iPhone 14 Pro Max camera is crap

Or at least the default camera app and software

You can click image below to see it on 1024x768 resolution

Some months ago I bought an iPhone 14 Pro Max with 256 GB disk space. All in all it has been quite good phone as far as smart phones can be in the first place and I have been quite happy with it. I can use apps what I want to use, it have good battery life and the screen is big enough so I can use apps for viewing chords when I play piano or guitar. For these use cases it is a OK phone as excepted.

One thing what I like about phones in current era is that they have quite capable cameras, at least on technical level. On modern iPhones their default software just seems to ruin too many photos to be unusable crap that it just does not feel photography anymore almost at all. Nowadays those feel just a random snapshot with forced oversaturated and over sharpened layers that photography and these outputs does not fit on the same sentence. It is just piece of crap if I try to think it as a photography, not as a computer generated artform.

In case you are wondering what I am talking about why I think these photos are terrible then shortly it is because of forced HDR what cannot be disabled anymore and over sharp images what is not natural looking at all. There is probably much more of other automatic adjustments what is ruining the photo, but at least these two are quite easy to spot by eye directly.

Personally I wish that there would be an option in Settings where I could just disable all of that crap and get again more photorealistic looking photos what are more faithful to real life, not this AI generated oversaturated ugliness I nowadays get. It feels sad to think about that years ago Apple had good cameras in iPhones and their software didn't ruin photos but now when we have technically much better lenses etc. we just get worse "photos" instead because of terrible software.

Not all hope is lost - use the RAW and edit with external app

iPhone 14 Pro Max have a possibility to take RAW photos and this is the only possible way (in time of writing this) to make your photos look like a photography using your iPhone default camera app or at least so far as I know. Still you need to edit these photos and remove all the crap what iPhone camera software have added. I have tested this with Lightroom and it has been quite good experience - at least I have been able to remove those forced additions and have usable photo.

Most annoying thing with this process is that you need lots of disk space, you need to edit manually all the photos you want and it is just time consuming and annoying especially if I think that this process is required just because the default app ruins the photos.

Situation might be different if you use external camera app - I am not sure since I have not yet tested those, but if I need to have different external app to get proper photos then it is not anymore as handy to have iPhone as a camera.

This kind of stupidity in application and firmware develoment makes me remember why having external camera what is not connected to internet is just much better. It is what it is and it does not randomly decide to update anything on its own. I can be sure that if I like the look of my photos of my external camera then it will stay that way, at least tehcnically since nothing is changing with forced updates. Maybe the best feature in stand alone -cameras is their lack of Internet connection.

2023-08-31