And unlike, for example, the Eiffel Tower, its appearance is not going to change drastically based on lighting. Moon shooting typically only happens at night, and Samsung's processing falls apart if the moon is partially obscured by clouds. One of the clearest ways Samsung's processing fiddles with the moon is in manipulating mid-tone contrast, making its topography more pronounced. Samsung does this because the Galaxy S21, S22, and S23 Ultra phones' 100x zoom images suck. They involve cropping massively into a small 10-MP sensor.

Samsung is hoping to talk its way out of a controversy over its camera processing technology. The company has shared an explanation of the Moon photo detection system it has used since the Galaxy S21. If you have Scene Optimizer turned on, AI detects when you're taking a clear photo of the Moon at 25X zoom or above. The tech lowers the brightness, captures multiple frames (to produce a bright, low-noise picture) and uses a neural network to enhance the detail using a high-resolution reference image for comparison. You can turn Scene Optimizer off. Samsung also notes that this won't work if you either take a snapshot of the obscured Moon or use an image that clearly wasn't taken on Earth.