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

[Borjan]

Halide. Again? Looks like advertising of this expensive app for me

Is this aimed at me?

Make no mistake, I’m just a humble user of the app (which I like) but the reason I post this is because I appreciate and respect the time and effort they put into their blog posts to inform the readers about the technical details of multiple generations of iPhone cameras.

 

[bunnyechoes]

Yes… open the app, select the .5x camera & press the AF Button on the left and you will see a flower icon. Touch that to begin.

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Thank you for the tips! I did all the steps you recommended but I got some weird results. The photo from Halide is zoomed out, whereas the one from the native camera app looks like I wanted it to.

 

[ToddH]

Thank you for the tips! I did all the steps you recommended but I got some weird results. The photo from Halide is zoomed out, whereas the one from the native camera app looks like I wanted it to.

You can choose the 1x or2x crop factor when in macro mode so the view won’t be a wide.

 

[ManuCH]

I have noticed myself some issues with the iPhone stock camera app on my iPhone 13 Pro Max. I haven't been satisfied with some pictures, so I started making a comparison with the Halide app (I'm not associated with it or its developers).

See the result for yourself. It can be reproduced. I'm attaching 2 screenshots of 100% crops, one taken with the stock iPhone app as HEIC, and the other taken with Halide, still as HEIC (not going via ProRAW). Both using the 3x telephoto lens.

Look at the difference in the patterns and other details. How can that be explained? It doesn't make sense to me. How can the stock app be so "bad"? I repeated the test several times, so it wasn't an unlucky shot with motion blur or the shot being out of focus.

I mean, I'm okay with using Halide, but it's a shame the stock camera app can't do better. Anyone?

 

[AlGardner]

Anyone

I’m on 15.4 beta iOS version
Have to admit they reduced levels of noise removal and over saturation
Still a bit worse than HDR in Lightroom, but definitely not as it was before on 15.1 and 15.2
What is your iOS version?

And, I think I’ll switch to the lr camera and further export in the camera roll

 

[ManuCH]

I’m on 15.4 beta iOS version
Have to admit they reduced levels of noise removal and over saturation
Still a bit worse than HDR in Lightroom, but definitely not as it was before on 15.1 and 15.2
What is your iOS version?

And, I think I’ll switch to the lr camera and further export in the camera roll

I'm on iOS 15.3, I was waiting a bit for 15.4 because it's a Beta 1 and I've read of issues with 4G reception, so I don't wanna risk that yet.

However, I just discovered something else: if I take the same picture using the stock camera but in "Portrait" mode, it works perfectly! Then the excessive noise removal is not applied. As soon as I switch back to normal "Photo" mode, it does it again. So that's either a bug, or something Apple decides to want that way. We will never know I guess.

I'm curious to see what iOS 15.4 brings though.

 

[Borjan]

I have noticed myself some issues with the iPhone stock camera app on my iPhone 13 Pro Max. I haven't been satisfied with some pictures, so I started making a comparison with the Halide app (I'm not associated with it or its developers).

See the result for yourself. It can be reproduced. I'm attaching 2 screenshots of 100% crops, one taken with the stock iPhone app as HEIC, and the other taken with Halide, still as HEIC (not going via ProRAW). Both using the 3x telephoto lens.

Look at the difference in the patterns and other details. How can that be explained? It doesn't make sense to me. How can the stock app be so "bad"? I repeated the test several times, so it wasn't an unlucky shot with motion blur or the shot being out of focus.

I mean, I'm okay with using Halide, but it's a shame the stock camera app can't do better. Anyone?

Please check out this link if you want a proper full explanation.

iPhone 13 Pro: The Edge of Intelligent Photography

Octobers excite us at Halide HQ. Apple releases new iPhones, and they’re certain to upgrade the cameras. As the makers of a camera app, we tend to take a longer look at these upgrades. Where other reviews might come out immediately and offer a quick impression, we spend a

lux.camera

Long story short, you are using the telephoto lens indoors and the standard iPhone camera app doesn’t think there is enough light. So it’s actually switching to the 1x lens and cropping afterwards (resulting in a quality loss). The Halide app forces the 3x.

You can test this behaviour by using your finger to cover specific lenses to determine what is being used when taking a shot.

 

[ManuCH]

Please check out this link if you want a proper full explanation.

iPhone 13 Pro: The Edge of Intelligent Photography

Octobers excite us at Halide HQ. Apple releases new iPhones, and they’re certain to upgrade the cameras. As the makers of a camera app, we tend to take a longer look at these upgrades. Where other reviews might come out immediately and offer a quick impression, we spend a

lux.camera

Long story short, you are using the telephoto lens indoors and the standard iPhone camera app doesn’t think there is enough light. So it’s actually switching to the 1x lens and cropping afterwards (resulting in a quality loss). The Halide app forces the 3x.

You can test this behaviour by using your finger to cover specific lenses to determine what is being used when taking a shot.

I am aware of the behavior, but no, that's not what's happening in this case at all. I have covered the specific lenses to see which one it was using, and I made sure to keep my finger over the 1x lens while taking that picture, in order not to risk the camera app reverting back to it. It did use the 3x lens, 100% sure. And it can be reproduced at will. I have spent quite some hours doing those experiments.

 

[Borjan]

And confirmed from the Photos app that the lens info is as expected? Other options might be that some settings in your Halide Capture settings are different, but Halide shooting just HEIC as far as I am aware is piping through the exact same image algorithms as the stock app.

Also note that when covering the 1x on my iPhone 12 Pro, you can see that it visibly alters the exposure levels of the image displayed on the 2x with the stock app. So perhaps the act of the finger covering did something? Depends on whether you did this as the photo was taken. This does not happen with the Halide app.

 

[ManuCH]

And confirmed from the Photos app that the lens info is as expected? Other options might be that some settings in your Halide Capture settings are different, but Halide shooting just HEIC as far as I am aware is piping through the exact same image algorithms as the stock app.

Also note that when covering the 1x on my iPhone 12 Pro, you can see that it visibly alters the exposure levels of the image displayed on the 2x with the stock app. So perhaps the act of the finger covering did something? Depends on whether you did this as the photo was taken. This does not happen with the Halide app.

Yes, confirmed from the Photos app that the lens info is as expected. Also with a third party EXIF viewer just to be sure.

I really have no idea why Halide shooting HEIC gives a better result, that's a real enigma. I might contact their developers, maybe they are still doing something different, because the file size is also bigger by about 50%. As far as I know, in the API you can choose with what quality to save the HEIC, and they use a higher setting than the stock app.

Also it could indeed be that covering the lens with my finger may do something, so I will run some more tests without doing that. Thank you for that input.

What I find weird is that if I set the stock camera app to "Portrait" mode, it behaves fine. It's as if the regular "Photo" mode had more compression or something.

 

[Borjan]

Triple check the Smartest Processing toggle as well in Halide. Let us know how you get on!

 

[ManuCH]

Triple check the Smartest Processing toggle as well in Halide. Let us know how you get on!

So: with Smartest Processing turned on (as it always was), the picture is absolutely perfect in Halide. If I turn it off, the picture is "almost unusable", much worse than the one taken with the stock camera app.

It seems like Smartest Processing works better in Halide than in the stock camera app, which makes no sense at all. Unless they have parameters in the API that they can call to influence how much it processes the picture. I will dig more into that.

 

[bunnyechoes]

You can choose the 1x or2x crop factor when in macro mode so the view won’t be a wide.

That's it! I knew I was missing something but couldn't figure out what. Thanks.

 

[ToddH]

Please check out this link if you want a proper full explanation.

iPhone 13 Pro: The Edge of Intelligent Photography

Octobers excite us at Halide HQ. Apple releases new iPhones, and they’re certain to upgrade the cameras. As the makers of a camera app, we tend to take a longer look at these upgrades. Where other reviews might come out immediately and offer a quick impression, we spend a

lux.camera

Long story short, you are using the telephoto lens indoors and the standard iPhone camera app doesn’t think there is enough light. So it’s actually switching to the 1x lens and cropping afterwards (resulting in a quality loss). The Halide app forces the 3x.

You can test this behaviour by using your finger to cover specific lenses to determine what is being used when taking a shot.

Correct! Glad you mentioned this.

 

[Lyalindotcom]

I've been reading this great thread (thanks for all the info folks) and while informative its depressing how bad the camera is on my new $1000 device.

Just some random examples of pictures that have been ruined by the default camera app include:

1. My 3 year old toddler, there are now photos where his teeth (which have spaces between them) are being filled in by the camera, making him look ridicules in more then one photo. Looks like he has dentures.
2. Many clothe items with patterns and textures are being smoothed out, loosing a ton of detail. Old photos look real and rich, new photos look smooth and plastic
3. My wife's teeth (teeth again... hmm) are being straightened by the camera. Seriously, I mean we zoom in and it draws a perfect line across the bottom of her teeth. what in the world is it thinking here. We again compare iPhone XR camera to new camera and its clearly damaging reality
4. We have one picture of the toddle where his arm has tons of folds in it. In the real world he is skinny/fit kid, no folds in his arms. How did that even happen? folds look like a perfect wave of skin once you realize its not real

My wife is so depressed by all this. I am often the one with more time to go play with our kid and she loves those memories I can share with her and our relatives across the country. Now my pictures are coming in ruined from the stock camera and yes we're exploring other options but this is unacceptable. We really need options to turn off post processing of these photos, please Apple .

p.s. while I won't post my family photos on here for privacy reasons, if Apple wanted to talk to me directly about this, please reach out.

 

[tedley]

I've been reading this great thread (thanks for all the info folks) and while informative its depressing how bad the camera is on my new $1000 device.

Just some random examples of pictures that have been ruined by the default camera app include:

1. My 3 year old toddler, there are now photos where his teeth (which have spaces between them) are being filled in by the camera, making him look ridicules in more then one photo. Looks like he has dentures.
2. Many clothe items with patterns and textures are being smoothed out, loosing a ton of detail. Old photos look real and rich, new photos look smooth and plastic
3. My wife's teeth (teeth again... hmm) are being straightened by the camera. Seriously, I mean we zoom in and it draws a perfect line across the bottom of her teeth. what in the world is it thinking here. We again compare iPhone XR camera to new camera and its clearly damaging reality
4. We have one picture of the toddle where his arm has tons of folds in it. In the real world he is skinny/fit kid, no folds in his arms. How did that even happen? folds look like a perfect wave of skin once you realize its not real

My wife is so depressed by all this. I am often the one with more time to go play with our kid and she loves those memories I can share with her and our relatives across the country. Now my pictures are coming in ruined from the stock camera and yes we're exploring other options but this is unacceptable. We really need options to turn off post processing of these photos, please Apple .

p.s. while I won't post my family photos on here for privacy reasons, if Apple wanted to talk to me directly about this, please reach out.

That horrible but it's not like apple is reading this forum. You should go to https://www.apple.com/contact/feedback/ and tell them what you posted here. The more complaints they receive about their crappy camera AI, the more likely they MAY actually do something to clean up their mess. I'm in your camp - just give us an ON/OFF button!!!

Good luck!!!

 

[Borjan]

I've been reading this great thread (thanks for all the info folks) and while informative its depressing how bad the camera is on my new $1000 device.

Just some random examples of pictures that have been ruined by the default camera app include:

1. My 3 year old toddler, there are now photos where his teeth (which have spaces between them) are being filled in by the camera, making him look ridicules in more then one photo. Looks like he has dentures.
2. Many clothe items with patterns and textures are being smoothed out, loosing a ton of detail. Old photos look real and rich, new photos look smooth and plastic
3. My wife's teeth (teeth again... hmm) are being straightened by the camera. Seriously, I mean we zoom in and it draws a perfect line across the bottom of her teeth. what in the world is it thinking here. We again compare iPhone XR camera to new camera and its clearly damaging reality
4. We have one picture of the toddle where his arm has tons of folds in it. In the real world he is skinny/fit kid, no folds in his arms. How did that even happen? folds look like a perfect wave of skin once you realize its not real

My wife is so depressed by all this. I am often the one with more time to go play with our kid and she loves those memories I can share with her and our relatives across the country. Now my pictures are coming in ruined from the stock camera and yes we're exploring other options but this is unacceptable. We really need options to turn off post processing of these photos, please Apple .

p.s. while I won't post my family photos on here for privacy reasons, if Apple wanted to talk to me directly about this, please reach out.

That’s sucks, sorry to hear that.

Out of curiosity, were these shots taken by the 3x lens or the regular 1x? Indoor or outdoor, time if day etc?

 

[ph.rei]

I've been reading this great thread (thanks for all the info folks) and while informative its depressing how bad the camera is on my new $1000 device.

Just some random examples of pictures that have been ruined by the default camera app include:

1. My 3 year old toddler, there are now photos where his teeth (which have spaces between them) are being filled in by the camera, making him look ridicules in more then one photo. Looks like he has dentures.
2. Many clothe items with patterns and textures are being smoothed out, loosing a ton of detail. Old photos look real and rich, new photos look smooth and plastic
3. My wife's teeth (teeth again... hmm) are being straightened by the camera. Seriously, I mean we zoom in and it draws a perfect line across the bottom of her teeth. what in the world is it thinking here. We again compare iPhone XR camera to new camera and its clearly damaging reality
4. We have one picture of the toddle where his arm has tons of folds in it. In the real world he is skinny/fit kid, no folds in his arms. How did that even happen? folds look like a perfect wave of skin once you realize its not real

My wife is so depressed by all this. I am often the one with more time to go play with our kid and she loves those memories I can share with her and our relatives across the country. Now my pictures are coming in ruined from the stock camera and yes we're exploring other options but this is unacceptable. We really need options to turn off post processing of these photos, please Apple .

p.s. while I won't post my family photos on here for privacy reasons, if Apple wanted to talk to me directly about this, please reach out.

Why would Apple ever want to reach out to you? All of your statement has no proof. If I doubt what you are saying, imagine their interest in your post equals zero ??‍♂️

 

[xTidus]

Why would Apple ever want to reach out to you? All of your statement has no proof. If I doubt what you are saying, imagine their interest in your post equals zero ??‍♂️

Get a life man… How boring it can be to think like that.
If Apple don’t listen to customer feedback, at who should they do ?
It’s as the situation few years ago with the MacBook Pros.. They didn’t listen at all about the MacBooks introduced in 2016 with the Touch Bar and Butterfly keyboard and they made less and less sells. Since that, they did listen and it becomes much better now.

And about you reply, maybe could you think that he doesn’t want to share Private pictures of his family… ?
What he reported seem kinda true. I took a few pictures with iPhone 13 at « x3 zoom » and numbers on the picture were wrongly « improved » by AI. There was weird flexion on corners of numbers as if AI tried to rewrite the numbers.
If you don’t believe it, try it yourself in a quite dim room.
As a statement, you could share your experience and explain in what conditions it happened and Apple could try to reproduce that.
Please, try to be more open-minded… If they’re reports about the camera quality, it’s a statement that they’re issues with it.


As a personal opinion, i think that Apple are really messing with the computational photography.
It was already the case with 12 lineup but it was acceptable and now with 13 they really made it worst.
Yeah, all the YouTubers that call themselves « pro » and just look at the picture on a wrong way. « Wow, look at the sharpness of the photo! » Yeah, that’s true, every picture on the 13s iPhone are sharp but these are digital sharpness that make it absolutely UNnatural. If you share it on Instagram, it’s indeed perfect.
But if you just zoom in a bit, you’ll see that there’re absolutely no details out there. The picture is so worked by the AI that it lost all the details. It’s the case with skins, hairs, leafs, etc. Take your older 3+ iPhone and compare the same picture, you’ll see how it is a mess now.
I hope Apple will look forward to more natural pictures and make the AI useful as it was. AI is indeed good, but they should make the picture more natural while keeping their color tones which are the best on smartphones.
More than that, there’s also the telephoto that is a decline since they’re not using it properly… It captures less detail, so let’s use the main camera that gets more light. Ouch, we forget that we have absolutely no details if we zoom in a bit…
They tried to fix it with the 15.2 update as it stays more on the telephoto but it’s far to be perfect.
And plus, they listened. So, it’s a proof that there’re issues and they’re listening to our feedbacks.

 

[al0kz]

Get a life man… How boring it can be to think like that.
If Apple don’t listen to customer feedback, at who should they do ?
It’s as the situation few years ago with the MacBook Pros.. They didn’t listen at all about the MacBooks introduced in 2016 with the Touch Bar and Butterfly keyboard and they made less and less sells. Since that, they did listen and it becomes much better now.

And about you reply, maybe could you think that he doesn’t want to share Private pictures of his family… ?
What he reported seem kinda true. I took a few pictures with iPhone 13 at « x3 zoom » and numbers on the picture were wrongly « improved » by AI. There was weird flexion on corners of numbers as if AI tried to rewrite the numbers.
If you don’t believe it, try it yourself in a quite dim room.
As a statement, you could share your experience and explain in what conditions it happened and Apple could try to reproduce that.
Please, try to be more open-minded… If they’re reports about the camera quality, it’s a statement that they’re issues with it.


As a personal opinion, i think that Apple are really messing with the computational photography.
It was already the case with 12 lineup but it was acceptable and now with 13 they really made it worst.
Yeah, all the YouTubers that call themselves « pro » and just look at the picture on a wrong way. « Wow, look at the sharpness of the photo! » Yeah, that’s true, every picture on the 13s iPhone are sharp but these are digital sharpness that make it absolutely UNnatural. If you share it on Instagram, it’s indeed perfect.
But if you just zoom in a bit, you’ll see that there’re absolutely no details out there. The picture is so worked by the AI that it lost all the details. It’s the case with skins, hairs, leafs, etc. Take your older 3+ iPhone and compare the same picture, you’ll see how it is a mess now.
I hope Apple will look forward to more natural pictures and make the AI useful as it was. AI is indeed good, but they should make the picture more natural while keeping their color tones which are the best on smartphones.
More than that, there’s also the telephoto that is a decline since they’re not using it properly… It captures less detail, so let’s use the main camera that gets more light. Ouch, we forget that we have absolutely no details if we zoom in a bit…
They tried to fix it with the 15.2 update as it stays more on the telephoto but it’s far to be perfect.
And plus, they listened. So, it’s a proof that there’re issues and they’re listening to our feedbacks.

Seeing the direction that Samsung is taking with their presentation on the S22 lineup, manufacturers are going to double down on AI filling in the blanks of their hardware’s physical limitations. Things like this are only going to get worse before they even begin to look better.

The unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of smartphone users prefer the heavily processed photos that they can share directly to social media and share amongst their peers. I personally just want a pure RAW mode without the processing that Apple does and I’ll be satisfied.

 

[tedley]

Seeing the direction that Samsung is taking with their presentation on the S22 lineup, manufacturers are going to double down on AI filling in the blanks of their hardware’s physical limitations. Things like this are only going to get worse before they even begin to look better.

The unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of smartphone users prefer the heavily processed photos that they can share directly to social media and share amongst their peers. I personally just want a pure RAW mode without the processing that Apple does and I’ll be satisfied.

Agreed! It's Halide or some other 3rd-party app for those of us who want RAW files. There are some good options out there.

 

[ph.rei]

They tried to fix it with the 15.2 update as it stays more on the telephoto but it’s far to be perfect.

So they didn't fix anything and you are proud that they are listening. Keep dreaming that they will fix something that works fine. Is not 's fault that its users are trying to take amazing photos in bad lighting.
Why are some users blown away by the quality of the camera and some other users are complaining like its the end of the world? Did you read that? His wife has straight teeth and the 3 years old has dentures. Really?

 

[golfnut1982]

I've been reading this great thread (thanks for all the info folks) and while informative its depressing how bad the camera is on my new $1000 device.

Just some random examples of pictures that have been ruined by the default camera app include:

1. My 3 year old toddler, there are now photos where his teeth (which have spaces between them) are being filled in by the camera, making him look ridicules in more then one photo. Looks like he has dentures.
2. Many clothe items with patterns and textures are being smoothed out, loosing a ton of detail. Old photos look real and rich, new photos look smooth and plastic
3. My wife's teeth (teeth again... hmm) are being straightened by the camera. Seriously, I mean we zoom in and it draws a perfect line across the bottom of her teeth. what in the world is it thinking here. We again compare iPhone XR camera to new camera and its clearly damaging reality
4. We have one picture of the toddle where his arm has tons of folds in it. In the real world he is skinny/fit kid, no folds in his arms. How did that even happen? folds look like a perfect wave of skin once you realize its not real

My wife is so depressed by all this. I am often the one with more time to go play with our kid and she loves those memories I can share with her and our relatives across the country. Now my pictures are coming in ruined from the stock camera and yes we're exploring other options but this is unacceptable. We really need options to turn off post processing of these photos, please Apple .

p.s. while I won't post my family photos on here for privacy reasons, if Apple wanted to talk to me directly about this, please reach out.

I bet the forum would like to see the before and after magical teeth updates...That s**t would go viral, and not in a good way for Apple's computational photography. my avatar knows a thing or too about bad teeth?

 

[maflynn]

[MOD NOTE]
A number of posts were removed due to off topic bickering. Please remain on topic and be civil

 

[AlGardner]

Beta 15.4.2 iOS installed
Still nothing
Comparing to Lightroom DNG files. Looks like they are finally leaving more noise) meaning less noise removal processing. It left fabric texture from 3 meters in poor lighting! They messed it a bit. But not totally as it was before. And best thing - seems they fixed bad white balance.

Two photos: crops as it is possible to zoom on iPhone.
Taken with tele lens iPhone



More warm photo is from Lightroom and white balance is too warm:



But still things are bad:
iPhone messed up with paper and metal:



Lightroom DNG is good:



And now GOOD thing, at least for me.

In very this topic I’ve read about portraits mode is less aggressive in noise removal and all the AI. So here are two examples. Look down on the black surface to see how digital noise appears there. And of course on the fabric texture and it’s sharpness. Softer is from portrait mode.
Both shots are taken From 3 meters with tele lens.

Portrait mode:



And regular photo mode:



Same napkin and metal box.
Portrait mode:



Regular photo mode:



Not a solution but definitely workaround. Just put f16 in the portrait mode settings to get maximum DoF. Good that now camera app saves all settings you’ve maid

White balance in the portrait mode is also the best. Regular photo mode is a bit colder.