. They don’t want their photos to be a reflection of reality. They want them to be better.
I was at a family gathering a year or so ago, and my mother was taking pictures with her phone. I noticed that one she took of me and my two siblings was applying a heavy skin smoothing algorithm. I asked for her phone, and discovered that she had “skin smoothing” turned up to 100 on her Android.
I took some comparison photos with it on and off and put it to the group. Everyone but me agreed that the heavily skin-smoothed photos were better. Even the men.
I don’t like the look of excessive skin smoothing either. At the same time, I do think that skin imperfections stand out much more in photos than they do when you’re looking at someone’s face in real life. So a tasteful about of smoothing can actually help to bring the experience of looking at a portrait a bit closer to the real experience of looking at someone’s face (where you are most likely not focusing on the zit on their nose, and the zit is not in sharp focus due to your eye’s small zone of high resolution vision).
At the same time, I do think that skin imperfections stand out much more in photos than they do when you’re looking at someone’s face in real life. So a tasteful about of smoothing can actually help to bring the experience of looking at a portrait a bit closer to the real experience of looking at someone’s face
That's such a dangerous argument, though, because where does it end?
Some audiophiles will tell you that they prefer the 'warm' harmonic distortion imparted by single-ended vacuum tube amplifiers. Psychoacoustic studies back that up to some extent. Does that mean that all first-party music players should apply a DSP transform that makes the output sound like it came through an 80-year-old Western Electric telephone repeater, without the option to allow the listener to turn it off unless they install a third-party app?
Or even worse, and more to the point, does it mean that all first-party recording apps should work that way?
Are you sure 'dangerous' is the right choice of word?
iPhones don't apply particularly heavy skin smoothing even in portrait mode, and don't do it at all if you shoot RAW. Android phones generally have an option to adjust the strength of the feature (or disable it altogether). So the answer to your 'where does it end?' question is straightforward: it ends wherever you the photographer want it to end. Portrait photographers have been using various techniques to soften the skin of their subjects since the dawn of photography.
Creating an accurate and 100% sharp record of all of someone's skin imperfections might be accurate in a forensic sense, but it isn't necessarily accurate to our everyday perceptions of other people's faces. Optical prints from negatives used to be naturally somewhat softer than modern digital images from high resolution sensors. Not every form of photography benefits from extreme sharpness and detail.
I can and do fix it in post. If you want a degree of automation, then there are hundreds of third party skin smoothing apps that will do that for you (with various degrees of control). I can see that it might be useful to have such a feature built in to the camera app, but I think it generally makes sense for Apple to keep the built in camera app fairly minimalist and let third party apps provide more niche features.
I wouldn’t go that far. However it just doesn’t effect EVERY photo in a bad way. At this point users are in the habit of taking lots of pics and throwing out the bad ones. When the software misses it just goes into the trash. But other times the software doesn’t miss and it’s appreciated.
I personally have a nice photo shoot with my partner but everyone noticed that I kinda look like a cardboard cutout in some. the post processing was def not missed by very none technical users.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadThe issue is “how many interpolations/adjustments are these companies making when converting the RAW to an image file?” Too much according to the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing
There is also the ”Scene Detection”setting which I have turned off.
Are you running iOS 14.3 or greater?
Go to Settings, scroll to Camera, choose Format. There you can turn on Apple ProRAW.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211965
As for the overarching reasons for poor AI implementations in their other product lines, my pet theory is that Apple’s pace of progress is what you get when constrained by their stated privacy goals.
I have little doubt that they’d be at the top of this game if they leveraged user data the way Google/Meta do.
Then Apple is not the product for you.
I use apps like Halide to fill in the gaps in the stock camera app, and shoot with a standalone camera when I want full creative control.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a wishlist.
The funny part is that the primary theme of my comment is about the control Apple gives you over your data - control you do not have when picking other products - and arguable a more important thing to allow me to control.
I've decided that Apple products are, indeed, for me. Wishing they would provide certain features doesn't change that.
Apple has shown repeatedly that they are continuing to invest in camera controls. The "RAW" button, support for ProRes, etc. are a few examples of this. Giving "creators" access to more creative modes in the camera is hardly an idea that is so opposite Apple's norms to imagine they might include it someday, or to conclude that I should abandon the ecosystem because they don't have it today.
I mean underlying a lot of Apple stuff is linux. Do you feel you have linux device and its might and endless configurability when working with iphone? My wife can't force that f!@#!@ device to allow her pattern unlock of her phone without losing warranty, Apple rather prefers her having no safety at all (since face ID simply doesn't work for her line of work, and typing minimum 6 digits code 100x a day is extremely annoying... no other choices on 13 mini).
Which expectations would those be and how are they misaligned? I have no allusions about what using Apple products entail. That doesn't mean I can't want things.
But my comment was more about the state of AI than anything.
also, the minimum is actually 4 digits. you can tap "passcode options" when setting/changing passcode. not sure how much better that would be though. i generally like face id but i do hope they add in-display touch id sometime.
Siri is incredibly stupid (ChatGPT also is, but at least it has a whole order of magnitude better at understanding; unlike Siri, which randomly fails at the most basic requests to the extent it's just about useful for "Hey Siri, turn bedroom lights off" - but even that doesn't always work as expected), and while they don't have photo retouching AI, Dall-E is quite renown in for working with images, so surely if they'd dabbled in that space they would be successful.
"Alarm named Timer set for 01:30"
Learn British already, Siri! Also getting 01:30 from "hour and a half".. I get how it's happened technically but that's dumb as hell.
Every damn time I both 1) forget to move the laundry to the dryer 2) jump out of my skin at 1:30am
One of the most confusing examples I have of the terrible autocorrect is that anytime I wrote “20”, it would always get replaced with “2.0” and “50” would always get replaced with “5-0”. I finally realized it was because I had two apps on my phone, one which had “2.0” in the name and the other “5-0”. Once I deleted those apps, it stopped replacing those numbers. It’s really baffling to me their autocorrect would work that way.
Similarly, I’ve resorted to using a 3rd party camera app to avoid the occasional picture coming out looking like an oil painting. I’ve been using halide mark ii, which works quite well, although I can’t recommend it anymore due to their new business model being a very pricey subscription. Luckily I got grandfathered in, so the app still works for me.
Swype on Android (and briefly on iOS) - RIP - was simply better in every imaginable way, but whoever bought it just buried it. Far better prediction (once they fixed the bug that interpreted a common swipe as "nee", which I almost never use, instead of "me", which I use constantly) and a host of useful features. Need to capitalize a word? Just Swype above the keyboard once during the motion. Need a double letter? Squiggle a bit on that letter as you move through the word. Swype-X, C, V for cut, copy, and paste. Swype-spacebar to bring up an editing keyboard that offered single-character cursor movement. Want to curse? Feel free, it won't forget it with the next version upgrade. Keyboard learned a typo? Delete it from your user dictionary and it won't appear anymore.
That was a startup. Apple could buy out any patents they had with pocket change. But they didn't, and I can't figure out why.
This alone pushes me towards Android phones since the keyboard experience there is in a completely different class.
The iPhone can shoot raw and avoid these issues, it's how I use mine. The complaints people would have if the iPhone didn't post-process for the average consumer... Every camera phone I've ever used has horrible defaults for JPG processing -- avoid it by shooting raw and using something like Darkroom to finesse.
No, you use a half decent professional camera and you can even opt for RAW format, the only processing your getting is the averaging algorithm for your exposure and ISO settings. Even without that all you are getting is some JPG compression, not half baked ML trying to move people's faces around, that's bonkers. Also pretty sure you are not getting RAW on any phone unless you are running some very custom OS/software, even then seems pretty pointless considering how noisy it's going to be.
It's the reason some still pick RED vs Alexa. Your RAW File & Colour Science aren't just up to you, they're carefully mastered with an ODT -- On Device Transform.
Also, let's see how Nikon go in the near future with Snapdragon.
These images are 90% shot on iPhone -- raw and edited in Darkroom on iOS. https://instagram.com/grant.pal
It’s dishonest to try compare color profiles with AI image manipulation .
Sure I forgot about colour correction, congrats... It's pretty absurd to argue uniform pixel data manipulation for colour processing is somehow comparable to ML based full image manipulation. One is for the purpose of trying to improve accuracy, the other is doing the exact opposite.
> and you're entirely wrong
But i'm not perfect either: I was being pushy in the tone of my previous comments.. I was focused on the high level differences but too impatient in my delivery - Had I been more nuanced and respectful you might have been more receptive to it, sorry.
I'm not sure if you mean "raw" in RAW sense, but FWIW this critique applies to Smart HDR specifically. If you shoot and share RAW images with an iPhone Smart HDR is not used, and you will reliably see something closely resembling reality.¹ I shoot everything in RAW, trained by the regret of not doing this for special shots earlier in my life.
¹ "You can, of course, take a RAW photo using apps like Halide (it’s worth noting that ProRAW photos are still post-processed), but then you’ll have a much larger image file just to get a more natural result."
Is it possible the appraiser was doing so?
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iphae1e882a3/io...
I promise all dedicated cameras are also doing (almost all of) this kind of processing though. It’s needed to develop raw images at all. The specific tuning is just up to taste.
The drawings in old field guides are curated to a supposed "idealized" form based on their use case (i.e., to be recognized in the wild by other researchers). Those specific idealized versions don't actually exist, though.
There was a famous instance of a ww1 phototographer (dont remember his name) who would allegedly move dead bodies around in his shots to better capture what he thought was the emotional reality through the resulting image rather than what the literal scene was.
We can have all the computerized scanning of the universe at our disposal but ultimately there's always the analog hole of our judgement in its interpretation
The idea that "reality is the goal" is the product of not bothering to think at all. Choosing what to make an image of, and framing the image, will always be in service of a story or "emotional reality". It always was, from cave-wall paintings onwards.
I was driving down the 99 towards Seattle last week, and the foggy sky took on this wonderful warm glow. But my phone did what it always does with the sky: change the color balance of the sky so that it looks blue. I wish it'd just left it alone.
You can likely stick your photograph into some basic editing software and set your own white balance. I even think the built-in Windows photo viewer can do WB adjustment these days
Exactly the point and exactly what is needed. Photographer choices, not camera choices. A pro[1] photographer knows what to do for different subjects, light, and goals, but phone software has no clue. Every image is a selfie for instagram.
1. Or an amateur who bothers to learn and experiment.
It seems like the author of this article is trying to use MKBHD's cachet to help champion his own point ("I don't like this AI post-processing much at all") which I doubt is one Marques would agree with, given that the phone which won his blind test is one that does just as much (if not more) post-processing than the iPhone, the Pixel 6A.
To me, the clearest signal of this is what Halide can and can’t do with the new Pro sensor. In ideal lighting, the Halide-processed 48MP JPEG shots look insanely good, with strand-of-hair-level detail. It’s hard to imagine Apple wouldn’t have wanted to show off the ability for ordinary users to take these shots. But capture speed is several seconds, and if conditions aren’t ideal, even that isn’t enough to get a clean shot.
Like MKBHD said about Google & the Pixel: Apple needs a generation or two for computation to be optimized for the capabilities of their new sensor.
If I wanted to spend time processing every snapshot I take with my phone, I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T and get pictures that are much better than anything the phone can do.
That’s what I’m actually doing. My Pixel 3 died suddenly in November 2021. Since it was an emergency, I bought a cheap phone with a horrible camera, intending to upgrade it quickly and taking photos with my X100T in the meantime. A year later and I’m still using that setup. The camera is portable enough to take it everywhere, the processing presets are good enough for me, and I have the RAW files available just in case. I’m probably in the minority of people who would do something like this, but I’m pretty happy so far.
I think most people buy iPhones because it's a status symbol or because it's what they are accustomed to. Certainly not because of feature A or B, and most definitely not if that feature is "tasteful photos", whatever that means (whose taste?).
But there is a small vocal minority which cares about picture quality, that is true. Totally irrelevant to apple's bottom line though.
Why is Apple like this? I dont always need a 9 MB or whatever photo size, it would be nice to be able to take lower res images to save space.
What was perhaps the most infuriating thing was that what I was seeing in the viewfinder preview looked great. I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.
Phone took 5 seconds or so to take each picture and it came out looking like it was just daylight. The only way you could tell I took it at night was the creation time of the file. The photo had things visible that I couldn't even see with my naked eye!
Technologically impressive, sure. What I was taking a picture of? Not at all.
I'll know for future reference but there's been no more combos of frosty and full moon so far.
Ah well. Wasn't an important picture or anything, just seemed neat. My phone encouraged me to enjoy the moment instead :)
If you want to reproduce a complicated scene like that, use a full manual app like Halide and then edit the raw back to what you remember. Or get an a7s.
On the other hand the iphone knows what time it is, your location, the location of the moon, the weather - it could probably guess if you're outside or inside - so it seems like a bit of a waste it can't do a better job at anticipating the scene...
Cameras do know if you're inside or outside though - at least, they know if you're shooting a landscape and if the scene is lit by natural or artificial light. That matters for boring but important things like auto white balance / auto ISO / if it should focus to infinity.
As long as you let me turn it off, hey, party on, knock yourself out with postprocessing hackery.
The first part -- the easy part -- is the problem Apple can't seem to manage.
Well, you can - record a video instead and press the button that takes a photo during video. It looks terrible, so it's better to switch to a 3rd party camera app instead. I think the main use case for those is women using beauty filters though.
If I can't turn that off, then the OEM camera app is simply broken. Telling me to spend money on a third-party app is just carrying water for two corporations that aren't paying you. Don't do that, at least not for free.
Halide is perfectly straightforward to use.
> I'm fine with plain old .JPG most of the time.
Halide can save JPGs if that's what you prefer.
>Telling me to spend money on a third-party app is just carrying water for two corporations that aren't paying you
The built in camera app has to cater to a lot of different kinds of user. I, like you, would be happy if it offered more controls, but this might make it less usable for the majority. The cost of one of these third party apps is pretty trivial compared to the cost of a new iPhone (or a 'real' camera), so it doesn't bother me overly – but you can obviously spend your money how you wish.
OTOH I don’t really have anything interesting on my phone in the first place, so it all really is a bit academic to me.
It does need location as long as the app is open, though you can make it imprecise.
A long hold on the focus point brings up an exposure slider, which lets you easily darken the image. It works really well, but the Samsung doesn't quite have the "flatten everything" feature that Marques talked about though (https://youtu.be/88kd9tVwkH8 - recommend watching this).
Also the stronger AI enhancements (auto scene detect) can be turned off with a single toggle; it's useful having the control.
And if that's not enough, there's the Pro mode - everything can be made manual.
I'm ashamed to say I'm generally getting better photos with my S21U than my old full frame D70s, with decent fixed lenses (35+50). Mainly it's down to the sensor; I often go for the hand held, low light kind of look, and the Samsung results are more often than not simply excellent.
I intend to get a mirrorless Nikon Z6II body and a lens adapter this year (my lenses still have decent value), but nonetheless, taking the time to fully explore the tool in your hand is probably one of the best things you can do.
A silly low-res solution would be to screen shot the camera app.
I wonder if you could at least take the screenshot of the preview.
- people who use “proper” cameras and thus have expectations about what a photo should look like
- people who want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene.
The iPhone camera app is configured for the second group, as it probably should be, but as a member of the first group I’d love an opt out button (without having to shoot in raw).
There are several presets which can be further tweaked but only using two controls: warmth and contrast.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph939c00e95/io...
That’s not too bad for the oob default camera app. I think it shows some awareness that how Apple is processing in the “standard” style may not match what everyone wants.
IIUC, Halide and other 3rd party camera apps can largely deliver on further post processing customization of non-raw photos.
Presumably these apps start with a RAW image in capture though and only pipeline it down to some save as some smaller, processed image.
It seems more about how people wish they perceived the scene. Like, over-saturated and with "beautification" filters; there's a recognition that this is not how the image maker [the person] actually perceives things. It's a dream of reality, a fairy tale.
Honestly, some Facebook photos ... all people on my Facebook are people I know in person, the filters some use are frankly ridiculous; like, I know what you actually look like and it's not a manga cartoon with massive eyes and completely smooth skin.
/rant
- People who just don't care and use the default photo app
- People who are looking for more professional results and use an app like Halide
- People who enjoy being angry on the internet more than taking pictures
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/adjust-hdr-camera-set...
Personally, I've never regretted just always shooting RAW.
The reason is that phones for years been screwing the photos no matter what you do, at one point both me and my dad bought a Motorola phone where they promised it would have an "eco-system" of accessories, with existing ones including more advanced cameras, game controllers and so on. We went to a place full of beautiful animals, took a ton of photos, but when we checked his photos, all of them were horribly screwed, like everything was pink, or even literally sheared, I found out the reason is that when you use the viewfinder, the phone skips some processing, as soon you take the photo, it mandatorily does some processing, in Motorola's case with a very buggy chip that would inevitably ruin your photos. Poking in the photo files it looked like the algorithm was managing to misalign the file in memory before doing the calculations. Something similar to mixing endianess.
The truth is that you cannot put the necessary hardware into a smartphone to take DSLR quality pictures. Not with the current form factor, and especially not if you're trying to be cost effective. They've tried getting around this by selling add-ons that socket into the body, or using three, four, even five cameras, more than one light sensor, and all of this damaging software. But manufacturers are trying to polish a dirt floor. There will always be imperfections simply because the materials weren't made for that level of quality.
Settings > Camera > Macro Control
There are some other cases (like if you have your finger over one camera it might switch) but that’s the really noticeable one. You’ll usually regret changing it though.
If I want 48 megapixel resolution and/or the added capture detail from ProRAW I'll turn on RAW+HEIC. That gives you a ProRaw you can edit after, as well as an "instant exposure" that basically just converts it to what you'd expect from HEIC mode. There is a tremendous amount of detail captured in the ProRaw shots that is processed away by the default app. As far as I know, you can't actually take 48 megapixel photos in the default camera app.
I seldom ever need to edit an individual file, because even if I'm shooting in 48mpx Halide will cook off an instagram-friendly edited version right away automatically. If I ever do want to tinker with the raw exposure, it's an option. The rest of the UI did take some fiddling to get used to, but I started out switching to Halide whenever I wanted to take a particularly good photo and before long I found myself using Halide for everything, because otherwise I'd be reviewing pictures and realize how much better one could have come out if I hadn't used the default app.
I found the official review of the 14 Pro camera by Halide's developer Lux to be a good primer on leveraging the app's capabilities: https://lux.camera/iphone-14-pro-camera-review-a-small-step-...
(Apologies for not seeing your response earlier.)
This was always going to be the case because no matter how good your software is, phone cameras will never have the optics, and probably not the sensors too, of a DSLR camera.
To cover this, manufacturers employ all sorts of clever post processing, which in turn make it so that your final image is different from the preview you're seeing (which is also heavily altered from what the sensor is seeing, probably).
With new tools such as AI introduced into post processing, we are just seeing more artifacts in what has been a fairly extensive process already. You can only push the tiny sensors and lenses so far but every manufacturer still wants the public to perceive their latest release as if a lot of progress has been made.
Perhaps people expect too much from their phone.
I wouldn’t call this “manipulation” however. It suggests some nefarious deed when instead it’s just about balancing color, skin tone, denoising, etc.
I was at a family gathering a year or so ago, and my mother was taking pictures with her phone. I noticed that one she took of me and my two siblings was applying a heavy skin smoothing algorithm. I asked for her phone, and discovered that she had “skin smoothing” turned up to 100 on her Android.
I took some comparison photos with it on and off and put it to the group. Everyone but me agreed that the heavily skin-smoothed photos were better. Even the men.
That's such a dangerous argument, though, because where does it end?
Some audiophiles will tell you that they prefer the 'warm' harmonic distortion imparted by single-ended vacuum tube amplifiers. Psychoacoustic studies back that up to some extent. Does that mean that all first-party music players should apply a DSP transform that makes the output sound like it came through an 80-year-old Western Electric telephone repeater, without the option to allow the listener to turn it off unless they install a third-party app?
Or even worse, and more to the point, does it mean that all first-party recording apps should work that way?
iPhones don't apply particularly heavy skin smoothing even in portrait mode, and don't do it at all if you shoot RAW. Android phones generally have an option to adjust the strength of the feature (or disable it altogether). So the answer to your 'where does it end?' question is straightforward: it ends wherever you the photographer want it to end. Portrait photographers have been using various techniques to soften the skin of their subjects since the dawn of photography.
Creating an accurate and 100% sharp record of all of someone's skin imperfections might be accurate in a forensic sense, but it isn't necessarily accurate to our everyday perceptions of other people's faces. Optical prints from negatives used to be naturally somewhat softer than modern digital images from high resolution sensors. Not every form of photography benefits from extreme sharpness and detail.
Correct, so fix it in post. That can be as simple as a button that says "Apply beauty filter when faces are detected."
I personally have a nice photo shoot with my partner but everyone noticed that I kinda look like a cardboard cutout in some. the post processing was def not missed by very none technical users.