Although I have an 11 Pro I’ve been keeping an eye on this thread with interest. Many of the photos look stunning, but it was the ‘oil painting’ effect that put me off going for one of the 13 models.
Out of interest; whenever I try using the magic wand feature I almost always feel it makes my photos look worse. So, not much of a magic wand at all in my opinion. Does anyone else find that?
The magic wand feature in the edit mode? Yeah I find it usually just increases brightness and constrast a bit, it certainly doesn't eliminate the grotesque oil painting effect. I'm really hoping the increased pixel count of the upcoming 14 Pro combined with pixel binning brings more detail with less oil painting effect.
These recent ones are really impressive! Do folks who post here use post processing or are they mostly stock?
Also, how does everyone avoid the “oil-painting” effect?
The thing with the "oil painting" effect from the default camera is it comes from two places: the Apple SmartHDR processing stuff AND lossy file compression. You can somewhat mitigate the oil painting effect via the following methods:
1) Use a third party app like "ProCamera" which lets you shoot regular HEIC images with all the Apple 'smart' processing stuff
BUT lets you adjust the compression of the file. Setting the compression quality to "100%" means you get lossless compression but the images take up more storage, anywhere between 1/3 to 1/2 the size of an equivalent ProRaw image. I've found this can actually provide Pro Raw levels of detail and overall resolution without unnecessarily massive file sizes. This method is probably the most practical. ProCamera is particular also lets you adjust the compression of video which results in dramatically better video footage (again, larger file sizes but nowhere near as big as Apple's ProRes capture).
2) Shoot in Pro Raw (considerably bigger sizes than both the regular stock camera image and 3rd party images). The oil painting effect is still here but you get more image detail + a greater range of editing.
3) Shoot in true RAW. This eliminates oil painting smearing completely. I love images taken in true RAW because the images look so much more even and all the sensor grain remains intact. The obvious massive downside is you don't get any Apple processing which makes shooting very difficult for quick shots and high contrast scenes.
