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Comment by nayroclade | Hacker News Reader

I discovered this issue just last month trying to take a good photo of my partner sat next to our Christmas tree. No matter what I did, the iPhone kept brightening the image and losing the darkened look I was going for. Even after disabling every "smart" feature I could, it still uniformly brightened everything and reduced the contrast.

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.

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I had a right laugh with this one. Taking sweet shots in the moonlight, that sort of ethereal white blue glow over everything.

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.

Cameras don’t know what time of day it is and can’t see in the dark like we can. Usually you want night mode on, because the alternative isn’t “nice dark picture”, it’s “you can’t see anything”.

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.

> Cameras don’t know what time of day it is

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...

Indeed that's true. But since people already complain that it does too much post processing, it seems like a dangerous road to try and do even more of it.

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.

But since people already complain that it does too much post processing, it seems like a dangerous road to try and do even more of it.

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.

You can turn night mode off by tapping the icon in the top left.

Can't turn off deep fusion though.

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.

You can get real single shot RAW files very easily using third party apps like Halide. I usually prefer the results of ProRAW, though (which doesn’t include beauty filters or anything like that).

I don't know about "very easily," and chances are I don't want to deal with RAW or ProRAW or whatever. I'm fine with plain old .JPG most of the time. But selectively altering the appearance of subjects in an unavoidable manner is beyond the line that almost any photographer I've ever known will draw.

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.

>I don't know about "very easily,"

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.

Usually what I see in the preview on my damn screen is more or less exactly what I want captured unless I muck with the exposure settings. More often than not, iphone gets clever and takes a completely different picture.

Complain at https://feedbackassistant.apple.com I guess.

Or a simple setting that says "no post processing".

You can turn night mode off and drag the exposure slider down if you want a more atmospheric look.

Aye when I got back I googled why the hell the camera was doing superman night vision mode but the moment was lost.

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 :)

I would assume you would turn it off if you knew so you could take the type of night photo you wanted, but this feature can be disabled https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211306.

You can turn off night mode for that shot and force it to take a quick snap instead of an extended length exposure

On my S21 Ultra the viewfinder will sometimes show a brightened image, to what I would prefer.

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.

At some point I just started screenshooting the preview.

I guess there are people out there who screenshots their viewfinder instead of shooting, apart from resolution that may work?

I’ve downloaded the app that the Moment lens folks put out, which lets you do things like set ISO and shutter speed, etc. Generally I’m suspicious of camera apps because it seems like a low-effort way of getting access to a user’s photo reel and other personal info (oh yah sure we need to constantly track your location to help tag the photos!), but I figure they have a business model (selling lenses) and a reputation so maybe they aren’t so creepy.

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.

Camera apps don’t need access to the entire photo library, you can give them write-only access.

It does need location as long as the app is open, though you can make it imprecise.

Yeah, I’m just generally suspicious of these kinds of apps. I put them in the category of free apps that I don’t understand the business model of. While it is possible to use the privacy features of the phone to limit the app’s access, I don’t really want to be running apps where I think I need to do that, if I can avoid it. I’m sure lots of them are fine, but I’m not able to distinguish between the fine and not-fine ones.

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.

A silly low-res solution would be to screen shot the camera app.

> I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.

I wonder if you could at least take the screenshot of the preview.

My partner’s iPhone 11 Pro overprocessed a shot where I was wearing shorts to the point where we started calling it the “cauliflower knees” shot.

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