Noise/Artifacts - is there anything I can do?

[BadWolf5150]

Noticed recently my iPhone XR is taking horrible pictures. Outdoor photos are better. I'm assuming it's an issue with low light/high ISO. I think it's a hardware issue but wanted to share to see if anyone had any ideas on if there was a way to correct these in LR. As you can see, the photo is very noisy and also has, not sure what to call it, blockiness? artifacts? You can see the blocks/pixels on the wood floor how they are not smooth.

I especially notice this on photos of people. Their faces don't look right...almost like they were painted or smoothed out too much, and looks plasticy. In the face picture for example, it looks like more than noise. I just don't know what to call it or how to fix?

[gary_sc]

Are these photos being taken with "Camera" on the iPhone or with Lightroom-Mobile's camera?

I agree with your assesment as to how it looks. I wonder if there is a setting that is forcing it to shoot at too high an iso AND a setting for automatic noise removal. Also, are these raw images (DNG for specifics) or JPG images?

[BadWolf5150]

Thanks for the reply. These pictures were taken with the iOS camera app and saved as .JPG.  Resolution 4032x33+9 ISO 640. Exposure 1/30sec at f/1.8

I did some experimentation and the photos with higher ISO (640,800) look terrible. The photos with ISO 320 are still extremely noisy but the artifact/blockiness is not there. 

I tried with the LR camera and saved as RAW.  Very noisy still but seeing simliar results.  I'm guessing its camera hardware.  

Is there anything besides noise reduction I could try to help clear up the blocky artifacts?

[gary_sc]

The blocky artifacts look more like jpg degredation than noise (or the combination of the degredation of the noise). 

You state that you noticed this recently. Have you futzed with any of the settings in the recent past?

I have the iPhone 11 Pro and find the noise to be very tolerable. If I really need to take a photo I'll go get my Canon 7Dm2 but for general pictures I have no hesitancy to use my iPhone. I was just looking at the settings for Camera on my phone (found in the phone's Settings app). One option was saving as JPG or the HEIF. The latter (HEIF) is a lossless format. If you are not saving your images in that format, try that and see if that makes a difference.

[dj_paige]

Shocking! A cell phone camera that doesn't take good photos!

Every new cell phone that comes out has advertisements about how this is the best cell phone camera ever, but none of them take photos as well as a DSLR. I doubt there's much you can do here, I generally gave up taking photos with my cell phone cameras except in bright sunlight.