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I would love to get a professional photographer to suggest the best camera settings to shoot photos on my iPhone 16 Max.
I’ve shot professionally and IMO, it starts with setting your phone to shoot in RAW. If you’re willing to invest the time in post processing your images, the results is far superior compared to shooting in JPEG.
 
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Greetings all,

Welcome to the New iPhone 16 Pro / iPhone 16 Pro Max photos up thread.

Peaople in Australia and New Zealand will be receiving their brand new iPhone 16 Pro's by now!


Please post all your photos taken from iPhone 16 Pro / iPhone 16 Pro Max here. Are you ready? 🙌🏻
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This kinda blew me away. This is a 48mp raw photo taken in a very dark room. If you know what this is you know it’s about the size of a deck of cards. The image quality is ridiculous.
 
Dynamic range on the 16 pro
Max is definitely better than the 15 pro max. See it for yourself if you haven’t erased your 15 pro yet. The same photo taken on the 15 pro max compared to the 16 pro max is clearly visible. The 16 pro max used ISO 640 vs ISO 1000 on the 15 pro max shooting the same subject which was my recliner. Shadow areas are lighter and more visible in the 16 pro max image. I expect to see the same using video. Pretty exciting! Here’s hoping for better Milky Way photos
These are directly out of camera, no editing. The new sensor is great!! Both iPhones are on iOS 18.
16 pro max

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15 pro max

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Haven’t had an opportunity to test fully yet but these new photographic styles seem like a winner. Really cool, almost exactly what I’ve been looking for from the stock camera. Super quick to change the look of an image without the over the top effect from filters prior.

If you’re using photographic styles in your pictures in this thread please tell us.

Coming from the 14 PM I’d say this 16 PM camera system is definitely a step up for everyday shooting. Not massive and not a must have but noticeable. 24MP stills by default are great.
 
I really really like the camera moods! I'm looking forward to an opportunity to truly take advantage of the extremely customizable and quick options (lots of upcoming trips planned). This is muted b&w.

In the meantime, I'm just playing around with it in my house and, as always, little Dudley is my test subject.

Has anyone found a way to quickly just get back to the normal standard without having to flip back to that option? I googled it and haven't really found anything.

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Anyone else genuinely bummed about the fact that the new phones are even more aggressive in terms of how they process images? I’ve seen a lot of side-by-side comparisons of photos taken from the 16 Pro and 15 Pro and the former are even flatter and more washed out because Apple continues to lift shadows and drop highlights. I don’t understand why. Is it to make these phones increasingly more like a digital camera where stock images inevitably require some form of editing? Unless I’m shooting in RAW, that’s not something I want to have to constantly deal with for images taken with my phone. I’m neither sold on photographic styles as using these forces you to shoot in HEIF.

Yep, mostly. Planning on playing with styles today, which looks promising (I’m okay with HEIF), and Halide Process Zero and Zerocam.

I bought a Fuji X-T5 last year and I love it. Not expecting anything like that quality of image from the 16 PM, but styles and tone reminds me somewhat of the Fuji film sims.

In general, I know it’ll be a big upgrade from my 11.
 
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So, what should Apple do now? They’ve provided Photographic Styles, yet many still shoot with the default settings and complain.
The photographic styles don’t override the processing. It’s like applying a filter to a photo; I don’t see much difference between that and a filter.

I chose my old iPhone 7 for my European trip over the iPhone 15 for the photos. The difference is so evident, especially in color science. The iPhone 7 captures moments accurately, with realistic colors that would look very muted to an iPhone 15 user, and proper skin tones. Overcast skies are let to be overcast — it doesn’t do the fake brightening of faces and objects and provides more natural contrast and depth when it’s cloudy. The 15 does it regardless of any photographic style applied. Even if you decrease the saturation, turn off night mode etc. it still produces messy images and trashes the lighting.

The 7 is just much more unbiased and transparent, willing to let the scene set the tone instead of wrestling with it. The 15 over-lights everything, ruining the vibe, the faces, and the nostalgia when looking back at the photos. And for me, the reason I took a photo in the first place is because I want it to bring me back somewhere. Especially when viewing photos on a large display, the iPhone 15’s scenes appear surreal, like a realistic watercolor painting or an AI-generated image. I just don’t connect with the photos it takes as well. And the 15 is a very notable improvement in what I hate about it over the 13 which was an absolute mess of a camera in exactly those aspects (worse than 12 imo).

I suppose you trade the grain and noise of earlier iPhones for this, but I’m not sure that’s a good trade. I prefer the grain to the what seems like AI-generated crisp “fill” that replaces the missing details where noise used to be with random artifacts. From what I'm seeing, the 16 is a step backwards from the 15, looking more AI-generated, aggressive and flat.
 
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Ok, I see that many are still complaining about the iPhone 16 Pro image quality, over sharpening, noise reduction, and poor image quality is still being discussed. Either your iPhone camera settings need to be changed, the exposure isn’t correctly adjusted, poor technique, and or motion blur caused by not holding the phone still enough could be the cause. High ISO will also force the camera software to apply heavier noise reduction to the image. Especially indoors when the lighting is low. You guys need to post some samples so maybe I can take a look & possibly explain what could be happening when taking a photo. I only mentioned that because I’ve been a photographer since 1995. The samples that I posted are straight out of the Camera with HEIF format I always shoot Raw, but I wanted to post some HEIF samples. Approximately 100% crops or more are added along with the original photo. As you can see in my samples, there’s no aggressive sharpening or watercolor effect, etc.. (I’m not sure how they’re going to look after being posted on this forum) but if you do see this in your photos, you’re probably zooming in past the 100% range where the image starts to break down. So let’s see some samples because otherwise I’m perfectly happy with what I see produced with the iPhone 16 Pro Max camera.

1x 48mp
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100%
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2x
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100% or more crop
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5x
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100% or so
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Indoors, 5x ISO 1600. Still looks clean.

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Crop

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