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 Pixe

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 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.