Does removing metadata change how the image looks?

Question

Accepted Answer

No. Metadata like C2PA Content Credentials, EXIF and XMP tags is stored separately from the pixels, so stripping it leaves the visible image identical — what you see is untouched. Calabi’s standard clean does add imperceptible changes at the pixel level — very light grain, with stronger modes adding tiny perspective or scale shifts that defeat fingerprinting — but these are calibrated to be invisible to the eye, and it uses visually lossless encoding (CRF 20 H.264 for video, JPEG quality 95+ for images). The result reads as a clean phone capture at the metadata layer while looking exactly like the original.