iPhone 13 Pro Really bad photos with iPhone 13 Pro (+Max) Merged

[MisterTibbs]

Thanks for this.

Since this picture was taken using the ultra wide camera, on a iPhone 13.

We now know, it is not only limited to the bigger sensor/brighter lens.

Also it is not limited to the iPhone 13 Pro series but it can affect all iPhones in the 13 series.

What I find most unfathomable from the metadata is the focal length, which is recorded at 1.54mm.

I am unable to replicate this focal length on my iPhone 13 Pro Max at all.

Maybe someone with more experience with cameras can chime in, on what to me is a focal length mystery.

If it is possible, would you mind posting the full picture without cropping in, so we all can have a better idea of the actually composition of the photo.

Thank you so much, your post has shed much light on this camera debacle(especially the metadata), that was previously not know.

I thought that too. I have a late 2012 iMac at home, running Mojave (Catalina screwed my mac) so maybe that is why. Looking at the meta on my iPhone X an it's listed as the below.

 

[juanmaasecas]

My main issue are portraits, I can’t bear the cartoonish hdr look.

I did a little trick and I like the results a bit better.
Try exposure compensation -0.7 (you can keep this in the camera settings to stick all the time)
Then in the photographic styles, go for rich contrast and manually set it to tone -100.

This makes Skintones a bit more natural and tanned skin looking way better.

I’m trying Halide and manually taking pics with ProShot (bought it a few years ago) and others. I think the main issue is the over smart processing…

The telephoto Lens is darker and has more zoom, and the stabilisation is not so good. When manually take pictures at slow shutter speeds they’re blurred. What the smart processing does is putting together some blurry pics and do their hdr tricks and stuff. Then it adds a very high radius sharpening and strong noise reduction. That’s why in medium/low light, even if the real telephoto lens is used, the quality is trash when trying to zoom in, with apparent lacking or definition. Solution for this? Skip all this neural processing trash and raise a bit shutter speed, you’ll have more noise but more natural detail…

 

[Big Dave]

Who is going to return the 13p/pm? The clock is ticking for me... Verizon says 30 day returns and I am not looking forward to leaving the Appleverse in terms of phone at least. This is frustrating. I could revert back to my XR and hope the 14 is better or maybe get a 12.
Any chance Apple can fix this with an update?

 

[valinda]

You guys have better eyes than me, I do use reading glasses. My pictures look good to me. I'm keeping my 13 pro. Did have a Pixel on order but cancelled it.

 

[kstewart61]

I had to return my 13 pro due to signal issues apple could not fix so it went back to TMobile. They didn't have the same phone in stock so I ordered the 13 mini I had the 12 mini which I loved but gave it to the wife.

 

[Pandyone]

Who is going to return the 13p/pm? The clock is ticking for me... Verizon says 30 day returns and I am not looking forward to leaving the Appleverse in terms of phone at least. This is frustrating. I could revert back to my XR and hope the 14 is better or maybe get a 12.
Any chance Apple can fix this with an update?

I am keeping mine and hoping that Apple will fix some of the issues with software updated.
The macro and ultra wide lens is working good (mostly, quite a lot of lens flare in some macro shots).

There is also the shortage of components that makes most iPhones having longer delivery time, at least where I live.
I am however thinking about getting Apple Care, and getting phone replaced later if things are not getting improved.

 

[TL24]

Can you guess which picture is the 13 Pro and which one is the Pixel 6 Pro?

 

[BigMcGuire]

Can you guess which picture is the 13 Pro and which one is the Pixel 6 Pro?

Should rename the file names - I think that gives it away unless that was intentional

 

[TL24]

Should rename the file names - I think that gives it away unless that was intentional

Lmao I didn’t even think of the file names, what a fail

 

[dantracht]

I am keeping mine and hoping that Apple will fix some of the issues with software updated.
The macro and ultra wide lens is working good (mostly, quite a lot of lens flare in some macro shots).

There is also the shortage of components that makes most iPhones having longer delivery time, at least where I live.
I am however thinking about getting Apple Care, and getting phone replaced later if things are not getting

Definitely get apple care.

 

[Nero Design]

I noticed this thread whilst looking to see how others were finding their iPhone 13 smartphone cameras and it seems plenty of users are experiencing the same issues. I don't have overly high expectations for a smartphone camera but this isn't an ideal situation if we're unable to be assured of decent image quality with casual photography using this instrument.

My iPhone 13 Pro Max arrived last week. The cameras module appears to function just fine - until it doesn't. Every now and then I'll be taking a Macro or even using the 77mm f/2.8 tele lens - or simply experimenting with the cameras... and it will produce some nasty, smeared "images" that are almost devoid of all detail of the details of the scene will be "muddy" and smeared. It's bad. If it were a camera other than a phone, I'd guess that everyone would be returning them for being either defective or for not being suitable for the purpose for which it was sold. I've not been able to determine the precise cause but my best guess is that it's to do with the iPhone 13 Pro using computational image rendering that strips out a lot of the noise but married more than one image in order to achieve this. The mid-lens (Wide lens) appears to function just fine for most of the time. It might be a landscape of clouds behind a building in daylight, or it might be an insect on a leaf, or a busker on the street that you want to photograph. But the uncropped images from the iPhone 13 are strangely horrid when this effect is present. Even the ProRAW file setting produces illumination artifacts in some images that must be edited out of the image... when a second shot of the same scene using HEIF or JPEG produces no such artifact with the same scene.

Below you can see an insect that was just fine in the first Closeup photograph - but the second shot below it is devoid of detail. I rested the phone on the ground and I had plenty of time to carefully sellect the focus... but that second shot looks like it came out of a 2004 Motorlla V3. These were shot in JPEG on the iPhone 13 Pro Max. I expected the JPEG to outperform the HEIF file for this closeup but no... The image gets a lot worse when viewed larger.

A possible solution for others, which certainly works for me... is to avoid using the Apple Camera App and use ProCam (which I think is now called "ProCam 8"). I just ran a test using ProCam on my desktop before replying to this thread... and the results were so much better than a side-by-side test from the Apple Camera App that I'm probably going to stop using the native App altogether. The AutoFocus is far more accurate with ProCam and I noticed that the Super Macro can locked in closer (virtually touching the lenses) using ProCam whereas the same subject with the Apple Camera App routinely loses focus and often fails at such close distances. You can also select RAW, TIFF or SMRT as capture options with the ProCam App and they seem to be far better than the native Apple Camera App, regardless of the settings used. I took 8 images using the native Apple Camera App and then 6 with the ProCam App of my wristwatch on a table a few feet away and ALL the shots from the Apple Camera App were smeared and useless... yet 5 out of 6 of the shots I took using the ProCam App were perfectly sharp. So much so that I was amazed at the difference.

Without pixel peeping, the image below was taken carefully in good light using the 77mm (3x) lens and was captured as a HEIF file, yet if you view the image more closely (see crop below), you can see how much detail is missing... There's very little image integrity here - although it's certainly not as bad as the insect image above.

I think it's a shame that Apple chose to release firmware and software that is simply under-performing on such a great camera module. The good news is that it can certainly be fixed with an update from Apple if they are informed that there is an issue. For those of you that migrated an old copy of ProCam (or a recent one, for that matter) onto their new iPhones, you'll find that the App will automatically update to use the new 3-camera module and the interface will enable access to the different iPhone 13 Pro cameras as required. Most importantly, you can turn on or off the SMRT option which can also be combined with TIFF & RAW. If you prefer HEIF files you can switch to the native Camera App.

Not all my shots were smeared or muddy in appearance, but I do have some hesitancy taking pictures with the iPhone 13 Pro Max now because I don't want to end up with poor quality images on a random basis. The results are entirely unpredictable to me so far although I think I'll be using the ProCam App from now on.

Regards

Marco

 

[Apple_Glen_UK]

Who is going to return the 13p/pm? The clock is ticking for me... Verizon says 30 day returns and I am not looking forward to leaving the Appleverse in terms of phone at least. This is frustrating. I could revert back to my XR and hope the 14 is better or maybe get a 12.
Any chance Apple can fix this with an update?

I've just cancelled an order for a 13 Pro (for the second time) due to the issues mentioned here. Although I've been impressed with many of the macro shots, I probably won't use that feature that often and am uncomfortable with spending £1,000 on a phone only to be disappointed with the quality of the photos. A friend of mine has a 12 Pro and hasn't been happy with it since he got it and I was talking to someone else who has one who made similar comments. So, I took the plunge and ordered a refurbished iPhone 11 Pro from Apple which will be an improvement on my SE 2 (wife will get the SE 2 and be happy!)

It's a shame because I'd been looking forward to getting a 13 Pro for quite a while and had there been a promise of a fix in a software update I'd have been prepared to wait.

 

[ediks]

what even was the point of adding night mode to the telephoto camera if the phone doesnt even use it in lower light..

 

[Nero Design]

what even was the point of adding night mode to the telephoto camera if the phone doesnt even use it in lower light..

The night mode comes on automatically for lowlight scenes. But it can be controlled (switched off) and manually exposed to a small degree (you can shorten the exposure slightly). When Night Mode is activated, the icon turns Yellow. You then touch it to enter a control mode. A slider bar appears near the shutter actuation button which can be set to "Off", "Auto" or "Max" ...you can shift the exposure time slightly. What I mean by that is that the camera evaluates how long it thinks the exposure should be and then displays a number. In my darkened room it just displayed "2s" which means a 2 second exposure. Moving the camera slightly, the exposure dropped to "1s". I believe that if you use it in the dark to photograph the Milky Way (astrophotography) then the number for the exposure time will be longer (eg 10s or longer).

The 77mm (3x) Tele lens also uses the Night Mode. I just tested it now and the Night Mode became active.

 

[Big Dave]

I noticed this thread whilst looking to see how others were finding their iPhone 13 smartphone cameras and it seems plenty of users are experiencing the same issues. I don't have overly high expectations for a smartphone camera but this isn't an ideal situation if we're unable to be assured of decent image quality with casual photography using this instrument.

My iPhone 13 Pro Max arrived last week. The cameras module appears to function just fine - until it doesn't. Every now and then I'll be taking a Macro or even using the 77mm f/2.8 tele lens - or simply experimenting with the cameras... and it will produce some nasty, smeared "images" that are almost devoid of all detail of the details of the scene will be "muddy" and smeared. It's bad. If it were a camera other than a phone, I'd guess that everyone would be returning them for being either defective or for not being suitable for the purpose for which it was sold. I've not been able to determine the precise cause but my best guess is that it's to do with the iPhone 13 Pro using computational image rendering that strips out a lot of the noise but married more than one image in order to achieve this. The mid-lens (Wide lens) appears to function just fine for most of the time. It might be a landscape of clouds behind a building in daylight, or it might be an insect on a leaf, or a busker on the street that you want to photograph. But the uncropped images from the iPhone 13 are strangely horrid when this effect is present. Even the ProRAW file setting produces illumination artifacts in some images that must be edited out of the image... when a second shot of the same scene using HEIF or JPEG produces no such artifact with the same scene.

Below you can see an insect that was just fine in the first Closeup photograph - but the second shot below it is devoid of detail. I rested the phone on the ground and I had plenty of time to carefully sellect the focus... but that second shot looks like it came out of a 2004 Motorlla V3. These were shot in JPEG on the iPhone 13 Pro Max. I expected the JPEG to outperform the HEIF file for this closeup but no... The image gets a lot worse when viewed larger.

View attachment 1901674

View attachment 1901690

A possible solution for others, which certainly works for me... is to avoid using the Apple Camera App and use ProCam (which I think is now called "ProCam 8"). I just ran a test using ProCam on my desktop before replying to this thread... and the results were so much better than a side-by-side test from the Apple Camera App that I'm probably going to stop using the native App altogether. The AutoFocus is far more accurate with ProCam and I noticed that the Super Macro can locked in closer (virtually touching the lenses) using ProCam whereas the same subject with the Apple Camera App routinely loses focus and often fails at such close distances. You can also select RAW, TIFF or SMRT as capture options with the ProCam App and they seem to be far better than the native Apple Camera App, regardless of the settings used. I took 8 images using the native Apple Camera App and then 6 with the ProCam App of my wristwatch on a table a few feet away and ALL the shots from the Apple Camera App were smeared and useless... yet 5 out of 6 of the shots I took using the ProCam App were perfectly sharp. So much so that I was amazed at the difference.

Without pixel peeping, the image below was taken carefully in good light using the 77mm (3x) lens and was captured as a HEIF file, yet if you view the image more closely (see crop below), you can see how much detail is missing... There's very little image integrity here - although it's certainly not as bad as the insect image above.

View attachment 1901677

View attachment 1901678

I think it's a shame that Apple chose to release firmware and software that is simply under-performing on such a great camera module. The good news is that it can certainly be fixed with an update from Apple if they are informed that there is an issue. For those of you that migrated an old copy of ProCam (or a recent one, for that matter) onto their new iPhones, you'll find that the App will automatically update to use the new 3-camera module and the interface will enable access to the different iPhone 13 Pro cameras as required. Most importantly, you can turn on or off the SMRT option which can also be combined with TIFF & RAW. If you prefer HEIF files you can switch to the native Camera App.

Not all my shots were smeared or muddy in appearance, but I do have some hesitancy taking pictures with the iPhone 13 Pro Max now because I don't want to end up with poor quality images on a random basis. The results are entirely unpredictable to me so far although I think I'll be using the ProCam App from now on.

Regards

Marco

This really helps. An 8 dollar app on top of a 1500 dollar phone is not too bad. I wish apple would still fix it as I am one of Steve Jobs' target customers... I want it to work like an appliance.

 

[golfnut1982]

 

[golfnut1982]

 

[golfnut1982]

Smart HDR might be the culprit...

 

[golfnut1982]

 

[golfnut1982]

Do you guys think Apple can or will improve the digital processing in the coming months???

 

[jprmercado]

Do you guys think Apple can or will improve the digital processing in the coming months???

If enough of us send feedback, or if someone high-profile [a news site or app developer] makes a report, they will.

Honestly, based on the anecdotal reports on how Apple responds to feedback, I think the latter option is what really gets Apple’s attention.

 

[Nero Design]

Smart HDR might be the culprit...

I suspect that you are correct. The problem seems to come back to this again and again. By forcing HDR on some shots, the camera module and processor inside the iPhone is layering images that capture various values withing the scene, sometimes resulting in poor calculations when combining media with detail with shots taken for illumination and lighting. There DOES seem to be an additional issue of the camera AF refusing to work properly...

Something else I noticed with using the ProCam App is that I could feel the OIS mechanism vibrating inside the camera when I shifted it with my hand. It's not something I could feel when using the native Camera App. I'm curious to figure out why that is happening as well.

Last night I conducted a comparison from my desk. It wasn't particularly scientific but I think it applied well to the real world. Every single picture I took was from a seated position with both hands holding the phone very carefully. The AF reticule was allowed to rest and lock exposure and focus before I took each picture. The target zone was the face of this wristwatch. I was surprised to see that every single picture from the Camera App using the 3x Lens was smeared. Some were worse (far worse) than others. The same applied when JPEG was selected instead of Apple's preferred HEIC files. Here's an example of one of the cropped JPEG images...



Switching to the ProCam App instead, I took three pictures using the TIFF (TIF) format with the SMRT feature turned off and on. All of these shots were somewhat ideal. Certainly what I would expect from the iPhone 13's cameras. Especially the 3x (77mm) f/2.8 camera.

As far as I am concerned, the problem lies with Apple's algorithms and computational software. If I can get virtually perfect shots with the ProCam App, or at least shots that match the best images from the Apple Camera App, then I'm happy to keep using this smartphone... but Apple needs to SORT THIS OUT A.S.A.P. You can see the full scene below - but the method used to try to nail the AF on each shot was perhaps even more stable and careful that the methods used by the average shooter. I'm both disappointed that I can't trust the Apple software/app and happy that I can at least be assured of reasonably good results from the ProCam app that I bought years ago. But as for *Apple, I find this completely unacceptable. * (Apple is welcome to reach out to me on this.)

Regards,

Marco

 

[jtuk]

So, there's clearly a problem with the photos on my iPhone 13 pro. It's not only me because yesterday I saw a topic here with people reporting the same thing.

Basically every single photo I take is automatically modified with evident layers of sharpness, excessive contrast and other things.
It's not one of the profile, it's not the normal post-processing of the phone. You know when in photoshop you put "sharpness" at 100 and everything look weird? Same thing.
And when I open a photo on the photo app at the beginning, for. fraction of second, I can see the normal photo with the normal colors. But after that second all the "modifications" pop up.
It happens on video too, it's even more evident because on the gallery you can see the icon of the video with the normal colors, only when you open it the different colors appear like a quick bad photoshop fix.

I tried everything and there no way to avoid this.

Another details, if I shoot a raw photo the preview is the same but when I open it to change it I finally see the "normal" version. But obviolsy I can't shoot only raw and I don't have this option with video.

This is the topic where people is reporting the same thing

Smart HDR Missing on iPhone 13 Pro?

Hi all, Just upgraded to a 13 Pro from XS and when I go to camera settings, the Smart HDR toggle is not there? Any ideas, or can it no longer be switched off? Thanks!

forums.macrumors.com

They think it's a side effect of a bad HDR implementation but for me is not that, the modification that the software apply are several and not only limited to exposure.

Edit: I just want to add. I had iPhones for years. I'm not confusing this with some "normal" post processing. The photos are really bad, it's basically impossibile to obtain a normal face without the "bad photoshop" effect.

Yes. Hugely disappointed by the camera in my 13 pro max. I get that strange thing you describe of seeing the photo for a fraction without charges and then it sharpens and so much it becomes almost unusable. I have tried to salvage some in photoshop but most photos can’t be used.
And the wide lens results are also really bad. They look ok on the phone and I was really excited to use it but when I zoom in on the photos they have no detail at all. Very blocky. Again photos you can’t use anywhere.
I am really shocked that the photos I get on my previous phone which was X Max plus we’re so much better. Confused about the reviews I see. Perhaps the phone is faulty?
Oddly the video so far seems really great!

 

[Pandyone]

I'm both disappointed that I can't trust the Apple software/app and happy that I can at least be assured of reasonably good results from the ProCam app that I bought years ago. But as for *Apple, I find this completely unacceptable. * (Apple is welcome to reach out to me on this.)

Thanks for the really good examples. I saw your post in another forum regarding this too, and your examples and conclusions are very detailed.

What worries me is that since it's not getting wider attention, and many users seem to not experiencing the same issues; it could be something device specific, and then the question is if Apple will patch it somehow with updates or replacing the device is necessary.

 

[diego.caraballo]

Something else I noticed with using the ProCam App is that I could feel the OIS mechanism vibrating inside the camera when I shifted it with my hand. It's not something I could feel when using the native

Nice catch. The more pictures I take the more convinced I’m that the aperture is not the only problem. Some results can only be explained by the lack of focus.
Which is weird since the Wide camera has sensor-shift stabilization and 100% focus pixels.