iPhone 13 Pro/Max camera quality concerns with blurry selfies or closeups, not focusing on subject, & 'oil painting' come to light

Apple’s iPhone 13 series was officially launched a few weeks ago. Camera quality is one of its most prominent features, especially on the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max.

However, recent reports from iPhone 13 Pro/Pro Max users raise concerns regarding the photographic performance of these devices. The main problems detected are ‘oil painting’ effect, blurry focus and selfies quality.

One of the problems reported (1, 2, 3, 4) is the ‘oil painting’ effect in some photos. This means that there is great loss in the details of the subject or object, and the textures are ‘washed’.

The effect can be clearly evidenced thanks to the screenshot provided in one of the reports. This shows a comparison of a photo taken by the iPhone 13 Pro against a photo taken by the iPhone 11 Pro.

Reports indicate that this could be due to excessive IA processing on the image. Due to this, some affected users claim the option to turn off ‘Smart HDR’ in the camera, the alleged feature responsible for the problem.

Other reports points to alleged focus problems on the iPhone 13 cameras (1, 2). On this matter, a user reports the following:

I’m noticing that when I touch the screen to get it to focus on a certain point it will adjust focus and I can see it get that point in focus, but then it will settle in/lock onto a different spot in the frame – meaning the point I touched is blurry…
Source

Basically, the iPhone 13 camera app doesn’t let focus on what the user wants. When the user chooses a focus point, it would change itself to another.

This problem also generates a poor quality of the closeups, because it is allegedly difficult to obtain a clear image of the object to be focused on.

Users suspect that this erratic behavior could be due to the automatic switching system between normal mode and macro mode not working well. However, this is yet to be confirmed.

The quality of the iPhone 13 Pro front camera is another reported problem (1, 2, 3, 4). Users complain that the picture quality is not good, especially in low light.

It is suspected that, as in the first problem, this could be due to a very aggressive image processing. One of the reports describes the situation as follows:

The front camera seems to have some kind of beauty or over-smoothing effect on and the pictures really do look unacceptable.
Source

It seems that iPhone 13 users are not very happy with the performance of their cameras. It only remains to wait for these complaints to reach Apple so that they can offer a solution.

We will update the article with the pertinent information, as and when we catch hold of any. In the meantime, you can also check our bug/issues tracker dedicated to the iPhone 13 series.

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