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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

I love the iPhone camera but photos still seem super processed compared to an actual camera body. Plus big camera lens have a lot of character in the bokeh and focus that a tiny phone lens/sensor can't capture. It's nice that people will have increasingly good cameras in their pockets, but Sony (who capitalized on great blogging cameras) and Fujifilm (who capitalized on fun bodies with good film simulation that everybody was already applying in post-processing paired with the expertise of a company who built satellite optics) will be fine. Canon seems to gotten to the mirrorless era a little later than the others and not doing as hot as they used to, but it's not clear that's entirely the fault of iPhone cameras getting better.

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> I love the iPhone camera but photos still seem super processed compared to an actual camera body

Anecdotally it seems to have got worse in the past few years. I don't know much about photography, but it feels like the software is far too aggressive in its desire to capture dynamic range, and generally unwilling to let areas naturally be in shadow. Many of the photos I've taken on the last couple of iPhones look flat and unpleasing, unless it's a bright sunny day. Which, given I live in the UK, is something of a rarity. Maybe the algorithms are tuned for Cupertino.

My wife has been using Google Pixels since the original—while it lags behind in video capture, imo, I've always preferred how the still photos out of her phone look.

My iphone camera is good. But It does some weird things. In just normal mode it blurs and shifts. It seriously distorted a sheep in the background of one of my shots and gave our dog a extra paw while running. (Its doing the multiple/merge thing..) Its great for bright and static shots. but anything moving or lower light it can have issues.

Very interested in seeing shots of this extra paw

It's all about personal taste, but I miss the iPhone 7 camera. Though it wasn't a great camera, it was fun and naturally limited.

I think the real issue is that the small lens build gives it an effective focal-length of an 18mm camera . So everything appears very wide angle. It’s easy to spot professional non-phone photos when larger focal lengths make faces appear much flatter (better).

Try the ProRAW mode on the iPhone 14 Pro. It has much less processing.

I mostly shoot ProRAW with Halide on my 14 Pro and the processing is reduced, but it's still there, and it's still obvious. I seldom get a photo I would actually consider printable at reasonable sizes because zooming in closely reveals obvious processing artifacts. The darker and higher contrast the scene, the worse it gets - the cool shots I've taken of SF's skyline at night are good test cases. They look good on the device display, but zooming in the processing is beyond obvious.

I was really excited for the 48MP sensor in my new iPhone. Initially I shot a lot more photos and tried to use it more like a 'real camera,' but I wound up picking up 35mm photography this year. I'll likely get a digital body eventually too, but I'm enjoying learning about film stocks and getting a really deep understanding of the exposure triangle. My fancy new iPhone camera ultimately just pushed me to realize I want to be shooting stuff that can enlarge and print better and it's still not there. Not to mention the optical effects of a "real lens" (bokeh, true and configurable physical depth of field).

It’s embarrassing there’s no toggle for minimal processing for everyday pictures of my kids. I just want some simple denoising filters to deal with the ccd Jank and mostly I want to see in the picture what my phone shows on the screen.

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