What causes the smeared or "painterly" look in some compact and smartphone photos?
Asked 9/13/2021
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In some photos from smartphones and compact cameras, fine detail can look hazy, smudged, or blotchy when viewed at full resolution. This is especially noticeable around textured areas like feathers, foliage, or building detail. In one example, a duck photo shot at ISO 800 shows smeared feather detail; in another long-distance house photo, bushes look like green blobs and the whole image looks distorted. What is this artifact called, and is it caused by the sensor, lens, image processing, or something else?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
4y ago
2 Answers
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The issue is already addressed in the review you are linking to and there, they call it image smoothing. It is the noise reduction algorithm, which works so agressively that image details are removed in the assumption that the details are noise.
To quote from the test:
Noise isn’t too problematic, but you can often see some severe image smoothing which gives a painterly effect when shooting in low light.
Your description in the question is a little bit vague, but I assume this is what you are talking about.
Originally by user10009. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user10009
4y ago
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There are two different effects in your examples.
For the duck image, the smeared or “painterly” look is aggressive noise reduction, often described in reviews as image smoothing. Small-sensor cameras and phones apply strong processing at higher ISO settings to hide noise, but that can blur fine detail and turn textures like feathers, grass, or leaves into blotches.
For the distant house image, the distortion is more likely heat haze / atmospheric shimmer: light is being refracted by layers of air at different temperatures, which makes distant detail look wavy, soft, or blobby.
So this is not a single lens defect. In compact-camera images, “smudging” is commonly from in-camera processing; in distant outdoor shots, it can also be caused by the atmosphere. Canon vs. Nikon/Sony differences are likely due to different JPEG processing choices, not a fundamentally different type of optical distortion.
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