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> https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/DuoTable_HDR_AppleiPhone18Pro_DxOMark_05-00-copie.jpeg https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/D

by Sharlin 12d ago

> https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/DuoTable_HDR_AppleiPhone18Pro_DxOMark_05-00-copie.jpeg https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/DuoTable_... Oh god that plasticization of the faces is absolutely horrifying. Like a bad image gen AI from 2022. Or reptilians wearing cheap rubber masks. Edit: what's with the downvotes?

kccqzy 12d ago
Some people’s faces just naturally look like that. Probably depends on the cosmetics applied.
- BugsJustFindMe 12d ago
  Compare against the comparison photos. They're there for a reason.
- FireBeyond 12d ago
  The girl in the front, sure. The girl behind? No. It's not even skin smoothing, there's not a single clearly defined feature to her face, while the hair at the same depth is markedly more detailed.
  - foldr 11d ago
    The woman in the background is slightly out of focus. It's a great look for most of us.
dpark 12d ago
> what's with the downvotes? Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.
- orbital-decay 12d ago
  What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with 17 Pro where details are visible over the entire face. It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from a stone is pretty hard.
  - dpark 12d ago
    > What's insulting about overprocessed photos? This is a heavy walk-back from reptile wearing a rubber mask. It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting. > You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred Not really. It’s a bit smoothed but the smoothest parts of her face are also where the skin is stretched tightest from smiling. It is actually smoother in those areas. I don’t see a ton of difference in the foreground between the skin texture in the different photos. Background is different but as you said, that’s blood from a stone. The data just isn’t there.
    - adrianmonk 12d ago
      > It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting. It's very hard to understand. It doesn't make sense that a criticism of the camera would be an insult to the subjects of the photo. The criticism is that the image isn't an accurate representation of the subjects. If B is bad, and B != A, it doesn't follow that A is bad.
      - dpark 12d ago
        You take a picture of your wife with your phone. You show it to a coworker. They tell you that your wife looks like a reptile wearing a rubber face mask. Your reaction is? a. “Yeah, the slight over processing definitely turned my wife into a lizard person.” b. “Fuck you.”
        12d ago
hopfenspergerj 12d ago
The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.
- hopfenspergerj 12d ago
  Look at one eye has lashes and the other doesn't! It's just a low-quality AI "denoise+sharpen" filter.
  - jimjimjim 12d ago
    Thank you, that is a nice simple concrete example of AI-ification in the photo.
- tarcon 11d ago
  That's just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking and has been around since decades.
heliomattress 12d ago
don't worry about those AI artifacts. allow nature to heal itself. wait until the photo finds its way onto social media, and then re-posted onto another social media site. there, it will take the form of a highly compressed video frame, and now no one will notice any sort "rubber mask" phenomenon because it will be too compressed and covered with filters to notice anything at all. https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg
jeroenhd 11d ago
Apple's cameras always look overprocessed to me. Not to the extent that some Chinese smartphone manufacturers replace your skin, but the general vibe of Apple's pictures is just off. Some people really like that style, though. I think it's a matter of preference, and it seems like the people who like that style are exactly who Apple is optimizing their image algorithms for. This particular iteration seems to increase the hallucinations a bit more than previous models, though. Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot.
- foldr 11d ago
  >Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot. This is just because the eye without eyelashes is on the side of her face that's in shadow. That means there's less contrast between the black of the eyelash and her skin tone (which is darker in the shadow area), and so the denoising algorithm wipes out the lash. All of this image processing happens way too fast on an iPhone for anything deserving the label of 'AI' to be involved. People are just going nuts over the unsurprising artefacts of a completely standard image processing pipeline.
wkjagt 11d ago
I wonder what percentage of pixels is actually from the camera's sensor vs made up / somewhat inspired by the data from the sensor. Maybe I'm too old for this, but I can't imagine people wanting their photos to look like this.
mananaysiempre 11d ago
No need for image gen to get this kind of problem; to me that skin look just reads as really aggressive denoising. And there is no escaping physics, a tiny high-res sensor will need a whole lot of denoising for this really challenging scene (meh lighting, strong backlight; the dark, shiny skin is probably also an issue but I’ve no experience there). The only surprising part is how good the results are: there is no leftover color noise that I can see, the window doesn’t have any color fringing, the high-frequency detail of the table setting and the drapes hasn’t been destroyed, the small backlit hairs on the sides of the face of the girl in front haven’t been smeared over oil-painting style. It’s strange how one eyebrow (in the back) got completely obliterated while the other looks completely fine, and it’s even stranger how the texture of the collar (in front) is basically perfect on the left where it’s unobstructed but basically destroyed on the right where some hair escaping from the braids was in front of it, so perhaps there is some image-gen-adjacent stuff going on here. The skin looks bad, don’t get me wrong. But the degree of badness seems fair for the situation, and as a whole the result has no business looking as good as it does to my 2016-camera-trained eye. (Also, don’t photograph people with a wide-angle lens from up close, it’s always freaky at best—like here—and ugly at worst. Just don’t.)

by Sharlin 12d ago

kccqzy 12d ago

Some people’s faces just naturally look like that. Probably depends on the cosmetics applied.

BugsJustFindMe 12d ago
Compare against the comparison photos. They're there for a reason.
FireBeyond 12d ago
The girl in the front, sure. The girl behind? No. It's not even skin smoothing, there's not a single clearly defined feature to her face, while the hair at the same depth is markedly more detailed.
- foldr 11d ago
  The woman in the background is slightly out of focus. It's a great look for most of us.

dpark 12d ago

> what's with the downvotes? Presumably because others disagree. I also do not see it here. Zooming in there are clear pores and skin texture. Is it somewhat smoothed? Yeah, it has that feel. Does it look like a cheap rubber mask? No. And that phrasing is frankly very insulting to the pictured subjects.

orbital-decay 12d ago
What's insulting about overprocessed photos? You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred, which happens neither to the other parts of her face nor to the photo taken with 17 Pro where details are visible over the entire face. It's smartphone cameras, squeezing blood from a stone is pretty hard.
- dpark 12d ago
  > What's insulting about overprocessed photos? This is a heavy walk-back from reptile wearing a rubber mask. It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting. > You can clearly see that the arbitrary part of the face of the girl in front is literally blurred Not really. It’s a bit smoothed but the smoothest parts of her face are also where the skin is stretched tightest from smiling. It is actually smoother in those areas. I don’t see a ton of difference in the foreground between the skin texture in the different photos. Background is different but as you said, that’s blood from a stone. The data just isn’t there.
  - adrianmonk 12d ago
    > It should not be hard to understand why that statement can be seen as insulting. It's very hard to understand. It doesn't make sense that a criticism of the camera would be an insult to the subjects of the photo. The criticism is that the image isn't an accurate representation of the subjects. If B is bad, and B != A, it doesn't follow that A is bad.
    - dpark 12d ago
      You take a picture of your wife with your phone. You show it to a coworker. They tell you that your wife looks like a reptile wearing a rubber face mask. Your reaction is? a. “Yeah, the slight over processing definitely turned my wife into a lizard person.” b. “Fuck you.”
      - 12d ago

hopfenspergerj 12d ago

The face is the background is clearly an AI model adding detail where the raw image is out of focus. The people you're talking to on this site are just blind.

hopfenspergerj 12d ago
Look at one eye has lashes and the other doesn't! It's just a low-quality AI "denoise+sharpen" filter.
- jimjimjim 12d ago
  Thank you, that is a nice simple concrete example of AI-ification in the photo.
tarcon 11d ago
That's just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking and has been around since decades.

heliomattress 12d ago

don't worry about those AI artifacts. allow nature to heal itself. wait until the photo finds its way onto social media, and then re-posted onto another social media site. there, it will take the form of a highly compressed video frame, and now no one will notice any sort "rubber mask" phenomenon because it will be too compressed and covered with filters to notice anything at all. https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/r9zx6a.jpg

jeroenhd 11d ago

Apple's cameras always look overprocessed to me. Not to the extent that some Chinese smartphone manufacturers replace your skin, but the general vibe of Apple's pictures is just off. Some people really like that style, though. I think it's a matter of preference, and it seems like the people who like that style are exactly who Apple is optimizing their image algorithms for. This particular iteration seems to increase the hallucinations a bit more than previous models, though. Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot.

foldr 11d ago
>Unless one of the models did actually have one eye with eyelashes and one without for the iPhone shoot. This is just because the eye without eyelashes is on the side of her face that's in shadow. That means there's less contrast between the black of the eyelash and her skin tone (which is darker in the shadow area), and so the denoising algorithm wipes out the lash. All of this image processing happens way too fast on an iPhone for anything deserving the label of 'AI' to be involved. People are just going nuts over the unsurprising artefacts of a completely standard image processing pipeline.

wkjagt 11d ago

I wonder what percentage of pixels is actually from the camera's sensor vs made up / somewhat inspired by the data from the sensor. Maybe I'm too old for this, but I can't imagine people wanting their photos to look like this.

mananaysiempre 11d ago

No need for image gen to get this kind of problem; to me that skin look just reads as really aggressive denoising. And there is no escaping physics, a tiny high-res sensor will need a whole lot of denoising for this really challenging scene (meh lighting, strong backlight; the dark, shiny skin is probably also an issue but I’ve no experience there). The only surprising part is how good the results are: there is no leftover color noise that I can see, the window doesn’t have any color fringing, the high-frequency detail of the table setting and the drapes hasn’t been destroyed, the small backlit hairs on the sides of the face of the girl in front haven’t been smeared over oil-painting style. It’s strange how one eyebrow (in the back) got completely obliterated while the other looks completely fine, and it’s even stranger how the texture of the collar (in front) is basically perfect on the left where it’s unobstructed but basically destroyed on the right where some hair escaping from the braids was in front of it, so perhaps there is some image-gen-adjacent stuff going on here. The skin looks bad, don’t get me wrong. But the degree of badness seems fair for the situation, and as a whole the result has no business looking as good as it does to my 2016-camera-trained eye. (Also, don’t photograph people with a wide-angle lens from up close, it’s always freaky at best—like here—and ugly at worst. Just don’t.)