IPhone 12 Pro lens flare

My few words (and two images) about the topic: I have bought the iPhone 12 Pro Max and I will be returning it. I am a semi-professional photographer and I understand the engineering behind the photo lenses - I know flares and other artifacts are to be expected, but what's going on with the iPhone 12 Pro Max is way too much - I consider this camera to be useless if I cannot take a panorama photo (see one of the images, it is a panorama, various artifacts).

Panorama:

Standard photo:

I had several iPhone before - I did not notice anything that strong on the photos. And I own a Huawei P30 Pro - with this phone I can take panoramas with the sun in front of me and they are clean, no strange lights/shadows or green dots on the photo.

Ample evidence was presented elsewhere in this thread, that yes, the iPhone 8/8 Plus did indeed do exactly this. I personally have concert video showing this when the stage lights would shine towards the camera.

Taken with an 8 Plus, from another thread:

No one doubts the issue occurs.

However, it is normal for premium smartphone cameras.

Note also the reviewer is obviously a phone reviewer, not a photographer or they would know the time they were attempting to capture photos is the most problematic time of day and professional photographers and cinematographers have to go through a lot of work that time of day to avoid flare with $5000 - $50,000 camera rigs.

One easy way to do so is as you can see the flare on the screen, aim your phone in such a way to redirect the flares into a portion of the frame you will crop out later.

Perhaps the best advice is this gem on avoiding lens flare from a photography web site in response to this photo from a compact camera:

There's an old joke that goes:

Guy goes to the doctor. Says "Doc, it hurts when I do this."

Doctor gives him a long look back, says: "Don't do that."

This is kind of the same. Lens flare is intrinsic to the optics, and while some handle it better than others, shooting directly into the sun is a very hard situation for any lens. Since you can't change the lens on your camera, your best bet is to avoid this kind of situation with this camera.

If you really a drawn to this as an artistic device, and aren't really able to experiment with lenses which might render flare/ghosting more attractively, you can make the best of it by watching the screen closely and adjusting the camera angle, or possibly block some of the light a little differently, or… edit it out digitally. 

The other option is to embrace what you get. Flare and ghosting are accepted parts of the language of photography. Use it to help say what you want to say rather than fighting.

i tested it on the 12 Pro Max, 12 Pro, and iPhone X. They all had the same issue, however the issue was by far more apparent on the 12 Pro models due to their increased sensitivity to light. I agree that this might be a defect for all devices. I would be surprised to hear that there are replacements out there that corrected this. Please let us know if that is the case so we can return our devices. I’m also extremely disappointed that Apple would allow this. In many low light conditions, shooting at bright subjects, there was just no way to angle the phones in a way that would

hide this reflective flare.

for comparisons sake, I attached the iPhone X photo here as well so you can see that it still exists, but is far less noticeable. I prefer the X flare all day over better aperture. C’mon Apple... 🙄

It's normal, so there's nothing to "fix."

If you take that iPhone X photo and adjust shadows, brightness, contrast and saturation to try and match the quality of what just comes out of the iPhone 12 Pro Max, guess what starts to take on greater prominence?

I have a similar problem but mine is more weird. I am not a professional photographer but I’ve never encountered this on my previous phone or camera. See image below.

the reflection of the moon (not in the shot) is somehow “multiplied” into the shot creating multiple dots. Again I am no expert but I would assume this is some issue with the lens. Any ideas? I will probably return my phone and buy another model or switch to another brand.

The dots absolutely and correctly correspond to each bright light in your photo. They are reflected off the sensor in the camera and as I've said over and over in this thread, all you have to do is angle the camera appropriately to eliminate them as I've also shown with these two photos I've posted now a few times. I didn't move my position at all. I simply altered the angle of the camera:

While neither photo are particularly great photos, it demonstrates how EASY it is to eliminate the flares simply by altering the angle of the camera.

Aberbud wrote:

My new iPhone 12 is giving the flare effect and it is definitely not visible before taking the shot.

Composing a photo intended to induce flare and showing the flare is indeed visible on-screen.

MiamiC70 wrote:

I know about lens flare and how to compose for it. Sun, moon not too hard how do you hide a hundred green dots from shooting a nighttime cityscape or Christmas tree?

I wasn't able to do this from work, but I took this in my darkened family room the other night of our Christmas tree 2020. This is how you take a photo of a Christmas tree on iPhone 12 without flares. BTW., the lights in the background are lights on our deck outside, reflected in the sliding glass doors.

This was taken in the room with some lights on from a different view:

And a decent night shot of the back of our home with the deck in lights and the tree inside:

Note: Flares were visible in all the photos. I simply did what I've been suggesting throughout this entire thread. I adjusted the angle of the camera to eliminate them.

There is really nothing wrong with these cameras and they can take some amazing (for a cell phone) pictures if you take the time to compose them appropriately.

Here’s one I took of table lamp. Adjusted and got rid of green dot by focusing on light. Also just tried some moon shots original with nightmode, then one with and without night mode. moved camera until green dot was over moon the rays... it is what it is compared to past attempts to shoot the moon, the 12 pro Max is better than the 11 pro Max

It was bit harder to remove it i tried snapspeed , it looked weird.

some software based remedy should be good enough I suppose, or may be mentioned in one the * they put in their product description. upfront information is always good

Imagine dealing with this on a video!! This is a screenshot of a video taken with 12pro max, just imagine that and those flares being on a persons face ruining a video for memory. Apple should be ashamed

Not this. This morning tried to do a moon shot. This was worst I’ve ever experienced. I still wonder about LED street lamps. I was at one when this happened. It’s still there final pic but I moved a bit and turned off night mode overall I have good photos but this surprised me this morning

Exactly, I really hope it gets fixed up. It’s a good phone and was happy with it until I ended up taking video in low light and night shots and notice brights lights getting doubled and ghosted somewhere in the picture frame. Like if you take a picture of a car and the day time running light is on. Youll get the led shape copied elsewhere, just like in this picture watch.