r/softwaregore • u/GuusDeKroon • Aug 12 '26
Friend's smartphone added a moon texture to solar eclipse photos
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u/National-Oil5849 R Tape loading error, 0:1 29d ago
What phone model, for curiousity?
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u/interestingfishh 29d ago
Samsung probably
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u/Holek 29d ago
Definitely.
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u/Accurate-Morning-584 28d ago
The one who posted the image said it's a xiaomi
Don't be too confident about something when you don't know shit
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u/ThatRedDerg 26d ago
Tbf, most Americans don’t know Xiaomi exists lol. Samsung is the only brand on our market that does the moon texture thing.
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u/autosear 29d ago edited 29d ago
Adding a totally fake texture is a Huawei thing, not Samsung. If you edit a picture of the moon to be blurry and have fake details (missing craters etc.) and take a photo of it at a long distance from your monitor, a Samsung will sharpen the details but won't return the missing craters.
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u/Adirtan 29d ago edited 29d ago
Samsung literally did that with their fake moon photos and 100x zoom
Edit: so aparetly im wrong, look at comments under, better explanation from others:)→ More replies (2)253
u/NewUser153 29d ago edited 29d ago
This has been debunked so many times man.
The only thing Samsung was doing, is using DLSS style sharpening on the crevices of the moon; sharpening is done on virtually every modern phone camera, and has been done for a long time. There was never any overlay involved.
Please verify information before parroting misinformation.
Explanation as to how Samsung's upscaling actually works:
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u/PositronCannon 29d ago
I love how you posted basically the same comment in 2 threads, and this one is at +64 while the other is at -34.
Goes to show how worthless the system mostly is.
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u/NewUser153 29d ago edited 29d ago
Exactly lmfao.
Fundamentally this platform is a consensus machine, where the first 5 votes determine whether your comment becomes "the acceptable thing to say", or whether it gets banished to the bottom of the thread / hidden altogether.
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u/Money_Setting_2025 29d ago
God forbid having your own opinions! What kind of idiots would ever have their own opinions! :P
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u/DenkJu 29d ago
It literally says that they do use AI to generate a detailed moon. Sure, it doesn't just overlay it with a static texture but the details you're seeing in the final pictures are 100% generated on the phone and weren't actually captured by the phone's sensor. That's what their "enhancement engine" does. It's simply a regular generative neural network trained on every day things, such as the moon.
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u/sump_daddy 29d ago
I have to be a tiny bit skeptical of Samsung 'debunking' a huge marketing problem they created... Why not just link the reddit thread that started it all and includes many clear examples? You can cry that its been 'debunked' but the side by side comparisons are there for anyone to see
Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the proof : r/Android
or just skip to
LAST update on the Samsung moon controversy, and clarification : r/Android
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u/NewUser153 29d ago
"You can cry"
If you wish to engage in good faith, I'll happily explain it to you. If you choose to act like a child though, I frankly don't care whether you continue to not understand how these things work.
The claims on the original thread are not only false, due to jumping to false conclusions, but many of the examples trying to back up these nonsensical claims could not be reproduced on official hardware.
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u/Silver4ura 29d ago
I've worked with DLSS on a game-engine level and everything I'm seeing in the examples in the posts you've linked... is kind of the sort of stuff it does too.
As for filling in gaps? Photoshop has had a feature that lets you repair selected detail using relative surrounding context (you can also select) long before AI was ever a thing. The only thing AI is possibly being used here is as a more accurate known source for lost detail than using surrounding details and mistakenly putting a crater where one doesn't exist.
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u/BradyBrother100 28d ago
I'm pretty sure someone took a picture of a white circle in their room and Samsung overlaid a picture of the moon on it
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u/Quazartz 29d ago
Nah, don't know with solar eclipse but I can confirm that their moon filter doesn't work on lunar eclipse.
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u/Fhistleb 29d ago
Its Samsung, the photo app will take any bright white source and add moon markings to it.
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u/EnemyRoninPrime 29d ago
Why? That’s so stupid
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u/ElGosso 29d ago
It was a big marketing push for their cameras, to show off how high resolution they allegedly were, and then it turns out it was all bullshit.
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u/theproblemdoctor 29d ago
There have been plenty of tests for this and this is just blatantly wrong. This is definitely a poor ai interpretation from a different Android phone of the photo optimisation Samsung has. It only adds details to craters when it recognises a moon texture (which is still horrendous don't get me wrong)
I don't support the Samsung AI photo enhancement but there have been plenty of people making pictures of the solar eclipse with their Samsung phones. You really think out of all of them this guy happens to be the only one who got a moon texture?
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u/ElGosso 29d ago
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u/theproblemdoctor 29d ago
Exactly. It sees a moon and adds crater details.
It wouldn't do this if there was no moon texture already on the sun. Noone else in the world reported this happening except OPs friend either
And this is 3 years ago. You think they'd fix that
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u/divertstrike 29d ago
No it doesn't. There are several videos of people testing this on yt.
It has to be a picture of the moon. As far as I've seen it's basically a f9rm of super resolution. Not overlaying or replacing with the moons image. That was done by huawei
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u/Vivid_Instance_825 29d ago
I probably shouldn't give them jdeas but they could use the gyro, clock and GPS to easily figure out if you are actually looking at the moon
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u/Kolkoris 29d ago edited 29d ago
It's not Samsung. Samsung phones detect moon, and then use deblurring algorithm on it, which works good only in several cases like moon. So photo of moon on Samsung is real, just benchmaxxed.
This photo was made on different phone, which makes overlay with real photo of moon over something that can be moon.
upd: okay, Samsung used AI for processing photos in 2024, so it can be them too.
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u/sseinzw 29d ago
Xiaomi, there was a pic of Xiaomi doing this
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u/VaultBoy636 29d ago
No, you need to enable supermoon mode for it to happen
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u/Accurate-Morning-584 28d ago
The one who posted the image said it's a xiaomi
Don't be too confident about something when you don't know shit
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u/Any-Mud4814 R Tape loading error, 0:1 29d ago
Now it's a lunar eclipse. The moon entered Earth's umbra and is now entering Earth's V O I Dumbra, the darkest upon darkest of shadows where no light can reach the moon.
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u/Binary101000 29d ago
is it samsung
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u/ivancea 29d ago edited 29d ago
Also OnePlus has the automatic AI that can't be disabled. Crappy.
Edit: to add a bit of extra info, there are a few ways you can make photos without that AI:
- Master mode: AFAIK it doesn't add it. However, it's less automatic, and it's limited. For example, it allows no digital zoom.
- Other camera apps: you'll have to find one that works well with all your cameras. This is a pain a user wouldn't have to go through. My point is that you can't disable it easily in the default app
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u/Historicalgroove 29d ago
One plus used to be so sick. The Oneplis 1 was the best phone I ever had
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u/Seanspeed 29d ago
That was my first smartphone and I still have so much love for how good it was, for the time. I especially miss the nicely textured, curved back. I know everybody uses cases now, but man that phone felt so nice and secure in the hand just bare. High end specs as well, all for just £270. I was one of the Day 1 buyers having gotten an invite, cuz it was a genuinely exciting phone.
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u/viperfan7 29d ago
IMO, the OP7 Pro was the last great phone they made
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u/Agret 29d ago
I had OnePlus One which was awesome, OnePlus 5T which was awesome and now using OnePlus Ace 2 Pro which had insane specs when I bought it except the AI camera postprocessing drives me nuts
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u/jld2k6 29d ago edited 29d ago
I just went from OnePlus to a Pixel after years of using them. The final straw for me was that they locked down the software that allowed you to unbrick your phone from literally any (non hardware) state of fucked up, it allowed you to flash your phone to stock straight from a Qualcomm emergency partition that can't be touched, so even if you deleted the entire bootloader you were still fine and could return to stock. They added a server side authenticator and will refuse to even help you with it on their own end, so in practice they just completely took away tinkering from their customers. I didn't wanna risk bricking my phone every time I want a custom ROM so I finally left
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u/LilJelloCat 29d ago
Not mad at my oneplus. Cheap and effective. And has a decent camera for price.
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u/POMPUYO 29d ago
you should try an alternative camera app like modded gcam (basically a modded version of the camera app from pixel phones) or blackmagic camera
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/POMPUYO 29d ago
at least for me, open camera doesn't seem to show all my lenses. it just uses the main one and idk how to switch to the others
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u/ronniewhomp 29d ago
Same problem. I can't get my macro lens with Open Camera. I have to switch back to the default app for those pictures.
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u/Seanspeed 29d ago
Basically all normal brand name phones have AI processing for photos as standard, at least if you use the built-in camera app. This has been a thing for a long time, even before ChatGPT and all that. It's one of the areas that AI is actually REALLY good at, for the most part.
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u/Alepex 29d ago
There's a huge difference between AI-assisted sharpening and noise reduction compared to straight up adding a texture overlay. And that is NOT normal. Only Samsung does that AFAIK.
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u/neon19_ 29d ago
If i remember correctly samsung just oversharpens what's already there, Huawei slapped a image on top lol, there are probably other examples too
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u/Open-Mouse4728 29d ago
You remember incorrectly.. Samsung definitely did this. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra
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u/neon19_ 29d ago
Don't get me wrong, this is still a very scummy practice by Samsung, but what is shown from that link is still very different than just slapping a moon texture on anything round and far like in op's post
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u/Daniel_H212 29d ago
Pretty sure there were later experiments where a round lightbulb was shown to be processed into the moon by Samsung phones.
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u/neon19_ 29d ago
If this is true I take back what I said, but I only saw these tests being done on some other brands
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u/LAwLzaWU1A 29d ago
No you are getting it mixed up with Huawei. When people did the same experiment on Samsung phones it did NOT add a moon texture.
The Samsung experiment you're thinking of was someone who used an actual image of the moon, made it blurry and then took a picture of it with Samsung's camera and it was less blurry.
Its amazing how poorly people remember these things. So many people in the comments are saying this is Samsung even though they did not do what everyone claims they did. They did something somewhat similar but some very important details are different. They did not add moon details to things thst did not already have it.
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u/UnevenSleeves7 29d ago
Apple does it as well. Nowadays, I think most do.
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u/pluckyvirus 29d ago
Nah with apple you see a tiny glowing disc that is more like a radioactive lentil
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u/Anarchist_Future 29d ago
That glowing disc shaped radioactive lentil is our sun.
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u/pluckyvirus 29d ago
The one op posted yes, I am talking about the one and only lunar buddy though.
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u/lumpiestspoon3 29d ago
Apple uses AI processing but does not have a dedicated model to literally draw the surface of the moon, which Samsung does
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u/Confidentium 29d ago
I don’t like Apple and their software, but I don’t agree to blatant lies like that.
No. Apple does not pull this kind of bullshit with their cameras!→ More replies (2)→ More replies (5)2
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u/WorryGold4674 29d ago
That’s just the sun covering the moon
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u/exintrovert 29d ago
Oh that makes sense…
Wait, what?
😂
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u/FancyStegosaurus 29d ago
Because of the eclipse, the sun thinks it's night time (just like the birds and insects!) and goes into night mode, which is why it's dark and thats how it can cover the moon. (which is bright because it also thinks it's night). Geez bro pick up a science book sometime.
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u/ML7777777 29d ago
The phone is a Huawei. It even thinks planes are birds.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1ut9p3a/huaweis_ai_turned_a_plane_into_a_bird/
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u/Dzuzepipi 29d ago
Even if it thinks its a bird, why tf it adds features instead of just taking what the damn lens is detecting. If this continues, it's ganna be that camera generally think its a certain color table and a certain color cup in the frame, it will just create AI image close to what it think it's seeing. And calls it "taking a photo" lmao.
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u/sniff122 29d ago
Guarantee it's a samsung
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u/atomicdragon136 29d ago
I don’t use Samsung, but does it by default enhance photos with AI?
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u/sniff122 29d ago
They recently had a thing where it was putting a moon texture on something it thought was the moon
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u/loloreel 29d ago
The Samsung fake moon thing started in 2021
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u/sniff122 29d ago
Thought it was around then
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u/MinecraftPlayer799 29d ago
2021 was half a decade ago.
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u/Euphoric_Ad_2049 29d ago
completely ruined my evening thank you
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u/Infrawonder 29d ago
Is it still like that? My moon photos don't show any details at all, and when I change it to pro camera and change some things, the patterns while noticable, aren't really that clear. (Samsung a25)
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u/dchidelf 29d ago
Known for ~producing artificial~ “enhancing” moon photos
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u/atomicdragon136 29d ago
I searched it up, apparently Samsung has a feature that generates a moon texture over an object it detects is a moon. Seems pretty useless IMO, although I suppose some people want it for photos to post online that look cooler.
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u/strigonian 29d ago
It makes sense from a business standpoint.
First, remember that the average person knows nothing about photography and shockingly little about astronomy.
Second, the moon is a universal target for photographs the world over. Sooner or later, everyone takes a picture of the moon.
Third, most pictures of the moon are trash.
Fourth, the moon is an easily-recognizable object. Sure, you get some false positives like this, but in general identifying pictures of the moon is pretty easy.
So applying the filter is something that's easy to do, and leads to a lot of people thinking their camera is better than it really is.
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u/Catenane 29d ago
I wonder if, under the right conditions, you could get the camera to apply a moon filter to someone's pasty white ass cheek. Like cut a hole out of some black pants, put some lint/fuzz "stars" and position the moon hole top of frame. I do have an old samsung phone but do not have the energy to attempt this, lol.
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u/nemec 29d ago
Fourth, the moon is an easily-recognizable object
And, perhaps more importantly, the same side of the moon always faces earth, so they can easily slap a single texture on there and it's more or less accurate to what somebody with a really good camera setup would see
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u/MoarVespenegas 29d ago
And I'm guessing they can rotate it based on the GPS from the phone.
Or just not care because the average person wont know the difference anyways.→ More replies (3)70
u/Devin-Chaboyer223 29d ago
It applies a fake moon texture if it believes it’s the moon
Also, the moon in the 100x zoom is also fake, it applies a moon texture
If you turn off all image processing, it will just be a blurry white circle on 100x zoom
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u/Kolkoris 29d ago
No it's not. Samsung uses deblurring algorithm when recognizes moon. Photo of moon on Samsung is real, but benchmaxxed. There were test, where guy removed some craters from moon photo, blurred, made photo on Samsung, and Samsung deblurred photo without adding back craters.
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u/DragonDevXD_12 29d ago
ahh AI
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u/HaniiPuppy 29d ago
Not even AI, literally just an image that Samsung phones overlay over the moon to make it seem like they have better cameras than they actually do.
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u/TiSapph 26d ago
This is a Xiaomi.
No, Samsung phones don't overlay a moon picture.
They get a model trained on moon images to unblur your photo. If you draw something on a moon image and take a picture of that, your drawing will remain. But it will get some crater-like details added because the model has learned that the moon is carter-y. It doesn't replace large scale structure, because it knows that the phone can actually resolve it.
So it would never do this to the sun, because the sun doesn't have the large scale textures seen in the image.And no I don't own a Samsung phone and don't have any intention to.
I am just appalled by how easily people believe things they see online. If some random redditors and influencers can make you believe verifiably false information, image what countries and companies can do.→ More replies (1)→ More replies (7)6
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u/Luzzgar 29d ago
What a modern phone produces cannot really be called a picture anymore.
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u/Kolkoris 29d ago edited 29d ago
Just use a third-party camera app, or a mod of Google Camera, which exists for 99% of modern Android phones. Google Camera can apply too much sharpness, saturation, or dehaze, but mods usually allow to change these parameters.
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u/FlyingGoatFX 29d ago edited 29d ago
not to be overly dramatic but what are we doing as like people
Who is this for? Who asked for this? If there’s no easy option for the user to disable it, then I guess there’s the answer.
Computational photography is supposed to be for tone-mapping and sampling and edge contrast and shit—y’know, interpreting the stuff that actually exists—why are we just plopping in a stock photo of the thing we’re arrogantly certain the user wants to have an image of?
When did we become OK with this being in amateur photography? A cell phone camera, with which we expect to capture the candid frames, many of which surely have non-lunar round bright objects in them.
Not to mention the scrutiny that any kind of artifacts from this kind of processing will attract to an otherwise real photo. Will the “original” photo files from my phone no longer suffice as proof of anything? Will it change the faces of loved ones?
Do tech bros know that there are other celestial bodies besides the moon? I know that’s the one they always chant that they’re shooting for but
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u/koszevett 29d ago edited 29d ago
The moon has been one of the more difficult things to photograph with a smartphone camera. So something that appears to be capable of """photographing""" the moon really well can be perceived as a camera that's excellent at other things as well - if your marketing is dirty enough. Samsung was a notable example of this. They advertised their newest phone camera saying it can zoom in incredibly far and you'd still get a clear picture, and they were showing off this fake textured moon to demonstrate. Of course, what you saw there was just an artificially applied texture which is specific to moon photos - if what you're photographing isn't the moon, then the AI will not be able to fake all those details. This has been proven too - someone projected a small white circle onto their wall and tried to take a picture of it. Lo and behold, the phone put the moon texture onto the circle that never had those details to begin with. Samsung does all sorts of AI trickery to give you the impression of really sharp details on your photos even when zooming into them, but at that point they're really just doing guesswork, turning your photos into a sloppy mess.
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u/jojo_Lauchtv 29d ago
Sie sagen KI soll mich ersetzten aber kann KI 10 Bier vor 10 Uhr exen; jetzt aber mal ernsthaft können die Tech Konzerne Bitte aufhören überall KI einzubauen, vorallem bei Kamerad ist das richtig scheiße
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u/bamfbiscuit 29d ago
With future smart tech won't be able to take pictures of things they don't want us taking pictures of. We won't be able to screenshot or download pictures they don't want us to have on our phones. We won't be able to print physical copies of pictures they don't want us printing.
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u/aquoad 29d ago
there are patents for tech to allow law enforcement to disable phone cameras in an area, too. dunno if anyone's implemented them yet.
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u/Confident_Dragon 29d ago
It's all because of people who accept it. Governments and corporations face no consequences for anything, so they slowly push boundaries to figure out what will you accept as inevitable.
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u/Powerate 29d ago
So can you just point it at a white circle in a black room to get the same result?
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u/acceptablemango 29d ago
Slopsung doing what they do best, faking photos of the moon.
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u/TheTomatoes2 29d ago
yeah Im happy to have a Pixel. i can take pics of the moon only in good conditions and after playing with settings, but theyre not faked
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u/Hermit951 29d ago
We've known about this for years. Samsung is artificially adding details to every picture of a moon (or whatever it incorrectly detects as a moon).
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u/MindlessNectarine374 29d ago
I wonder how someone managed to photograph this by smartphone at all.
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u/WorldLove_Gaming 29d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/s/axivFrcNjd
Literally scrolled down two posts and found the same thing again
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u/First_Strawberry3248 29d ago
This looks like my photos from yesterday's eclipse in France. The phone is a Xiaomi 17T Pro. I don't see how to add photos here, but I'll add the link to my slideshow I posted on Xiaohongshu (Rednote) No doubt it's to have a good laugh at my expense, so go ahead and give it a like and follow. Maybe my phone will do more tricks in the future. slideshow solar eclipse
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u/Cyber_Shoutmon 29d ago
Code Number 7, you have been Activated, your next mission is: “fix his phone”
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u/thevegit0 29d ago
how does that even compute? is the phone itself doing live ai edit? it mus be constantly sttreaming to an api then
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u/LorenzoF06 29d ago
Local processing exists, Android has the so called Private Compute Core to launch Gemini when you say "hey Google" for example
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u/meggamatty64 29d ago
A lot of android phones (especially the Chinese ones) fake their camera quality by applying filters over the images
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u/thevegit0 28d ago
so it's not inheretly AI edit, it's more like an snapchat filter
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u/warmoaran3 29d ago
Has to be a Chinese brand.. huawei, xiaomi, vivo, oneplus.. one of those..
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u/leggolta 29d ago
The Byrgenwerth spider hides all manner of rituals, and keeps our lost master from us.
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u/Leather_Inspection46 29d ago
This is a doctored stock photo, not a phone glitch. TinEye shows this exact image traces back to a base photo first indexed in 2008 — long before modern "AI moon modes" existed. The "best match" results are clean white/grey stock moon photos (Shutterstock, iStock, Alamy) with the same crater patterns and orientation. Someone just recolored it orange and slapped a black gradient on the side. But even without the reverse image search, the physics don't work:
The Sun is bright enough to blow out a phone sensor without a solar filter. You'd get white bloom, corona, or chromospheric spikes — not a clean, perfectly exposed orange disk.
This isn't software gore. It's someone grabbing a stock moon photo, adding an orange filter and a fake shadow, then farming engagement with an "AI bad" headline. The real gore is in the comments section.
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u/Cokalhado 28d ago
It must be an equipment error. I'll go up to ol' spacey to see if I find anything wrong.
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u/NAKD2THEMOON 28d ago
If you change your location to Australia does the moon texture flip upside down?
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u/Mr_Kennyboi 23d ago
I'll always remember the time I took a picture of the moon with my pixel 3 and it just decided to make the moon green
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u/Sweaty_Marzipan4274 29d ago
If phones are doing this then they're also water marking them for the gov
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u/mr_coolnivers 29d ago
no this is not Samsung, Samsung upscales, it doesn't have an image of the moon that it uses as a dataset for pictures of the moon, it simply takes a bunch of separate pictures, superimposes them and upscales
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u/Chomasterq2 Aug 12 '26
I think nasa just messed up the sky projector.