Have iPhone cameras become too smart?

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Controversial take: DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have largely made themselves irrelevant by ignoring computational photography advancements (computational photography is seen as &quot;cheating&quot;).<p>I own several &quot;real&quot; cameras: FF, M43, and over a dozen lenses. Multiple camera companies. On paper many have very impressive specs. The problem is that camera companies focus primarily on raw specs with software being a secondary concern. To give one concrete example, I can press one button on a cellphone (almost any) and it will capture more dynamic range than my $2K DSLR.<p>How can a tiny sense in a cellphone capture more dynamic range can a massive sensor? Software. It is stacking multiple rapid exposures using an eShutter and computationally merging them. You can do that with a DSLR, but it is time-consuming, outside of camera, and produces worse results (e.g. motion in the frame will ruin your stack).<p>It is super aggravating, but it isn&#x27;t actually surprising if you look at the amounts of money spent on photographic software alone compared to almost the entire camera industry. I&#x27;ve given up for most things, a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches.

It&#x27;s not that cameras have become too smart. It&#x27;s that they&#x27;re making choices for us, and these are not the choices we would make for ourselves.<p>11 years ago, I gave a talk about this at the Internet Archive. It seems to have held up. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UMMogOoWEbI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UMMogOoWEbI</a>

After watching far too many videos comparing the iPhone 13 Pro Max, Samsung S22 Ultra, and Pixel 6 Pro, I decided against the iPhone because of the automatic skin smoothing.<p>The iPhone 13 Pro Max removed wrinkles, sun spots, moles, hair, etc to the point where the results looked like overprocessed, manually edited photos. This wasn&#x27;t subtle -- the reviewers commented on it as well.<p>While I don&#x27;t do video, I was struck by a specific example: the iPhone 13 Pro Max&#x27;s automatic enhancement for dark scenes decided a barely visible wall was red and recently painted. It looked like someone had drawn a box in the photo and did a red fill.<p>I suspect it is only a matter of time before Samsung and Pixel&#x27;s photos look as overprocessed. But, for now, we have some choice.

Personally I&#x27;m tired of the HDR-ification of everything. House listings? It&#x27;s like realtors figured out what HDR was and went NUTS. Those images are like the comic sans of photography.

The whole idea that the iPhone 7 was dumb but now the 12 is too smart shows how poorly researched this article is. The aperture on all cell phone cameras are tiny, so you’re running into the limits of physics as you get very few photons per pixel imaged. The noise is just very high and uneven. So all cameras use computational photography, including way before the iPhone 7, in order to achieve the results they get. You can argue that the algorithms are getting worse, but you cannot say they weren’t smart before.

I found this interesting as I&#x27;m someone who used to travel with at least one camera most of the time, but I&#x27;ve recently come back from a holiday where I used my iPhone 13 Pro as my only camera.<p>Overall I actually found it a great experience – I love having an ultra wide angle lens in my pocket and after a bit of time getting used to it, I find the 3x zoom a more useful focal length than the 2x zoom on my previous iPhone X – but I did find the over-processing (the &quot;painterly&quot; look) frustrating, and even more annoying is that it will often use the wide angle lens and upscale rather than using the 3x zoom (even with ProRAW enabled – see [1]).<p>I understand why the software makes these choices for the &quot;average&quot; user, but it would be nice to enable a &quot;pro&quot; mode which reduces noise reduction and favours the zoom lens in more situations.<p>I ended up using the stock camera app for &quot;snapshots&quot; (e.g. photos where I didn&#x27;t care too much about the quality, or where I was just using the wide angle lens), and Lightroom Mobile&#x27;s camera for shots where I wanted more control, or when I wanted to ensure that the zoom lens was being used (Halide is also good for this, but I found it convenient to have the photos in LR Mobile for processing immediately, even if Lightroom&#x27;s UX is clunkier).<p>This actually worked pretty well for me – you can trust the stock camera to take a photo which will look good at mobile screen sizes even in challenging conditions, so it&#x27;s great for &quot;capturing the moment&quot;, while if you are taking a photo where you care about the details, it&#x27;s usually not an issue to take a few extra seconds to open LR... but it would be nice to be able to do this in the stock camera.<p>The results with RAWs from Lightroom are actually pretty impressive IMO – there&#x27;s more noise than the stock camera, but I prefer this to the smudged noise reduction look and I&#x27;m sure with some processing I can find a happy medium. Even the ultra wide photos are reasonably sharp.<p>This was a long way of saying that if you&#x27;re frustrated by this issue, try a third party camera app and hopefully you&#x27;ll find that you can get more out of the newer iPhone&#x27;s great cameras, while still having the default camera there for quick snapshots!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lux.camera&#x2F;iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lux.camera&#x2F;iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...</a>

I feel the opposite: I don&#x27;t care about the camera. I just take snaps of people and random things and like the memory more than anything else. I wish apple made high end phones with cameras that were flush in the body. For me the extended lenses are just an annoying and user hostile design statement.*<p>And ditto ipads: since the first ipad came out I&#x27;ve taken a grand total of one photo with it. The aggressive cluster of lenses is a real downer since I can&#x27;t lay it flat.<p>* Yes I know some people chose their phone by the camera and need the physics of a longer lens barrel. They are not wrong, nor am I: I&#x27;m just saying that one size doesn&#x27;t fit all.

Whole article talks about photo differences but there aren’t any concrete shown examples of the problem images. Kind of disappointing because it’s difficult to tell if the differences are huge or mild exaggeration.

It&#x27;s the same thing with the webcams on the M1 Macs.<p>Comparing my 2015 Macbook Pro and my 2021 Macbook Pro, I can say that they both have crappy webcams. The 2015 has a somewhat grainy, high contrast look. The 2021 webcam has extreme smoothing applied, to the point where my facial hair looks like it&#x27;s painted on. The result is that my face always looks blurry. There are also weird movement glitches that are probably caused by temporal smoothing.<p>From a distance, the pictures from the new webcams look better. But up close it&#x27;s frustrating that my face is always blurry.

As long as there&#x27;s a photography thread...<p>I&#x27;m going to Africa next year. I have been before, and taken a DMC-ZS60. It&#x27;s OK but not great. By far the best feature is that it packs a tremendous zoom lens into a very small and light package, which is really a must for wildlife photography.<p>I would like to step up my photography game for my next trip without having to add too much bulk and weight. Once upon a time I had a DMC-GX1 with a 300mm lens and that worked well, but I found that even that was too big for me to comfortably lug around and so I got rid of it because I never used it. That camera is also getting pretty old. Has the technology improved at all? Is there a better alternative out there for a good zoom (300mm or better) without the bulk of a regular DSLR?<p>[UPDATE]<p>In case anyone is interested, here are a few shots from the ZS60:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;Seabourn2019&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;422.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;Seabourn2019&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;422.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;Seabourn2019&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;496.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;Seabourn2019&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;496.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;Africa2022&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;303.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;Africa2022&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;303.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;west_africa_2015&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;707.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;west_africa_2015&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;707.htm...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;west_africa_2015&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;950.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;west_africa_2015&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;950.htm...</a><p>And one from the GX1 for comparison. (Another advantage to that camera is a fast shutter!)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;NWP2015&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;162.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flownet.com&#x2F;ron&#x2F;trips&#x2F;NWP2015&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;162.html</a>

I took a fairly elderly Panasonic DMC-GX80 on holiday with me and despite the lack of HDR, AI and clever stuff with multiple exposures, I found that for most of the interesting photos I wanted to take, it did the right thing.<p>My phone on the other hand did the blandest thing possible. Impossible to get an atmospheric color cast, a dramatic silhouette or anything that made a photo interesting to me. It was fine in most situations with &quot;normal&quot; lighting but they aren&#x27;t usually the things I want to photograph.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t the smartness - it&#x27;s that combined with the pathological desire to simplify UI and remove options. Give me the clever stuff but let me tweak it.<p>But no - settings are bad and options are confusing to the user.

As several here have noted, an antidote is to use both RAW and jpg formats. I have my Pixel set to dual outputs, which yields both Google&#x27;s processed image and a dng I can use later.<p>For the shifts in color (blue skies at night or colorful sunsets turned dun), that problem exists for most cameras. No matter the camera you use, if you turn off automatic white balance and pin it to &#x27;daylight&#x27; or ~5500K, you&#x27;ll find a whole world of color returns to your images. There&#x27;s post-processing work (definitely work in RAW, of course) to do, but it brings back a perspective that is often lost.<p>As for the author&#x27;s lament, <i>&quot;Now every photo we take on our iPhones has had the salt applied generously, whether it is needed or not.&quot;</i> , I&#x27;m less sad. People like salty snacks and fast food, but that doesn&#x27;t mean a meal from a skilled chef is any less delicious. If anything, it makes the work of an artisan stand out more to those who appreciate it.<p>An example -- check out Bianca Germain&#x27;s images <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;biancagermainphoto.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;biancagermainphoto.com&#x2F;</a> (@biancagermain). The composition of her environmental portraiture captures context and narrative, something an algorithm cannot do.

Observation about the author&#x27;s Ms. McCabe deciding to carry a Pixel: I was out this weekend with my wife and her friends and they all had iPhones. They all kept asking me to use my Pixel, because &quot;it takes better pictures.&quot; Not sure how much more damning it can be than a bunch of 40-50 year old moms noticing the camera for it&#x27;s suck.<p>The Pixel is definitely, unabashedly, engaging in similar computational chicanery, but it&#x27;s better at it&#x27;s particular brand of misdirection than the iPhone is at it&#x27;s brand. And this is the first time soccer moms have noticed.<p>I have a friend who was a PM at Apple and moved to Google. He said never expect to work with Apple on a software project. It didn&#x27;t make any sense for them to contract for software services, because they didn&#x27;t have any data.

While most readers probably have at least some firsthand experience with this, some examples would&#x27;ve gone a long way to illustrate the issues brought up.

&gt; “Make it less smart—I’m serious,” she said. Lately she’s taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google’s line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures.<p>And here we completely sabotage the premise of the headline, and make it clear that this whole topic is a subjective perception issue by the consumers. Pixels do FAR more ML-based post-processing than iPhones. It just so happens that I guess they do a BETTER job.<p>Which means that iPhone cameras aren&#x27;t too smart, but rather aren&#x27;t smart enough.

Samsung has some crazy thing turned on by default which makes selfies into air-brushed portraits where you&#x27;ve applied blush and a sparkle to your eye. It&#x27;s surreal, ridiculous and generally disturbing.<p>Happily, since it&#x27;s a non-iOS device, I can just turn it off.<p>Apple is Apple. Bitching about the way they over-coddle their users is a pastime almost as old as I am at this point, so I won&#x27;t. I&#x27;d be a devoted Apple zealot if they gave power users the ability to customize their devices. It&#x27;s disappointing they don&#x27;t, as they have such nice kit, but I&#x27;m not their target market and never have been, so I just use other products.<p>Apple hasn&#x27;t noticed my personal boycott, yet, but any day now, they&#x27;ll notice and cave in to my demands, I&#x27;m sure.

One could argue iPhone 7 had computational photography as well. But let&#x27;s spilt it between Apple actually mentions it, ( iPhone X ) and prior iPhone.<p>For a long time, iPhones&#x27; Camera were the most realistic of all Smartphone Cameras. No HDR, No filters, it tries to preserve the image as real life as it can be. And that means things do look a little dull most of the time without proper lighting and adjustment. It carries on from Steve Jobs era. While Samsung, much like their TV, likes to tune their colour profile with high contrast and pop colours. It was easy for most consumer to think Samsung takes better quality pictures, but Apple stood ground. Refuse to give in, if you wanted professional edited photos alike, use a separate App.<p>This changed with iPhone X, or more accurately with the release of Google Pixel in 2016. Where the race of computational photography began. Apple decided to show their own take on iPhone X a year later. And since then Apple went all in on eye popping colour. The direction of their Camera profile took a 180 degree change.<p>And it is sort of strange in 2022, Google Pixel and Samsung actually has less pop colour and contrast compared to an iPhone.<p>I cant name many things or if <i>any</i> thing Tim Cook&#x27;s Apple has done right. But I can list many things they have changed and done wrong. Camera being one of them.

Digital photos are inherently computational, I think the distinction is where you stop processing and how much human control is exercised over the final product. Even film has some carefully developed characteristics that are used by the the photographer and developer to influence the image.<p>I love the full spectrum of it, from my DSLR to my iPhone. I&#x27;d love to see camera companies embrace the ability to capture the raw data to make deeper processing available and to open up the pipeline and let me tweak to my preference.

I think it&#x27;s a welcome effect for many average people on the street. As a hobbyist photographer who likes nature and astrophotograpy with quite serious gear (5D Mark IV, Sigma 14 f1.8, Canon 50mm f&#x2F;1.2 etc) I find iPhone camera really impressive and is actually the primary reason of upgrading every year.<p>Yet, I&#x27;d love to see an &quot;off&quot; switch when needed. But at least we&#x27;ve got RAW shooting which doesn&#x27;t apply much effects (but still overprocesses a little too much for &quot;raw&quot;, agreed.)

An article talking about photos that has no photos in it, huh.

I tried to show mates how filthy I was turned over my new apartment, and what I&#x27;m assuming to be the anti shadow AI in the sensor removed so much of the dirt..

If the iPhone provided access to the RAW image then this wouldn&#x27;t be a big deal. Discard the processed image if you want. Maybe Apple could make it a setting for whether to keep the RAW photo?<p>I have an iPhone SE and you can take good photographs with that camera - if you know what you&#x27;re doing. I&#x27;ve been doing photography as a hobby since the days of processing my own film and having my own darkroom and I can tell you the iPhone is capable of capturing great shots. But you have to know what you&#x27;re doing and you can&#x27;t have the camera&#x27;s software interfering with what you&#x27;re doing.<p>Can an iPhone replace your DSLR (assuming you know what you&#x27;re doing)? No. The DSLR simply captures more information, has more detail, especially in low-lit situations, and has better color. But for a device you always have in your pocket? It&#x27;s a pro-level snapshot camera! But it&#x27;s not replacing your DSLR and for most people that&#x27;s just fine.

Seems there are quite a few ways to get around this.<p>Didn&#x27;t know you could change the keyframe in a live photo, and it appears that removes the processing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appletoolbox.com&#x2F;disable-photo-auto-enhance-iphone&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;appletoolbox.com&#x2F;disable-photo-auto-enhance-iphone&#x2F;</a>

There&#x27;s a good record of phone imaging over the years to be found in a few devoted sites still comparing phone cameras with the Lumia 1020, the 2013 flagship of Windows Phones known for their camera hardware and naturalistic processing.<p>I find it quite remarkable that the 1020&#x27;s 41 MP, 1&#x2F;1.5&quot;, f&#x2F;2.2 camera, relying only on oversampling, has performance that still falls within the range of the flagships of today. It even achieves comparable performance when <i>zooming</i>, despite modern dedicated telephotos!<p>Nokia 808 vs 1020 vs Pixel 5 vs iPhone 12 Pro Max:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;allaboutwindowsphone.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;item&#x2F;24153_Youwantedityougotit2021PureVie.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;allaboutwindowsphone.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;item&#x2F;24153_Youwante...</a>

Sun Microsystems used to have a tagline: &quot;The network is the computer,&quot; now it&#x27;s starting to look like the network is the camera.<p>Basically photography is about Pentagram, Twatter and Faceborg more than it is about the photo itself.<p>The medium is starting to alter the aesthetics of the images themselves¹.<p>Joking aside, a professional photographer needs to be able to get reproducible results. Because the algorithms in the phones are mostly black box, with few parameters, they can&#x27;t be used in a professional setting.<p>Even if you have the control over the algorithm, they are still really weak. Portrait mode for example can&#x27;t reliably separate the subjects hair from the background properly.<p>Doing this optically does not suffer from these problems at all.<p>1: For example, vertical videos.

I think the point about resulting uncanniness is valid, but can&#x27;t most of these features be turned off? Portrait mode, despite the blurring issues, seems to be a popular feature.<p>Having just traded from an iPhone 5 to a 13 Pro, I can without hesitation say the upgrade to the quality of my pictures blew my mind. Let&#x27;s not overthink this.

Funny, I just had this problem. We got a taro-mousse cake for my daughter&#x27;s birthday and I was trying to take a photo of it on my iPhone 11 Pro. I could see the brilliant purple of the taro section of the cake with my own eyes, but the iPhone would hesitate before eventually turning it into a darker, almost brown color.

I’ve noticed with my 12 pro, my wife’s 11 pro, and my mom’s S10 that shots will sometimes look distorted in weird ways. With someone’s face being unnaturally elongated, or an arm in the foreground shortened. You’ll think you captured the shot and will only notice it after.

I noticed this recently. I was in Lightroom editing some photos from iPhone 13 Pro and zooming in they looked like impressionist paintings, small blotches of color, instead of what I&#x27;m used to from previous phones.

This is a terrible article full of outright falsehoods with no examples.<p>It seems like they just quoted a bunch of older &quot;get off my lawn&quot; photographers who either don&#x27;t know how to use the latest iPhones or haven&#x27;t even tried them.<p>Pretty much everything they&#x27;re talking about is either outright wrong, or it&#x27;s behavior that can be turned off in the settings or influenced in the camera app, or just go use an alternate app.<p>Some of the complaints in the article are as simple as the person complaining doesn&#x27;t know how to control exposure compensation or automatic exposure lock on the iPhone. Both of these are things that have not changed in a long time on the iPhone. Portrait mode is imperfect for sure, but the author doesn&#x27;t seem to understand that a large aperture on a traditional camera is also liable to produce weird effects in a picture and will most certainly do things like make things in the background disappear. Using that wisely separates a good photographer from a bad one.<p>There is a RAW mode for people who are complaining about that. Maybe it&#x27;s not &quot;RAW enough&quot; but the same thing has happened in the DSLR&#x2F;MILC world for a while too. Sony was doing processing on their RAW files a long time ago.<p>Some of the stuff going on with DLSRs&#x2F;MILC is targeted very heavily at spec sheet chasers these days and far less so artistic&#x2F;working photographers. It&#x27;s gotten a bit out of hand lately. I have a bunch of pro level photo gear and a lot of it has lost a lot of fun over the last 10 years.. the smartphone photography has gotten a lot more interesting. I&#x27;ve printed 60&quot; wide photos on one of my cameras and it&#x27;s 10 years old now. Zero reason for me to upgrade it for any realistic improvement in megapixels and the other things the camera companies are selling, for which they want $4000. Likewise ultra expensive new lenses which improve performance in the corner of the frame but weigh 2x as much as what I have already. The spec chasers love all this stuff to death but if the subject of the photo isn&#x27;t in the corner no viewer cares, and not many quality compositions focus on the corners. And it&#x27;s certainly not worth upgrading a $1000 lens to a $2000-3000 lens. Even MILC is in many ways a sideways move and often focuses on the same stuff smartphones are doing.<p>The 3 lens smartphones have gotten really really compelling for anyone who really thinks about how they shoot. If you&#x27;re not chasing printing big prints you can take the smartphone and get the same results as having to take an entire bag of expensive camera gear that cost you thousands.<p>The biggest weakness of the smartphones is flash &amp; external lighting.. but there have been hacks &amp; add on devices to control external flashes for quite a while now too. As in years. A lot of that is the same kind of stuff you used to have to do with &quot;Pro&quot; photo gear.<p>No matter what the camera is someone will always complain about the camera being the cause of their bad photography. It is almost never the camera&#x27;s fault. It is almost always a problem between the floor and the shutter button. Be a maker not a taker, etc..

Film cameras might hip again for the same feeling as music LP. The digital version of photos become a little bit to perfect.<p>Why do we call addictive smart phones that tracks users by selling advertisement smart?

like most technology today it is now being forced on us rather than being available as a tool.

An article about photos... with no photos.