There are a lot of reasons why soap operas look the way they do, partly to do with ingenuity and partly with economics. 

Back in the soap opera heyday of the '70s and '80s, soap cinematographers actually spread a small amount of Vaseline (petroleum jelly) on their lenses to give a scene a soft, glowing look. That's a pretty clever, hands-on approach to filmmaking that doesn't exist in the same way anymore -- today, the same effect is achieved (albeit less pronounced) with custom-built filters that can snap on and off the cameras more easily than removing a layer of petroleum jelly.

Fortunately, petroleum jelly is cheap, because everything else about the soap opera look is dictated by economics.

Soaps were an early user of videotape (and more recently, digital video), rather than shooting on film. Most maintain that film looks nicer (the reasons for this get incredibly technical and subjective), but it's more expensive to buy and more time-consuming to edit. One of the advantages to video, though, is that it's described as having a "smoother" look (again for very technical reasons relating to the number of frames per second it records).

One last factor dictating the soap opera look, and which is again dictated by budgetary constraints, is the lighting. To save time, soaps generally put light evenly across the entire set, rather than on the individual actors, so the actors can move around without requiring a new lighting set up. As every kid who has ever tried to tell a ghost story with a flashlight under their chin knows, directed light makes things look sharper than blanketed light.

Time is a big factor for soaps, of course, because not only do they have lower budgets than their prime-time counterparts, but they also have to produce five hours of content per week instead of one.

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