Another year, another iPhone with near ZERO improvements to … – MacRumors

This is getting tiring. iPhones have been delivering very poor white balance and color rendering for YEARS now, especially in low or imperfect light (such as overcast). I don’t understand what is going on. This year’s Smart HDR was upgraded to version 5 but the “improvements” (or lack thereof) to rectify this issue are not up to par, in particular when compared to Pixel in many scenarios. If you have give me 10 pictures from an iPhone and 10 from any other smartphone I can usually figure out which one is the iPhone based on the yellow-green characteristic alone. Here are some yearly observations from all the review photos (as well as my own) that are yet to be fixed. I will use specific examples from 14 Pro and 15 Pro reviews to demonstrate.

1. iPhones repeatedly render a green or yellow tinge in many photos and subsequently kill the kind of beautiful color contrast we see in the ‘best case’ photos from Apple’s keynote as well as our own photographs.
2. White balance misses all too frequently in scenarios without perfect direct sunlight. Even then it sometimes struggles.

It’s getting to the point where every new iPhone release has me waiting in anticipation for the first real life photos to be published JUST so I can see if they’ve fixed this one issue. I often find myself adjusting my 14 PM photos slightly to account for the yellow cast and subsequent desaturation/poor contrast.

Let me start by presenting a side by side comparison of a shot from the 14 Pro and Pixel 7 from The Verge’s iPhone review last year. I know it’s a year old but I remember being irate when I saw it last year because this is a particularly disgusting example. As you will see the 15 Pro still has this issue in varying degrees of severity:

You see it? The Pixel is very balanced, there are different colored lights and the color of buildings can be seen through the harsh office lights, all the while the sky is closer to what you would see if you were actually standing there. The iPhone on the other hand looks like a PS3 cutscene from a Yakuza game, a complete blob of yellow-green Gotham CGI.

Unfortunately the 15 Pro exhibits the same issue, maybe there are some slight improvements but not enough. Again from The Verge 15 Pro review except this time I’ve included the same image with some very simple correction applied to it via Pixelmator. I’m no editor or professional photographer so you may not agree with the final output of my corrections but the point is to demonstrate that the original needs some form of correction in the first place to counter the yellow-green tinge:

Again, the correction is not perfect as I’m applying auto white balance adjustments to an already compressed jpeg, Apple’s original processing could produce a much better result. Look at the overall color of the original image though, in particular the buildings and the sky. I assure you Market St doesn’t look so jaundice.

Some more examples:

Disclaimer: let’s get this out of the way. The following responses are meaningless so there’s no need to post them: 1) “Buy a pixel” no thanks, I’m locked in to iPhone and prefer Apple’s ecosystem, it’s entirely reasonable to ask for improvements to a product you’re heavily invested in. 2) “iPhones are not meant for upgrading every year, don’t expect radical changes” this problem has been going on for years and it never gets addressed. If Google can deliver big upgrades to both their camera hardware and software processing whilst avoiding major mishaps with white balance/color, why can’t Apple? I’m not asking for magic, just some focus on white balance and color