Post-processing is ruining iPhone photos
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
What was perhaps the most infuriating thing was that what I was seeing in the viewfinder preview looked great. I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.
Phone took 5 seconds or so to take each picture and it came out looking like it was just daylight. The only way you could tell I took it at night was the creation time of the file. The photo had things visible that I couldn't even see with my naked eye!
Technologically impressive, sure. What I was taking a picture of? Not at all.
I'll know for future reference but there's been no more combos of frosty and full moon so far.
Ah well. Wasn't an important picture or anything, just seemed neat. My phone encouraged me to enjoy the moment instead :)
If you want to reproduce a complicated scene like that, use a full manual app like Halide and then edit the raw back to what you remember. Or get an a7s.
On the other hand the iphone knows what time it is, your location, the location of the moon, the weather - it could probably guess if you're outside or inside - so it seems like a bit of a waste it can't do a better job at anticipating the scene...
Cameras do know if you're inside or outside though - at least, they know if you're shooting a landscape and if the scene is lit by natural or artificial light. That matters for boring but important things like auto white balance / auto ISO / if it should focus to infinity.
As long as you let me turn it off, hey, party on, knock yourself out with postprocessing hackery.
The first part -- the easy part -- is the problem Apple can't seem to manage.
Well, you can - record a video instead and press the button that takes a photo during video. It looks terrible, so it's better to switch to a 3rd party camera app instead. I think the main use case for those is women using beauty filters though.
If I can't turn that off, then the OEM camera app is simply broken. Telling me to spend money on a third-party app is just carrying water for two corporations that aren't paying you. Don't do that, at least not for free.
Halide is perfectly straightforward to use.
> I'm fine with plain old .JPG most of the time.
Halide can save JPGs if that's what you prefer.
>Telling me to spend money on a third-party app is just carrying water for two corporations that aren't paying you
The built in camera app has to cater to a lot of different kinds of user. I, like you, would be happy if it offered more controls, but this might make it less usable for the majority. The cost of one of these third party apps is pretty trivial compared to the cost of a new iPhone (or a 'real' camera), so it doesn't bother me overly – but you can obviously spend your money how you wish.
OTOH I don’t really have anything interesting on my phone in the first place, so it all really is a bit academic to me.
It does need location as long as the app is open, though you can make it imprecise.
A long hold on the focus point brings up an exposure slider, which lets you easily darken the image. It works really well, but the Samsung doesn't quite have the "flatten everything" feature that Marques talked about though (https://youtu.be/88kd9tVwkH8 - recommend watching this).
Also the stronger AI enhancements (auto scene detect) can be turned off with a single toggle; it's useful having the control.
And if that's not enough, there's the Pro mode - everything can be made manual.
I'm ashamed to say I'm generally getting better photos with my S21U than my old full frame D70s, with decent fixed lenses (35+50). Mainly it's down to the sensor; I often go for the hand held, low light kind of look, and the Samsung results are more often than not simply excellent.
I intend to get a mirrorless Nikon Z6II body and a lens adapter this year (my lenses still have decent value), but nonetheless, taking the time to fully explore the tool in your hand is probably one of the best things you can do.
A silly low-res solution would be to screen shot the camera app.
I wonder if you could at least take the screenshot of the preview.
The iPhone can shoot raw and avoid these issues, it's how I use mine. The complaints people would have if the iPhone didn't post-process for the average consumer... Every camera phone I've ever used has horrible defaults for JPG processing -- avoid it by shooting raw and using something like Darkroom to finesse.
No, you use a half decent professional camera and you can even opt for RAW format, the only processing your getting is the averaging algorithm for your exposure and ISO settings. Even without that all you are getting is some JPG compression, not half baked ML trying to move people's faces around, that's bonkers. Also pretty sure you are not getting RAW on any phone unless you are running some very custom OS/software, even then seems pretty pointless considering how noisy it's going to be.
It's the reason some still pick RED vs Alexa. Your RAW File & Colour Science aren't just up to you, they're carefully mastered with an ODT -- On Device Transform.
Also, let's see how Nikon go in the near future with Snapdragon.
These images are 90% shot on iPhone -- raw and edited in Darkroom on iOS. https://instagram.com/grant.pal
It’s dishonest to try compare color profiles with AI image manipulation .
Sure I forgot about colour correction, congrats... It's pretty absurd to argue uniform pixel data manipulation for colour processing is somehow comparable to ML based full image manipulation. One is for the purpose of trying to improve accuracy, the other is doing the exact opposite.
> and you're entirely wrong
But i'm not perfect either: I was being pushy in the tone of my previous comments.. I was focused on the high level differences but too impatient in my delivery - Had I been more nuanced and respectful you might have been more receptive to it, sorry.
I'm not sure if you mean "raw" in RAW sense, but FWIW this critique applies to Smart HDR specifically. If you shoot and share RAW images with an iPhone Smart HDR is not used, and you will reliably see something closely resembling reality.¹ I shoot everything in RAW, trained by the regret of not doing this for special shots earlier in my life.
¹ "You can, of course, take a RAW photo using apps like Halide (it’s worth noting that ProRAW photos are still post-processed), but then you’ll have a much larger image file just to get a more natural result."
Is it possible the appraiser was doing so?
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iphae1e882a3/io...
I promise all dedicated cameras are also doing (almost all of) this kind of processing though. It’s needed to develop raw images at all. The specific tuning is just up to taste.
The drawings in old field guides are curated to a supposed "idealized" form based on their use case (i.e., to be recognized in the wild by other researchers). Those specific idealized versions don't actually exist, though.
There was a famous instance of a ww1 phototographer (dont remember his name) who would allegedly move dead bodies around in his shots to better capture what he thought was the emotional reality through the resulting image rather than what the literal scene was.
We can have all the computerized scanning of the universe at our disposal but ultimately there's always the analog hole of our judgement in its interpretation
The idea that "reality is the goal" is the product of not bothering to think at all. Choosing what to make an image of, and framing the image, will always be in service of a story or "emotional reality". It always was, from cave-wall paintings onwards.
I was driving down the 99 towards Seattle last week, and the foggy sky took on this wonderful warm glow. But my phone did what it always does with the sky: change the color balance of the sky so that it looks blue. I wish it'd just left it alone.
You can likely stick your photograph into some basic editing software and set your own white balance. I even think the built-in Windows photo viewer can do WB adjustment these days
Exactly the point and exactly what is needed. Photographer choices, not camera choices. A pro[1] photographer knows what to do for different subjects, light, and goals, but phone software has no clue. Every image is a selfie for instagram.
1. Or an amateur who bothers to learn and experiment.
It is actually stagering how bad the photo looks after compared to without.
This was always going to be the case because no matter how good your software is, phone cameras will never have the optics, and probably not the sensors too, of a DSLR camera.
To cover this, manufacturers employ all sorts of clever post processing, which in turn make it so that your final image is different from the preview you're seeing (which is also heavily altered from what the sensor is seeing, probably).
With new tools such as AI introduced into post processing, we are just seeing more artifacts in what has been a fairly extensive process already. You can only push the tiny sensors and lenses so far but every manufacturer still wants the public to perceive their latest release as if a lot of progress has been made.
Perhaps people expect too much from their phone.
I wouldn’t call this “manipulation” however. It suggests some nefarious deed when instead it’s just about balancing color, skin tone, denoising, etc.
Settings > Camera > Macro Control
There are some other cases (like if you have your finger over one camera it might switch) but that’s the really noticeable one. You’ll usually regret changing it though.
If I want 48 megapixel resolution and/or the added capture detail from ProRAW I'll turn on RAW+HEIC. That gives you a ProRaw you can edit after, as well as an "instant exposure" that basically just converts it to what you'd expect from HEIC mode. There is a tremendous amount of detail captured in the ProRaw shots that is processed away by the default app. As far as I know, you can't actually take 48 megapixel photos in the default camera app.
I seldom ever need to edit an individual file, because even if I'm shooting in 48mpx Halide will cook off an instagram-friendly edited version right away automatically. If I ever do want to tinker with the raw exposure, it's an option. The rest of the UI did take some fiddling to get used to, but I started out switching to Halide whenever I wanted to take a particularly good photo and before long I found myself using Halide for everything, because otherwise I'd be reviewing pictures and realize how much better one could have come out if I hadn't used the default app.
I found the official review of the 14 Pro camera by Halide's developer Lux to be a good primer on leveraging the app's capabilities: https://lux.camera/iphone-14-pro-camera-review-a-small-step-...
(Apologies for not seeing your response earlier.)
The reason is that phones for years been screwing the photos no matter what you do, at one point both me and my dad bought a Motorola phone where they promised it would have an "eco-system" of accessories, with existing ones including more advanced cameras, game controllers and so on. We went to a place full of beautiful animals, took a ton of photos, but when we checked his photos, all of them were horribly screwed, like everything was pink, or even literally sheared, I found out the reason is that when you use the viewfinder, the phone skips some processing, as soon you take the photo, it mandatorily does some processing, in Motorola's case with a very buggy chip that would inevitably ruin your photos. Poking in the photo files it looked like the algorithm was managing to misalign the file in memory before doing the calculations. Something similar to mixing endianess.
The truth is that you cannot put the necessary hardware into a smartphone to take DSLR quality pictures. Not with the current form factor, and especially not if you're trying to be cost effective. They've tried getting around this by selling add-ons that socket into the body, or using three, four, even five cameras, more than one light sensor, and all of this damaging software. But manufacturers are trying to polish a dirt floor. There will always be imperfections simply because the materials weren't made for that level of quality.
So the end result of your smartphone photograph is an AI’s hallucination of what a pro photographer with pro equipment would have taken of the same scene.
Manufacturers and some consumers will love it because it gets photos that look amazing from any old crappy sensor and from any terrible photographer.
I really hate this idea, but at the same time, I kinda wanna try building it.
It seems like the author of this article is trying to use MKBHD's cachet to help champion his own point ("I don't like this AI post-processing much at all") which I doubt is one Marques would agree with, given that the phone which won his blind test is one that does just as much (if not more) post-processing than the iPhone, the Pixel 6A.
To me, the clearest signal of this is what Halide can and can’t do with the new Pro sensor. In ideal lighting, the Halide-processed 48MP JPEG shots look insanely good, with strand-of-hair-level detail. It’s hard to imagine Apple wouldn’t have wanted to show off the ability for ordinary users to take these shots. But capture speed is several seconds, and if conditions aren’t ideal, even that isn’t enough to get a clean shot.
Like MKBHD said about Google & the Pixel: Apple needs a generation or two for computation to be optimized for the capabilities of their new sensor.
I was at a family gathering a year or so ago, and my mother was taking pictures with her phone. I noticed that one she took of me and my two siblings was applying a heavy skin smoothing algorithm. I asked for her phone, and discovered that she had “skin smoothing” turned up to 100 on her Android.
I took some comparison photos with it on and off and put it to the group. Everyone but me agreed that the heavily skin-smoothed photos were better. Even the men.
That's such a dangerous argument, though, because where does it end?
Some audiophiles will tell you that they prefer the 'warm' harmonic distortion imparted by single-ended vacuum tube amplifiers. Psychoacoustic studies back that up to some extent. Does that mean that all first-party music players should apply a DSP transform that makes the output sound like it came through an 80-year-old Western Electric telephone repeater, without the option to allow the listener to turn it off unless they install a third-party app?
Or even worse, and more to the point, does it mean that all first-party recording apps should work that way?
iPhones don't apply particularly heavy skin smoothing even in portrait mode, and don't do it at all if you shoot RAW. Android phones generally have an option to adjust the strength of the feature (or disable it altogether). So the answer to your 'where does it end?' question is straightforward: it ends wherever you the photographer want it to end. Portrait photographers have been using various techniques to soften the skin of their subjects since the dawn of photography.
Creating an accurate and 100% sharp record of all of someone's skin imperfections might be accurate in a forensic sense, but it isn't necessarily accurate to our everyday perceptions of other people's faces. Optical prints from negatives used to be naturally somewhat softer than modern digital images from high resolution sensors. Not every form of photography benefits from extreme sharpness and detail.
Correct, so fix it in post. That can be as simple as a button that says "Apply beauty filter when faces are detected."
I personally have a nice photo shoot with my partner but everyone noticed that I kinda look like a cardboard cutout in some. the post processing was def not missed by very none technical users.
- people who use “proper” cameras and thus have expectations about what a photo should look like
- people who want iPhone photos to reflect how they perceive the scene.
The iPhone camera app is configured for the second group, as it probably should be, but as a member of the first group I’d love an opt out button (without having to shoot in raw).
There are several presets which can be further tweaked but only using two controls: warmth and contrast.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph939c00e95/io...
That’s not too bad for the oob default camera app. I think it shows some awareness that how Apple is processing in the “standard” style may not match what everyone wants.
IIUC, Halide and other 3rd party camera apps can largely deliver on further post processing customization of non-raw photos.
Presumably these apps start with a RAW image in capture though and only pipeline it down to some save as some smaller, processed image.
It seems more about how people wish they perceived the scene. Like, over-saturated and with "beautification" filters; there's a recognition that this is not how the image maker [the person] actually perceives things. It's a dream of reality, a fairy tale.
Honestly, some Facebook photos ... all people on my Facebook are people I know in person, the filters some use are frankly ridiculous; like, I know what you actually look like and it's not a manga cartoon with massive eyes and completely smooth skin.
/rant
- People who just don't care and use the default photo app
- People who are looking for more professional results and use an app like Halide
- People who enjoy being angry on the internet more than taking pictures
I've addressed the technical side of this argument before, but I want to address a side that bother's me quite a bit but I don't see addressed often.
Adding computational aspects into photography means that the images taken on these platforms will all have the same artistic interpretation at the level that that computation works. This is fine for snapshots, etc. Where it hurts is in artistic expression. It's almost as if all photos will go through an artistic AI after being taken.
This process can, and likely will, increase the acceptability of those pictures that we use those cameras for most often. I truly think that computational photography will hurt the artistic expression and the feel of images taken outside of those situations.
Right now, with a "real" camera shooting RAW, you keep as much detail of the image as possible and the photographer (artist) edits it to present what their mind's eye told them was there from that RAW data. With anything using computational photography the computer algorithm has already modified that data permanently, pushing and shaping it towards what that algorithm has determined is most pleasing for the largest number of people. I feel like this is a major win for most people who don't care about the art side of photography, but a major loss we aren't yet acknowledging for those who want to explore the artistic expression of the medium.
With all due respect, this is so far from the truth that it really takes away everything from the argument. How is computational photography any different than simply using other statistical methods to improve the signal-to-noise ratio? Is ISO and changing shutter speed any different? That also changes the actual thing.
Shutter and ISO are subtle and predictable variants that you know exactly what tweaking them will do. Computational photography is a black box.
It looks at the noisy pixels (those that aren't mapping to the rest of the area) and decides, based on AI modeling using "attractive photos" in their dataset, what those pixels should be so the image maps to those attractive images.
This can result in all kinds of suboptimal outcomes if you want a specific look other than that, whether that be as true to life as you can get it or something entirely different.
This isn't a new problem (I've since learned), and there's been attempted fixes (I guess they didn't work for me). But it's a great example of just one of the image quality problems that affect iPhone (and other phone) cameras. Phone cameras can't make it, for various reasons for various scenarios, so they fake it. Faking it has problems too, and now we're stuck between two bad options.
I'm glad people are talking about the frustration here, hopefully we'll see powerful options for wielding post-processing tech. When I looked up my problem there were a lot of people saying "this happens on every camera/phone, it's a law of physics and there's no solution".
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252134950
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/apple-may-fi...
The only way to remove it fully would be with more expensive lens coatings and probably the removal of the outer lens cover.
If I wanted to spend time processing every snapshot I take with my phone, I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T and get pictures that are much better than anything the phone can do.
That’s what I’m actually doing. My Pixel 3 died suddenly in November 2021. Since it was an emergency, I bought a cheap phone with a horrible camera, intending to upgrade it quickly and taking photos with my X100T in the meantime. A year later and I’m still using that setup. The camera is portable enough to take it everywhere, the processing presets are good enough for me, and I have the RAW files available just in case. I’m probably in the minority of people who would do something like this, but I’m pretty happy so far.
I think most people buy iPhones because it's a status symbol or because it's what they are accustomed to. Certainly not because of feature A or B, and most definitely not if that feature is "tasteful photos", whatever that means (whose taste?).
But there is a small vocal minority which cares about picture quality, that is true. Totally irrelevant to apple's bottom line though.
How people imagine one can faithfully squeeze dynamic range of ~10 to 120k nits onto a typical 250 nit screen? How about a printed medium that reflects at most 100 nits in typical viewing conditions?
I love the expression that professionals use, simply "tones are good". That's it, zero insight on to how it's done.
Our eyes (or eye-brain combination) has also been found to do quite a lot of processing on it's own. For example white balancing (famous blue/gold dress story). Relative colour perception. Illusion of depth based on "cues", etc.
There is also the ”Scene Detection”setting which I have turned off.
Are you running iOS 14.3 or greater?
Go to Settings, scroll to Camera, choose Format. There you can turn on Apple ProRAW.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/adjust-hdr-camera-set...
Personally, I've never regretted just always shooting RAW.
It's that the development of the processing engine of phones is geared towards garnering likes on social media, and therefore, it is being taken in very grotesque directions.
I wanted a picture but the iPhone blended the two colors :-(
The issue is “how many interpolations/adjustments are these companies making when converting the RAW to an image file?” Too much according to the article.
As for the overarching reasons for poor AI implementations in their other product lines, my pet theory is that Apple’s pace of progress is what you get when constrained by their stated privacy goals.
I have little doubt that they’d be at the top of this game if they leveraged user data the way Google/Meta do.
Then Apple is not the product for you.
I use apps like Halide to fill in the gaps in the stock camera app, and shoot with a standalone camera when I want full creative control.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have a wishlist.
The funny part is that the primary theme of my comment is about the control Apple gives you over your data - control you do not have when picking other products - and arguable a more important thing to allow me to control.
I've decided that Apple products are, indeed, for me. Wishing they would provide certain features doesn't change that.
Apple has shown repeatedly that they are continuing to invest in camera controls. The "RAW" button, support for ProRes, etc. are a few examples of this. Giving "creators" access to more creative modes in the camera is hardly an idea that is so opposite Apple's norms to imagine they might include it someday, or to conclude that I should abandon the ecosystem because they don't have it today.
I mean underlying a lot of Apple stuff is linux. Do you feel you have linux device and its might and endless configurability when working with iphone? My wife can't force that f!@#!@ device to allow her pattern unlock of her phone without losing warranty, Apple rather prefers her having no safety at all (since face ID simply doesn't work for her line of work, and typing minimum 6 digits code 100x a day is extremely annoying... no other choices on 13 mini).
Which expectations would those be and how are they misaligned? I have no allusions about what using Apple products entail. That doesn't mean I can't want things.
But my comment was more about the state of AI than anything.
also, the minimum is actually 4 digits. you can tap "passcode options" when setting/changing passcode. not sure how much better that would be though. i generally like face id but i do hope they add in-display touch id sometime.
Siri is incredibly stupid (ChatGPT also is, but at least it has a whole order of magnitude better at understanding; unlike Siri, which randomly fails at the most basic requests to the extent it's just about useful for "Hey Siri, turn bedroom lights off" - but even that doesn't always work as expected), and while they don't have photo retouching AI, Dall-E is quite renown in for working with images, so surely if they'd dabbled in that space they would be successful.
"Alarm named Timer set for 01:30"
Learn British already, Siri! Also getting 01:30 from "hour and a half".. I get how it's happened technically but that's dumb as hell.
Every damn time I both 1) forget to move the laundry to the dryer 2) jump out of my skin at 1:30am
One of the most confusing examples I have of the terrible autocorrect is that anytime I wrote “20”, it would always get replaced with “2.0” and “50” would always get replaced with “5-0”. I finally realized it was because I had two apps on my phone, one which had “2.0” in the name and the other “5-0”. Once I deleted those apps, it stopped replacing those numbers. It’s really baffling to me their autocorrect would work that way.
Similarly, I’ve resorted to using a 3rd party camera app to avoid the occasional picture coming out looking like an oil painting. I’ve been using halide mark ii, which works quite well, although I can’t recommend it anymore due to their new business model being a very pricey subscription. Luckily I got grandfathered in, so the app still works for me.
Swype on Android (and briefly on iOS) - RIP - was simply better in every imaginable way, but whoever bought it just buried it. Far better prediction (once they fixed the bug that interpreted a common swipe as "nee", which I almost never use, instead of "me", which I use constantly) and a host of useful features. Need to capitalize a word? Just Swype above the keyboard once during the motion. Need a double letter? Squiggle a bit on that letter as you move through the word. Swype-X, C, V for cut, copy, and paste. Swype-spacebar to bring up an editing keyboard that offered single-character cursor movement. Want to curse? Feel free, it won't forget it with the next version upgrade. Keyboard learned a typo? Delete it from your user dictionary and it won't appear anymore.
That was a startup. Apple could buy out any patents they had with pocket change. But they didn't, and I can't figure out why.
This alone pushes me towards Android phones since the keyboard experience there is in a completely different class.
Why is Apple like this? I dont always need a 9 MB or whatever photo size, it would be nice to be able to take lower res images to save space.
I can't let this claim go. Every Android photo when taken next to an iPhone looks over-sharpened compared to the iPhone. Why is this article claiming the opposite?
If you want control of every feature and no post processing then download a different photo app like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/halide-mark-ii-pro-camera/id88...
This to me is no different than the popular digital cameras vs the pro cameras. The built in app is targeting the masses. it can never make every choice perfectly and further it doesn't need to please everyone. That's the entire point of having apps
https://www.lomography.com/magazine/39913-holga-120gn-imperf...