What is Happening with iPhone Camera?




What exactly is happening with the iPhone’s camera? The Blind Smartphone Camera Test: https://youtu.be/LQdjmGimh04 …

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About the Author: Marques Brownlee

30 Comments

  1. There was this notion of color "style" associated with brands among members of clubs of people with fancy cameras where I live. Nikon colour, canon colour, Sony colour, Pentax, Leica etc. We were wasting our time comparing, arguing, defending, Not the ways how the light is processed, but how it looks on screen. Some of just didn't have the time for such things, since we had weddings or other events to shoot on weekends, process the whole photos, and deliver the prints to clients asap. Sometimes we had to work with cameras from different brands. So we just shoot raw, create our own colour profile on Lightroom, and send all photos through it before tweaks. This experience influences the way I choose phones with cameras. It doesn't bother me that much.

  2. while there might not be a way to judge "better", there is a way to judge "more accurate" though…perhaps it should be a metric nowdays…
    how accurate to real life is it, if you take a picture and then view it on a well-calibrated screen, how close is it to what you actually see in real life?
    it would be somewhere down in the technical description among like focus length and specific chipset, but it would be ACTUALLY good to know info…

  3. That's the reason I try to get my own conclusions and do not trust anymore YouTubers comparisons or camera reviews.

    If you were learning how to take good pictures before cameras on phones, probably you had your own "HDR phase". Usually, beginners discover HDR and suddenly think their photos are awesome, even when they are just popping colours and ultrasharpening crap.

    If they succeed and keep learning, they will look back to their HDRish photos and dye in selfshame.
    All of these facts happened to every legit photographer.

    And that's exactly what software photography is doing: follow newbies photographers tastes, with no photography background more than apply VSCO filters and add some ##

    I think that's also why Sony phones rate always so low. Their photos look more similar to raw and always gonna loose facing a shiny sharp colourful pop picture.

    For me, the way to go will be having the possibility to choose between .jpeg profiles. These way you could easily switch between "Apple standard look", "custom look",… similar to what Fujifilm is doing in their cameras for years.

    Cheers

  4. This is getting frustrating.. you're comparing apples and pixels. You're saying that the software is making all of these decisions, but of course you don't have to shoot that way and you're not making it clear.. was this a 12 or 48 MP RAW image.. was it a half-the-size of jpg HEIC image? The image of you at the harbor is objectively superior on the iPhone, sorry maybe the blurry version is how you wish you looked but at least with the iPhone image I feel like I'm truly seeing your knuckles, your hair, your eyes, etc.. and again it could go far beyond this if you would shoot 48MP RAW and then edit in lightroom.. even rendered down to JPG it would blow all of these other cameras out of the water. Please be more specific about what settings you're using in the future as there are so many ways to balance trade-offs on iPhone right now.. I'm even able to shoot in 16-bit color now but the onus is on the user to educate themselves on the settings to get amazing results out of it. Also, when it comes time to print in the future the 48MP images coming out of the iPhone 14 Pro will make a massive difference in terms of possible size and this is not well understood by the public yet. If you want future-proof photos for your special events you HAVE to shoot 48MP RAW.

  5. this is why it's nice to be able to take RAW format photos (in addition to normal ones!)
    because that way you can get the REAL camera data, and touch up on it YOURSELF (or well, have your own software do it), instead of baking all the bias into a jpeg
    it's also way bigger, lol

    and yes, there's still a little bit of bias in there, too, but it's more or less the actual raw camera data, with whatever real settings you used, not trying to photoshop the moon, or evenly light your face, or correct for what it thinks is your skin tone, or whatever
    and yes, it does mean you have to take effort AFTER the photo, or have someone (or -thing) else do the effort, but it also means you don't have to do all of that calculation INSTANTLY during the photo snap, and it also means you can have different photos actually look different depending on what you REALLY want, you might want evenly lit faces in a lot of photos, but perhaps you then take some pictures with intentionally unbalanced light, perhaps you want to take a picture of the ACTUAL colors of some facinating part of nature, which gets washed away by the auto-proccessing…

  6. It's not just image or computational quality that's the issue. I switched to the iPhone specifically for the quality of the video for my channel, and for the continuity camera feature. Both of those have been terrible. Video is overly red tinted.The 240fps recording mode almost never works. I have dropped frames all the time. And continuity camera glitches with even moderate movement.

  7. I stayed with my 13 Pro as my experience w/Android phones is to skip the first year of a new camera sensor. Processing tends to lag behind the HW change. Honestly though, its only video that keeps me on an iPhone at this point. Some of the flagship Android cameras are just better and more interesting for stills imo.

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