As pointed out by MKBHD, most phones handle well in favorable scenarios, such as a clear sky or a subject in front of a clear background. But when you have different colors and textures in the same scene, the post-processing must be smart enough to understand what will be the best setting for all these elements.
But the thing is, while companies like Google are doing it the right way, Apple is definitely not. As shown by the YouTuber, the iPhone 14 Pro always tries to lighten the shadows, especially on people’s faces, making the photo look very artificial. The iPhone also exaggerates the sharpness of the photos compared to other smartphones. MKBHD even complains that his skin tone looks quite different on the iPhone camera.
In the iPhone 14 Pro camera review by Sebastiaan de With, developer of the popular camera app Halide, he also pointed out multiple flaws in Smart HDR. For example, every time there’s a very bright background, the iPhone also tries to boost the brightness of the people in the photo, making them look very white.
Filipe EspósitoI have honestly never seen it make for a better photo. The result is simply jarring, he said.
It feels somewhat inappropriate to comment on this topic since I haven’t owned an iPhone in more than four years – nor do I have any intention of returning to Apple’s ecosystem – but the iPhone photos from Marques’ video are blatantly worse. Attempting to level shadows over an entire face in postprocessing is a terrible choice; in real-world situations it’s common that certain areas are lit more intensely than others, and a photo should properly reflect that, not invent some ideal scenario where the light source is dead-center and smooth. On top of that, the iPhone photos have a sickly yellow tone, an obvious case of incorrect color temperature. It’s possible that I picked up on these glaring flaws during the blind smartphone camera test, hence the iPhone dropped to the lower half of my rankings for the portrait section.
There’s an argument to unpack this issue further: because of its tight ecosystem integration, Apple sees little user drain to Android – in the US at least, an iPhone user will consistently upgrade to another iPhone. Thus Apple has effectively very little competition for its base and feels no great incentive to stay competitive in features such as photo quality; their customers will continue to spend on overpriced iPhones even with subpar postprocessing because they wouldn’t give up on the perceived advantages of the ecosystem.
As for awarding the Best Camera System to the iPhone despite these flaws based on other considerations such as speed and responsiveness… naturally some of these factors are subjective, with some people preferring a quicker camera app, other more editing features or better photos overall. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of people snapping hundreds of pics on their smartphones, I think the quality of the postprocessing should be their main concern. When they will look back at these memories years from now, they are not going to remember that their camera app opened a microsecond faster; but a botched edit of that unique moment will remain ruined forever…
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