For example, iPhones automatically brighten people once they detect a face, which is especially noticeable when taking photos against the light. It ruins the contrast and makes the photo look really bad.
Is there a way to turn that stuff off?
1. Taking Live photos can be a good work around, since this mostly maintains the individuals frames which are used to build the full image. Use the built in photo editor to go to a different frame in the live photo and set this as the Key Photo - this dodges a lot of the HDR/image adjustment process.
2. Using the AE/AF lock can prevent a fair bit of the automated adjustments from taking place. (Tapping the screen on dark areas or hot points will adjust the exposure, holding your finger for a moment will turn on the AE/AF lock keeping it there as you move the phone around.)
3. If it's not just for one shot, but all shots you take. Go to the Camera settings and turn on preserve "Exposure Adjustment", in the settings which starts each camera session with the exposure settings preserved from earlier - and simply keep this on 0.0. This can also make it more straight forward (one tap) to undo much of the automatic levelling without locking AE. Similarly you may want to also disable night shooting for darker scenes, by preserving that setting too.
4. On older iPhones, disable the HDR mode.
Similarly, ProRAW photos imported to Apple Photos on Mac can be reduced in processing by clicking Edit Photo, and then hitting Save Changes without necessarily changing any settings (or just changing something inconsequential would work too). Doing editing forces the Photos app to discard the preprocessed image embedded in the ProRAW and replaces it with a software processed version which I find slightly more natural. However, ProRAW is still processed by the phone, so you need to download a third party app and shoot classic non pro RAW (then use the same conversion shortcut maybe) on top of it.
According to the developer of something called AMVR [2], the quality obtainable is much higher than that of even the aforementioned log files from iOS.
I asked whether it would be feasible to shoot DNG on iOS as video and was told that iOS lacks a camera API that is performant enough, resulting in several fps only. I haven't personally tested it though, so maybe this could be a fun project.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyeS_xYxCLI&pp=ygUfYW15IHNoY...
As a side note, whenever Apple takes steps to release a feature aimed at professionals there is a significant uptick in users trying out MotionCam. I think there is a small but very vocal group of users that have wanted something like this for years but have not been catered to.
Ha, and here I am, learning about your app for the first time, and about to install it... :)
Halide, like the official camera app, can also shoot ProRAW but ProRAW is not totally RAW, it has been processed with the frame stacking to reduce noise, but introduces sharpening artifacts.
I’m always pissed about bad the iPhone is at taking photos of rainy days.
Given that it gives such fine-grained control of the sensor, it wouldn't surprise me though.
Edit: Fix typo