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by jsmith99 1236 days ago
It's not about better or worse, it's about trade offs. At small social media sizes pictures will look better from a phone than from an enthusiast camera.

Sharpening is a destructive process and the appropriate amount depends on how and what size you are using the image. It can also be easily applied anytime later. So enthusiast camera apply minimal sharpening and look under sharpened at small sizes, and phone cameras apply heavy sharpening but have artefacts if you zoom into them.

Same with saturation and 'ai' tricks like skin smoothing: users of enthusiast cameras often have different preferences.

1 comments

> Same with saturation and 'ai' tricks like skin smoothing: users of enthusiast cameras often have different preferences.

Note, phone cameras don't do skin smoothing, people just think they do. (Unless you get a beauty camera app.)

The issue is that almost any processing has the effect of removing noise, which is the same as skin smoothing. If you're taking 2-3 images and merging them, it'll remove the noise even if you do something smarter than averaging the pixels - so you actually have to add steps to measure the noise level and add it back.

The same issue comes up in video compression, where there's dedicated film grain metadata since almost any compression kills the real thing.