White Balance on iPhone 4

Yes, it does do an excellent job outdoors. But indoors it's really pretty bad, let's admit it. I've had a number of cellphone cameras and they all did a better job, white balance wise, than the I4. Even my 3GS did a better job under tungsten lighting.

But yes, this is a very sharp camera with good color under outdoor conditions.

White balance presets and ICC profiles are very different things though.
As you said, ICC profiles are there to allow images to show correctly on different display device screens or printer papers.
All we're trying to do here is to be able to set 5 different preset combinations of colour temperature and green/magenta tint on a single device.
Once you display that image somewhere else i.e your Mac screen or printed page, those ICC profiles that are present in a calibrated display or printer profile will do a reasonable job of ensuring it stays looking the same (to most peoples requirements at least)
I guess it's a case of some simple presets will be far better than relying on an automatic system which clearly doesn't work at the moment.

Front camera shot


Rear camera shot a moment later


The front camera obviously is better. Exposure may be different, but should not affect white balance.

seems like 4.0.1 won't be fixing the white balance issue. I don't even know if this is a defect on my phone or if it's a software problem. 😟

Returned mine and my son's iPhone 4 yesterday after the Genius Bar appointment. We took pictures of my son's new iPhone and the white balance issue (yellow-orange-green tint) disappeared. Didn't test mine. I got home, took pictures using the flash at low light setting and BAM! The yellow-orange-green tint is BACK! I should have took the pictures at the store!
So yes, my son's pictures are spot on after the exchange and mine is still a lemon!

I have the same issues with White Balance. pics are very yellow to orange. Only seems to be an issue on the back camera. The front is fine. Did a side by side with my wifes and hers seems to be allot better. Still slightly yellow though. I have a 32 gig and she has a 16 gig, both Iphone 4's. Outdoor and under florescent lighting is fine too. Only happens under incandescent lighting. So good luck recreating in the apple store under their florescent lighting. spoke to Customer support and they just said to restore my phone to original settings. Didnt work of course. Also the tech thought there was a white balance setting in the settings menu. Maybe the older iphones had this option but not the 4's. Hopefully there will be another software update to correct this issue. Good luck.

I have this exact same problem. Camera is fantastic in sunlight, day light, outdoors, and indoors with no lights on, but as soon as the lights are on, or its a bit low light, the in-phone view turns everything yellow and the photos too. It does seem like a significant white-balance issue, under low light and tungsten light etc.

Is this going to get fixed, because this is the main reason i upgraded over the 3G, and if this doesn't get fixed, i want to return my phone, but my 14 days (Now 30 days?) will be up very soon, and i'll be stuck with a phone that only takes yellow pictures indoors.

I also have a significant reception issue, even when i merely touch the black strip (bridging the two metal sections) without ANY other grip at all. This is quite another matter though.

Any reply from Apple would be nice on this issue, seeing as over 100 people on this thread alone, seem to be getting a clueless response from Apple, but if 100 people have reported this, how can they say they've never heard of this before?

Please Apple, fix this so i can keep this otherwise, (nearly) perfect phone!

PS> i upgraded to 4.0.1 and it didn't help.

Another iPhone 4 with the yellowing photo issue. I just bought my 32 GB iPhone 4 less than a week ago and noticed the color issue a few days later. Outside, the photos are great and very true to color. Indoors, the rear camera gives everything a strong, yellowish hue. The front camera does not.

I haven't contacted customer support yet, but I'm really disappointed in this flaw. I use my camera several times a day for my job and can't take the time to manually edit each photo to fix the colors.

Is this issue universal to all iPhone 4's? I was hoping I just had a bad phone and a replacement would resolve this issue, but judging by all the other reports in this thread, that's not likely. I'll miss my gorgeous retina display, but if this isn't resolved quickly, I'll have to go back to the 3GS. 😟

I too had this issue. I looked at the display cameras and compared them side by side with mine and you could see mine was putting out yellow tinted pictures. One of the genius bar workers told me that it was a hardware flaw, and another told me that 50% of them were suffering from it. Anyways I went through 3 replacement units until I got one with a working back camera.

I would highly advise anyone experiencing the issue go to the genius bar and get a replacement as well. A software problem wouldn't explain how only some units are effected, even in the same model number, and how some are worst than others in yellow tint. It's more likely a Q/C issue on some of the cameras.

Just my 2cents

I too have this same auto white balancing problem on the iPhone 4 16gb. All indoor pictures seem to be extremely yellowish. Outdoor pics are gorgeous. I'm afraid to get a replacement phone which exhibits some sort of other problem since this phone is near perfect. Wondering if this is truly a software issue or if I should hold off on waiting to hear something from Apple..

Same problem. now on my 2nd 32gb phone 4.. same issues. there are 2 problems with the white balance:
-first the screen itself is on the yellowish grayish compared to the 16gb iphones 4 I saw at the apple store, and the difference is way more obvious when compared to my old 3GS

-second, the rear camera's white balance is way off (yellow-green) indoors under fluorescent (green tint) and tungsten (yellow tint) lights. the front camera is well balanced.

So I am assuming that there are 2 problem one with the camera and another with the screen and they both add up (when viewed on the phone and only camera issue when photos are viewed on a computer obviously). I assume a large number of the 32GB iPhone 4 (and possibly the 16GB) have the problem (what the probability of going through 2 iphone or 4 iphones like other people mentioned with the same problem unless more than 50% of them actually have it). I hope that a software update would fix the issue.

I had my yellow camera swapped out twice, and now I have a yellow-green camera. Just got a follow up call from a local Apple Store manager that informed me the only course I can take now is to bring my Mac Pro into the store so they can see if the problem lies there. There's no way I'm taking my computer into the mall for a defective phone. I've been inconvenienced way too much for faulty engineering and poor customer support.

kurujiru wrote:
I had my yellow camera swapped out twice, and now I have a yellow-green camera. Just got a follow up call from a local Apple Store manager that informed me the only course I can take now is to bring my Mac Pro into the store so they can see if the problem lies there. There's no way I'm taking my computer into the mall for a defective phone. I've been inconvenienced way too much for faulty engineering and poor customer support.

That Apple Store Manager should be fired. Nobdy as dumb as that should be in a position of authority.

Having the same problem. Nasty yellow indoor pictures with a big blue spot in the middle.

This topic is much more active, and has listings of good and bad serial numbers plus videos for reference.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2479908&start=0&tstart=0

I am having the same problem with yellow video.
Also the white balance keeps changing while recording. Is there a way to lock the white balance so that it does not keep changing colors?