It’s possible you’re seeing some undesirable output from the Remove Noise model. To be sure, send us the image and we can double-check.
For context, the Remove Noise model will still attempt to improve faces, but it may just do so badly (especially for small or low-quality faces). Face Recovery runs another model on top of Remove Noise output that creates better results. We haven’t heard any other reports of Face Recovery running when it’s disabled.
If this issue is caused by the Remove Noise model, we do have an upcoming improved Remove Noise model (see roadmap that should help with the issue.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Ah, I wasn’t aware Remove Noise would try to reconstruct faces. Good to know. Hmm, I wonder if that can be dialed up/down in the future for those pesky background faces? (I shoot a lot of sports and it likes to fix those blurry faces)
So I repro’d it another way and realized that I had on “Remove Noise” AND “Enhance Resolution”. I suspect that the “suppress noise” coupled with the “remove noise” are both trying to fix those blurred background faces. So my workaround right now is to turn of noise reduction when using enhance resolution. This drastically reduces the ai trying to reconstruct the faces.