The Truth about "Beautygate" on iPhone XS & XS Max! By AppleInsider

You may have heard some talk about Beauty gate, where Apple's new iPhone, 10s and 10s Mac seem to be applying a skin smoothing filter to photos taken with the selfie camera. Now, that's not the truth. So, let's talk about what's actually happening behind the Saints. It's all due to the new smart HDR feature in Apple's new iPhones, which is designed to increase dynamic range. As you can see in this photo from our iPhone 10 vs 10 s Mac's photo comparison, the face and body are properly exposed, but on the TENS image the highlights and the background are blown out on the 10s max. You can see all the details and textures and the colors are accurately reproduced.

Not only that, but if you look at the shadows, they appear brighter, and you get more detail as well. Now here's where it gets interesting. If you compare the pants on each image, it looks like there's a smoothing effect being applied on the 10s Macs and if you look at a selfie photo taken in low-light, the effect is even more pronounced. Now, there are two main reasons why this is happening, and they're both related to smart HDR, with a regular HDR photo on last year's iPhone 10. The camera will snap three photos one exposed for the face, one for the highlights and one for the shadows and then blend the best parts of each image into one photo.

Professional photographers sometimes take these photos manually before blending them in a program like Adobe Lightroom, resulting in a photo with incredible detail and dynamic range with Apple's new, smart HDR. It all starts with something: Apple calls: zero shutter lag whenever your camera app is open. The camera is constantly shooting a four frame buffer, basically for photos over and over again, without actually saving them, so that when you do take a photo, you get one instantly and at the same time the camera is also capturing a variety of frames at different exposures. It then analyzes and merges the best rings together into one photo, which you got a admit, has seriously great dynamic range in order to make this work. All this has to happen very quickly, and you can thank the new front-facing and rear-facing sensors for this.

The new sensors have increased readout speed, allowing it to snap photos quicker. However, there's another limitation shutter speed, which is basically the amount of time the camera shutters open to allow light into the sensor. Now, since smart HDR requires everything to happen very quickly. The shutter speed needs to be faster so as not to slow down the process, because of that less light has a chance to get into the sensor and to compensate the camera increases the ISO which digitally brightens the image, but that also increases noise in bright sunlight. We won't notice much of a difference, since the image may already be perfectly exposed, even with faster shutter speed, but in a low-light scenario the ISO needs to be turned up, pretty high, which introduces a lot of noise and to compensate for that Apple adds noise reduction processing to the images and the most common drawback to noise reduction is that the details start to lose their sharpness and look soft.

Basically, what people are calling skin smoothing and the reason the effect is more noticeable on the front-facing camera is because the sensor is a lot smaller than the one on the rear, so even less light has a chance to get in Sebastien d width. The developer of the camera app halite discovered that the new iPhone appears to favor fast shutter speeds and higher ISO levels, regardless of whether the smart HDR feature is on or off so no Apple isn't applying a beauty filter. The smooth out areas are mostly due to added noise reduction. If we compare a low-light photo from the 10s max to something like the Galaxy Note, 9 we'll see that the node 9 is applying noise reduction as well, leading to a similar beauty mode effect. So there's half of the Beauty gate puzzle.

Now, let's go through the second half, which is responsible for making this effect look even more pronounced because smart HDR is taking more frames at different exposures and combining them it's able to have more high light and low light detail than ever before. However, when merging these images together, the photo becomes more balanced and there is an overall decrease, in contrast, throughout the whole image. Looking at these photos, it seems as though the iPhone tends photo is sharper, but if you look closely, it's actually not the reason the photo looks sharper is that it has more contrast. Now, contrast is basically the difference in brightness between objects in a photo. In this example, the bottom half isn't any sharper.

It just has added contrast. We noticed this effect when comparing the tennis max to the note 9, the photos and video on the tennis max lacked contrast and looked less sharp compared to the note 9, but in reality it was just as detailed looking at the selfie photo comparison. You'll notice that the iPhone tends image has more contrast, making it look more detailed. The iPhone tennis Max's lack of contrast, makes it look like there's some kind of ski smoothing effect being applied, but if we add some contrast back in that effect goes away. So it's actually the lack of contrast that makes it seem like the skin is softer, even when in a well-lit environment.

So there you have it that's beauty gate in a nutshell. Technically Apple would just need to tweak the software to resolve the issue if they choose to ask for some more HDR ALPA can tune the feature to make it work slower and allow the shutter to stay open a bit longer. But, of course, that'll reduce the dynamic range performance on the 10s and 10s Max's new cameras. So thanks for watching guys, let me know what you thought about that explanation in the comment section below and make sure to subscribe. So you don't miss out on more videos like this one.

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Source : AppleInsider