valillon

It’s been a while since iOS 12.1.2 has been released and still hoping Apple includes some camera fixes in its reluctant neural HDR camera system. Smart HDR has proved to resolve some challenging lightning situations quite brilliantly. Now Apple is world-wide promoting astonishing pictures from their new line of iPhones, a new campaign come out recently for Christmas. However nothing it’s being said since that beautygate issue jumped to the internet community few days after the Xphones were put on sale. It seems like a fine layer of makeup is being spread to make the issue vanish. That fine tuning fixed on iOS 12.1 is almost nothing compared to the severe facial artifacts generated by the smartHDR. HDR can cause flat contrast images, since this is what HDR is intended to perform. To the limit, HDR methods can produce very unrealistic images. I personally do not like those extreme HDR pictures, this is a matter of taste though. On the iPhones, a tiny contrast boost can solve the thing sometimes. What is disturbing to me is not the contrast however, but the reddish skin tone the smartHDR produces. In this post previously commented some coloring issues that the Xphones are suffering as soon as a face come into the scene. Now in this example my face is not only exposed very flat, but also the skin is so red that as soon as I look at the image it feels like it’s not me. It’s like I’ve been made-up or simply like I’ve been hours under the sun with no skin-protection at all. On the contrary with the previous auto HDR method some parts of the face are over exposed, but it doesn’t bother me so much since the skin tones are pretty much the same my skin is. Since HDR should deal with only exposure, my question is, why the heck smartHDR modifies, not only the local contrast, but also the color tones of the image, specially on faces?