New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….
Original story (published on October 4, 2022) follows:
When it comes to photography, iPhones are among the best smartphones available on the market. Apple has now included an all-new Photonic Engine in the iPhone 14 Pro.
It enables Deep Fusion, which merges the best pixels from multiple exposures into a single shot, to occur earlier in the process on uncompressed images.
This preserves far more data, allowing for brighter, more vivid colors and highly detailed textures in low-light photography.
iPhone 14 Pro camera photos over processed OR overexposed
However, some iPhone 14 Pro users claim that the cameras’ picture quality falls short of expectations and disappoints them (1,2,3,4,5,6,7).
Apple jumped on the auto-enhancement bandwagon a long time ago, as all iPhones (11 onwards) include Deep Fusion technology, which applies multiple filters automatically whether you want them or not.
This can cause oversaturated blues and greens, exaggerated shadows, grainy and over-sharpened pictures taken on an iPhone. And that’s exactly the case for many iPhone 14 Pro users.
Apparently, Apple processes photos aggressively at times, eliminating details in them. Furthermore, some believe that the iPhone 13 (or perhaps 12) series takes superior shots in certain situations.
i just got a iphone 14 and upgraded from the xr. i feel like the camera makes everything too sharpened. is there a way to change that? before i take the picture it looks fine, but when i open it on photos it’s very sharpened and grainy. almost as if there’s a filter on it. i went in settings and turned off view full hdr but didn’t notice a difference.
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I just bought an iPhone 14 Pro Max but the both videos and photos I take are over smooth, I mean in a bad way. Videos are not sharp enough like my previous iphone 11 pro max. Is there a auto-filter or something, and how can I disable it? Please help
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Others are having issues with the 14 Pro camera’s exposure, claiming that the pictures taken are either totally blow out the sky or underexpose the subject (1,2,3).
In low light, the photos taken are not accurately focused on the subject. Even in night mode, the photographs are underexposed and look as if HDR mode is not functioning properly.
I purchased my IPhone 14 Pro Max today and it has an annoying over exposure that it does to all my photos. It look very different from what I’m seeing on the screen when I’m taking the photo. How do I fix this to get this automatic over exposure turned off?
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Some tried switching the HDR mode off and took the photo again but there was little to no difference as it was still oversaturated and grainy.
While last year a section of users asked for better HDR performance, it seems some are now finding it too overdone.
We hope Apple listens and fixes the issues with overprocessed OR overexposed iPhone 14 Pro photos. When they do, we will be updating this space to reflect the same so stay tuned.
Update 1 (January 6, 2023)
12:50 pm (IST): The camera quality in modern iPhone models is still the subject of discussion. This time it was Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) who has weighed in on the matter.
In his video, Marques Brownlee suggests that the camera AI or post-processing is to blame for the photo quality issues in certain scenarios. Apparently, it could be more aggressive than it should.
The later iPhone models offer bigger camera sensors, so aggressive post-processing should be less necessary than on older models with smaller sensors.
Marques Brownlee’s conclusion is that Apple could be implementing camera AI or post-processing with the same ‘intensity’ in recent iPhone models as in older models, resulting in over-processing. You can watch the full video below:
Update 2 (May 19, 2023)
02:44 pm (IST): All eligible iPhones got the iOS 16.5 update a few hours ago. Sadly, some users confirmed that the ‘oversharpened or overprocessed photos’ issue is still present (1, 2).
Note: You can check out our Apple iPhone 14 series bug tracker to know more about other issues.
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