[astrange]

> 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.