What distinct technical advantage does Deep Fusion offer over Smart HDR in preserving subtle textures and fine details in moderately low-light scenes?

Deep Fusion offers a distinct technical advantage over Smart HDR in preserving subtle textures and fine details in moderately low-light scenes primarily through its advanced capture strategy and its sophisticated, pixel-level computational photography pipeline powered by the Neural Engine. To understand this, we must first briefly explain Smart HDR. Smart HDR is a computational photography technique that takes multiple images, usually between three and nine, at different exposure levels (a process called exposure bracketing). It then aligns and merges these images to create a single photograph with a wider dynamic range, meaning it can capture more detail in both the brightest (highlights) and darkest (shadows) parts of a scene, preventing overexposure and underexposure. While it enhances overall image quality and exposure balance, its primary focus is on expanding the light information, not specifically on reconstructing fine textures at a microscopic level. Deep Fusion, by contrast, is a more specialized and intensive computational process that activates automatically in moderately low-light conditions, before extremely dark scenes trig....