Blurry After Editing

That bizarre work-around of rotating the photo has worked for me. With iCloud open I could then watch the rotated photos synching. Thank you for that tip.

I have the same problem on an Apple M1 iMac running Ventura. But the problem goes away entirely if I shut down my computer between uploading my photos and editing them.

Same issue here. I experienced similar issues on my Intel (i5) Mac and recently upgraded to an Apple M2 Max Powerbook. I am using iCloud, but have it set to "Download Originals to this Mac. / Store original photos and videos on this Mac." so that I will have access to full-resolution versions of my photos on my Mac.

I hope this is resolved by Apple soon. In the meantime, I used Brian Hartmann's suggestion to rotate the photos and then rotate them back. That worked for me. Thank you Brian.

As others have noted, four successive uses of Command-R to rotate an image often eliminates the blurring, but not always. And the blurring never appears in Edit mode, only in the normal display mode.

That didn't work for me, but what did is when you have the crisp raw photo, hit Command, Shift, 4 to take a screen shot. Then export that file to jpeg and mine came out beautiful.

vanabsten wrote:

Good news. I installed the mac OS Sоnоmа bеta yesterday and it looks like the bug has beed fixed!

Good feedback - thanks. On the downside: (a) It's a bit depressing that we have to wait for a major OS upgrade to get silly bugs fixed; (b) IIRC Apple fixed this issue in an earlier Ventura update - and then broke it in a subsequent update - so who knows what's going to happen in future updates.

I still have this problem after so many years, since Mojave, seems like Apple might not know what could have caused it.

I would suggest to any professional photographers just switch to paid version of CaptureOne or something else; Photos.app is simply unpredictable and may waste so much of your time and risk delivery schedule. Casual user may consider switching to free version of CaptureOne if able to accept limited functionality.

Good news. I installed the mac OS Sоnоmа bеta yesterday and it looks like the bug has beed fixed!

Fixed in MacOS Sonoma! Hooray :-)

Just signed up here to vent my frustration at this. I've experienced this exact issue for as long as I can remember, having owned various MacBooks for 15+ years. There are also reports of this bug going as far back as 2008 (After editing, photos now look blurry - Apple Community)... 15 years without a proper fix is honestly absurd.

The fact that Apple (suppliers of the most expensive and supposedly "capable" laptops for creatives/professionals), have let this bug fester for so long really is a complete joke. Personally, couple that with the fact that I've just dropped £10k+ on camera gear, and yet cannot edit the photos on my £2k MacBook due to useless software... its infuriating stuff.

I've attempted to report this via the online chat. However, the support agent unfortunately wasn't able to simply elevate it to the relevant team without having me jump through a hundred loops first. I did find find a separate feedback form for submitting Photos bug reports here - Feedback - Photos - Apple.

I'd recommend anybody that comes across the issue here to also submit a bug report using the above form. Other than that I'm out of ideas.

Side note: Rotating doesn't fix this for me. I'm editing 150mb .AWR files from the Sony A7RV, which seems to make things even more unstable for me. I used to have maybe 1/10 edited photos going blurry with my lower megapixel camera. Since upgrading, EVERY single photo becomes blurry after editing with no temporary fix available other than reverting the changes ☹️.

Hi, did you contact Apple? I think posting the problem here is not going to help as Apple don't seem to read it. If you contact Apple, ask for a Senior Advisor as the regular support staff have no idea and maybe tell them to look at the thread. I might have another go at contacting them as I just took a lot of photos, edited them and want to upload them quickly but can't as the problem still persists. I usually have to wait about 24 hours before photos are usable.

I use an Olympus EM5 mk 2 which I shoot RAW+JPEG. Am now running Sonoma 14.0 and don't see this blurry photo after editing in Apple Photos. But I also don't remember seeing it prior to upgrading to Sonoma. So perhaps the issue is with certain RAW files. (I also shoot RAW+JPEG with my Sony RX100mk5 and have never seen this issue with the RAW photos from that camera.) Admittedly I have never just imported the RAW files from either camera alone - I allow Photos to import the RAW+JPEG pairs - so perhaps that is also why I have not seen the issue. (And yes, when I read this thread and tested it out on my M1iMac I did switch from the original being JPEG to RAW.)