Blurry After Editing

Aperture was a pro-level app, designed for the professional or serious hobbyist. Photos is aimed squarely at the iPhone shooter- not that it won't do more, but that's its target audience. If, like me, you miss Aperture then you need to look at similar apps, like the various forms of Lightroom, CaptureOne, OnOne Photo Raw, DxO Photolab and so on. If Aperture is your measure of a good app Photos will enver make you happy. It's just not designed for that.

I'll give that a try, but I believe there is some kind of software conflict with Photos.

I tried running Photos on another computer (M1 vs Intel) with the same images and I could not reproduce the problem. No blurry images on the second computer. More testing to follow...

I contacted Apple about this and the Apple help staff member didn't seem aware of the problem or how to fix it. He spoke to his manager who said it was fixed in the latest update so I installed it but it didn't change anything and the problem still exists. There is nothing in the release notes that says a bug for Photos was fixed either. It seems Apple know about the problem but haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.

I contacted Apple again on Friday and spoke to a Senior Advisor. He asked me to send screenshots and said he will be in contact with their engineers so hoping this moves forward and gets resolved soon. I hope everyone who has this problem contacts Apple and asks to speak to someone higher up. The more the better.

The photos I took on Friday were fundamentally broken, blurry and could not be exported after editing. I got a 3306 error message if I tried opening them in Preview. Now they are usable and sometimes stay crisp after editing so there does seem to be a time lag. Some still revert to blurry after editing though. A very strange and frustrating bug.

It looks like the more edits I apply to a photo the more likely it is to go blurry. So there's definitely a correlation between the amount of editing + the overall resolution of the photo (so I guess the overall amount of processing required), and this bug occurring.

The blurry thumbnail is presumably a placeholder of sorts until the photo has been processed, but clearly the underlying bug here prevents the photo from ever finishing processing (which is exacerbated by RAW/large files and some thorough editing). This obviously isn't a solution at all, just my extra 2 cents in case somebody at Apple ever sees it.

Ever think that, having spent £10k+ on camera gear, using a top of the range Sony, that you might not get the best results using give-away software? Or that if you're going to spend that kind of money on your gear that it might be worth spending a little on software that is equal to the camera? The issue here isn't the laptop, it's that Photos is aimed squarely at folks shooting with a phone and sharing across devices. It will do other things, but that's not what it is optimised for. I've said before you can write a doctoral thesis in TextEdit. It is possible. But is it the appropriate tool for the job? I see post after post on this forum from folks who are serious about their photography, have invested heavily in it, and the obvious is that they are using the wrong software. Photos is a give-away app. That's its price point. It does what it is intended to do, at that price point. I suggest that you'll have much better experience exploring apps that are optimised for what you're doing and the gear you're using.

I am utterly convinced that Apple have no real interest in serving high-end photographers with their software. Actions (or inactions) speak loudly.

So are you saying it’s okay for this long-standing bug to go unfixed because of my choice of camera? Like I said, I’ve also experienced this issue over the years using photos taken with various other cameras.

Also, what exactly makes Apple Photos give-away? I’m paying a premium for Apple products and the apps that are built in are part of the Apple ecosystem. I expect them to work as they’re designed to without any major flaws making them unusable.

Further to that, I have over a decade of personal photos in my Photos library, sorted into albums, geo-tagged, with various Photos-only metadata applied. Migrating everything into another app isn’t trivial. 

I’m not interested in the bloatware that comes with Adobe Lightroom and often don’t need to make more than a few adjustments to my photos. When I do need to, I’ll use other software that I have available. 

And where does Apple say that Photos is "aimed squarely at folks shooting with a phone and sharing across devices”? I must’ve missed that bit.

There’s no reason to be an Apple apologist. A bug fix is all that’s required here.

Rotating worked on some and not others. The problem seems to be worse if I use the Retouch tool - which has been a consistent problem in one way or another in photos with my Mac (2019 version with lots of storage and speed). Apple really needs to get on top of this. Originally I thought it might be slow upload problems but even after I upgraded to the fastest wi-fi and broadband, it's not fixed.

I've just taken over 1,000 RAW photos of a sporting event on a Canon EOS90D and uploaded them via SD card into a brand new M2 Max Macbook Pro, 64Gb RAM, 4Tb of storage and after a marathon editing session found everyone of those that I'd retouched/cropped/lightened etc was blurred and effectively unusable. Photos would also take it upon itself to intermittently crash whilst trying to unpick this mess by reverting each image to its original unedited status and to also corrupt some photos with psychedelic lines and colours

This blurring does NOT happen if I use a photo library containing edited RAW photos from my previous Macbook.

I don't have iCloud switched on, this is a new bug and one Apple need to get serious about resolving. I don't spend almost £5k on a laptop for it to be so fundamentally flawed.

This issue still exists for macOS 13.4.1 with photos that are RAW captured by iPhone 14 pro max. The rotating doesn't work, toggling the wand auto-edit on and the off then back on sometimes works, but not consistently. Seems that quality control has gone down in recent OS releases.

Sure, you could do this (and maybe Apple assumes that most people use the same, lossy, low-quality, JPEG workflow)...

...The thing is, many of us want a RAW workflow, so we can preserve our "digital negatives" AND take advantage of easy cataloguing and browsing capabilities. This all used to work, but is now broken - as so many contributors to this thread have demonstrated. (I suspect we'll have to wait until "Sonoma" to get any fixes, sadly.)

I hadn't seen the blurring problem for several weeks, but yesterday I upgraded to Ventura 13.5.2 (M1 iMac) and now many photos are blurred, including those that were fine yesterday before the upgrade. Only RAW versions of the image are blurred, JPEGs are still OK. Also, the magnification slider does not work on the blurred images. And, I can no longer right-click on an image in the browser to bring up the menu to duplicate, etc. If I double-click to open an image, then I can right-click to bring up the menu.

I doubt any professional shooter is relying on a give-away app for mission critical work. There are other alternatives to CaptureOne, among them the Lightroom suite of apps, Mylio, On1 Photo Raw, Photo Supreme and DxO Photo lab. Of them all Lightroom CC and Mylio are closest in feel to Photos.

@tomfw, it's not your choice of camera - I am using a Sony AR7 IV creating RAW files (called .ARW).

MacBook Air M2 Ventura 13.6.4. running Photos Version 8.0 and have the same exact issue. (@Brian Hartmann - As you can see, I'm on an M2)

Wrote some more about it on this thread over here:

Raw photos low resolution after editing (… - Apple Community

I agree it's frustrating. I guess I will have to upgrade as dgr27 and Yer_Man. Was holding off as a third party app I use a lot isn't compatible with Sonoma just yet...