I have a 12 Pro and can sympathise with your experiences. Technically it’s a very decent camera, but the processing is so inconsistent that I can no longer rely on it to take natural-looking photographs.
Sadly I learned this the hard way. A month ago I took a holiday to a place I’d never been before, and naively assumed that it was finally time to just take the iPhone for my photography.
For focal lengths I just about got away with it, but my word the processing of the images was bordering on heart-breaking at times.
Buildings that literally look as if they’ve been lasso tooled in Photoshop to separate them from the other points of interest, resulting in an oversaturated sky, overly bright landmark and okay street.
Other times the colours start clipping. Detail is lost through some denoising process. Edges look like they’ve been smeared with Vaseline.
This was an important trip for me and I was so disappointed with my photos after, it made me realise how convenience can’t always trump trusted quality. And to be fair even the most compact camera offers more resolution and detail than a smartphone; if I want to enhance images later I can do that in a lot of software.
Something else I realised was that it’s stupid of me to be paying so much more for the ‘pro’ phone just to get the telephoto lens when, in truth, I don’t even like the resulting images.