[daggersandscars]

It's certainly a part of it. A comment I left 4 months ago[0]:

"After watching far too many videos comparing the iPhone 13 Pro Max, Samsung S22 Ultra, and Pixel 6 Pro, I decided against the iPhone because of the automatic skin smoothing.[1]

The iPhone 13 Pro Max removed wrinkles, sun spots, moles, hair, etc to the point where the results looked like overprocessed, manually edited photos. This wasn't subtle -- the reviewers commented on it as well.[...]"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30754912

[1] A responder in that thread took issue with my calling this skin smoothing. Whether this is intentional skin smoothing or overly aggressive noise reduction, the impact on the image is noticeable.

[snovv_crash]

They probably run a bilateral filter [0] to get rid of sensor noise, but the settings are way too aggressive. Bilateral filters aren't there to explicitly smooth out skin, but they do this very well by being edge preserving and noise removing.

0: https://answers.opencv.org/question/557/face-lifting-on-ios/...