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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

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.

foldr 4y ago
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).
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  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?
  - foldr 4y ago
    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.
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      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."
      - foldr 4y ago
        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.

foldr 4y ago

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).

CamperBob2 4y ago
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?
- foldr 4y ago
  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.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    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."
    - foldr 4y ago
      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.