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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.)

> 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.