Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Over the course of the last week, the front-facing camera in the iPhone XS and XS Max has been receiving a lot of attention because the selfies captured on the new devices are drastically different from those captured with the iPhone X or earlier iPhone models.

In a MacRumors forum thread and on Reddit, Apple has been accused of using a skin-smoothing feature or a “beauty filter” for prettier selfies from the front-facing camera.

And:

When taking a selfie in a situation where lighting is less than ideal, such as indoors or outdoors in areas with lower lighting, the iPhone XS Max appears to be applying a drastic smoothing effect that can hide freckles, blemishes, and other issues.

More to the point:

In full outdoor lighting the problem is less apparent, which has led to speculation that the skin smoothing is actually a result of some heavy-handed noise reduction techniques.

The iPhone intentionally applying a “beauty filter” without specifically calling out a setting just doesn’t click for me. Heavy handed noise reduction or, perhaps, over zealous Smart HDR sounds more likely.

Turning off HDR does not remove the smoothing effect, nor does tweaking any other camera setting, so if the ultra skin smoothing is a result of something like unintentional excessive noise reduction, it needs to be tweaked on Apple’s end through a software update.

Couple of things to look at here:

• Compared to China’s Selfie Obsession, this issue feels like a very small thing.

• Michael Tsai does a nice rollup of the articles relating to iPhone XS skin smoothing.

My instinct here is that we are seeing unintended consequences, perhaps driven by machine learning, rather than an intentional “beautifying filter”.