That's why we thought the iPhone XS had a softening filter – BGR

Last week, users of the iPhone XS swept the forums, Internet forks in hand, to complain that the selfie cameras of their new phones were secretly applying a filter "smoothing the skin". That was not the most absurd idea: smartphone makers often include filters, including "beauty" filters, in their camera apps, and it's not like Apple has never given users new functionality without the slightest way to disable it. The claims were corroborated by comparisons between an iPhone X and an iPhone XS, which showed a skin that seemed to have been artificially smoothed.

But as you can imagine, there has been no international conspiracy between Apple and the makeup companies to promote an artificial beauty standard among the nation's youth. Instead, skin smoothing is a side effect of how the iPhone XS uses multiple exposures and computing capabilities to produce better images.

Sebastiaan de With, creator of the (excellent) Halide camera app for iPhone, plunged into the process of capturing photographs of the iPhone to determine what was happening. This is due to two factors: the multi-exposure HDR system, which enhances the lighting, and the fact that the iPhone XS takes pictures at a higher ISO, which increases the noise:

The iPhone XS merges the exposures and reduces the brightness of the bright areas as well as the darkness of the shadows. The detail remains, but we can perceive it as less clear because it lost local contrast. In the photo above, the skin is smoother just because the light is not as hard.

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After testing the iPhone XS side by side with the X, we found that the XS preferred a faster shutter speed and a higher ISO level. In other words, taking pictures is much faster, but at the price of noise.

This noise must be eliminated, one way or another, and this has a cost: the noise reduction removes a little detail and local contrast.

To prove that it is not a specific filter for softening the skin, it has been shown that the same effect is applied to subjects other than the skin, such as a lemon.

So the conspiracy theory is debunked, which is good news. But here's the bad news: if you do not like the look of photos, there is no way to change the settings properly. You can disable Smart HDR, which will "fix" the problem to a certain extent, but at the cost of worsening most of your photos.

Source of image: Zach Epstein, BGR