iPhone 13 iPhone camera is overprocessing. Will it ever end?

[ToddH]

So I’ve tested the new Halide update (process zero) on the moon with the 5x & surprisingly it did very well. There is none of the water color look when editing. I DID have to manually set the iso to 200 and use a 1/1000 second shutter speed & I had to Focus Manually using the loupe and 2.5x readers to achieve sharp focus. I also tested the 1x camera around the house with ambient light, setting iso to 100 or 200 and adjusting shutter speed & manually focusing. It does look good, you just have to get your camera settings adjusted first. The final result shows a good bit of detail and craters. Here is the moon. The crop is 500% zoomed in. Edited in Lightroom mobile

—If you use the Reeflex app in Raw, you will get the same results as Halide. Samples look very similar.—

A lesser crop

 

[ToddH]

A couple of halide samples: raw, 15 pro max

Thunder storm 1x camera

Keys: 1x camera, edited & screenshot of the raw file. Lightroom edits

So far I like what the new feature of Halide does, but I prefer ProRAW and 48mp files. I will use Halide with the 5x camera more often or as needed though. Hopefully the developers will make a way for raw files for the 48mp format soon.

 

[shadowboi]

A couple of halide samples: raw, 15 pro max

Thunder storm 1x camera

View attachment 2407090

Keys: 1x camera, edited & screenshot of the raw file. Lightroom edits

So far I like what the new feature of Halide does, but I prefer ProRAW and 48mp files. I will use Halide with the 5x camera more often or as needed though. Hopefully the developers will make a way for raw files for the 48mp format soon.

View attachment 2407089

View attachment 2407091

I can only imagine having jpegs like the 1st and 3rd photos. I
can remember my iPhone 5 shoot like that. Here is an example I took back in 2013:

And another one:

No computational craps, no denoises, pure image. And no bothering fixing exposure and shadows in LR.

Now I have to exclusively use LR to shoot RAW with my SE.
I was thinking of getting regular 15 but looks like it is not so easy with RAW here. Since the sensor is quad Bayer it could be some hardware-coded limitation of it being unable to shoot true RAW. Maybe Apple can remove the hardcoding but I doubt it will happen at all.

One quite magical thing my old 5 had that neither of new iPhones do is 33mm equivalent lens. Modern are too wide (26mm in 15 and 24mm in Pro/PM). So to achieve my preferred "almost 35mm" distance I gotta crop and lose resolution

 

[LockOn2B]

Since the sensor is quad Bayer it could be some hardware-coded limitation of it being unable to shoot true RAW. Maybe Apple can remove the hardcoding but I doubt it will happen at all.

It’s more like, Quad Bayer sensors usually shuffle quad pixels around to regular Bayer in full-res mode, which is what’s fed to the ISP. So yeah, it’s really up to Apple.