Love the cameras. But horrible lens flares.
And it seems it’s defective:
One the right, above the window. Green flares from tube lights to the left.
In the middle of the picture:
On the TV screen:
Will try out during the day and post
I can't remember if I showed these two photos here in this thread or in another one on this topic.
Here's a picture I took with flare. I could easily see the flare on my iPhone 12 Pro Max screen before I took the photo, which you could have seen if you were holding my phone as well:
Is my phone defective? No, of course not.
Without moving my position at all, I moved the angle of the camera relative to the scene and took this photo seconds later. Notice anything different? The flares are gone.
I can't remember if I showed these two photos here in this thread or in another one on this topic.
Here's a picture I took with flare. I could easily see the flare on my iPhone 12 Pro Max screen before I took the photo, which you could have seen if you were holding my phone as well:
Is my phone defective? No, of course not.
Without moving my position at all, I moved the angle of the camera relative to the scene and took this photo seconds later. Notice anything different? The flares are gone.
Then why are you here?
Apple DID exchange my 12 Pro Max yesterday and both the screen color is better (whiter) and the lens flare issue is nowhere near as bad as original one. Engineering told Genius Bar manager that there have been sensor issue with 12 pro Max.
You won't lose your view if you angle the camera a bit differently. Think about this. With dedicated cameras, like a DSLR, you hold the camera up to eye and look through a view finder to capture a photo. This generally puts the lens in the right plane of field to capture a photo correctly. But with a cell phone camera, you are holding the camera away from your body at angles often not optimal for the subject you are trying to photograph. Of course there's no way to put the camera screen up to your eye. You wouldn't be able to see what you're taking a picture of. So angling the phone better becomes harder to do with a cell phone camera. This is why you need to look more carefully at the image on your screen before you take the picture. And if you angle the camera a bit differently to eliminate flares, you'll still capture a decent image. And you'll capture a better image without flares because you angled the sensor better for the scene you're capturing.
I would tell the person who took that photo to first notice the flare was on their screen before they took the photo and to angle the camera differently. As they did so, they'd see the flare move either up or down, depending on how they are changing the angle and use that as their guide to eliminate the angle. They'd still have taken a great photo. But they could have eliminated the flare. And since he took this photo, it can be fixed easily with post processing tools, such as Snapseed or if they have an Adobe Cloud subscription, PhotoShop Express, with the healing brush.
Florian Wardell wrote:
Tomorrow I’ll send you two videos of the exact same location and time, one filmed with the 12PM and one filmed with a two year old android device. You’ll tell me which has acceptable flare.
Please don't, as that won't prove a thing.
It's not a "If you don't like it, leave" mentality, it's a very reasonable "If this annoys you, get a refund now because it won't be changing, and because it's a limitation of optics, it likely won't be changing on future devices, either issue." It's not a fanboy thing, it's that posting more and more photos of an artifact we all know can be generated on any premium smartphone camera on the market does what, precisely? If you won't return it for a refund, it gives you what, the right to complain about it and post more flare photos for the next year or two? If so, feel free, it won't change anything.
If you manage to not get those effects on your Android, good for you. As I said, you should visit Android boards and tell users how to avoid it, because they certainly see it using the same device.
Once again:
You can contact Apple Support here if you feel it is a sample defect:
Contact - Official Apple Support
You may provide feedback here if you think it's something Apple devices "shouldn't do":
If you can't stand to live with it, you can return your device within 14 days of purchase for a full refund (and actually, as of right now for US purchases (policies vary worldwide):
Items purchased at the Apple Online Store that are received between 10 November and 25 December 2020 may be returned up to 8 January 2021.
Posting here accomplishes nothing constructive as Apple does not officially read these forums to gain feedback on current or future products, they only do via the Feedback link mentioned above.
And the article suggests this isn't new and has been on just about about every modern iPhone for the last few years, but that it's being noted more because of Night Mode photography where people are just noticing it more. And it suggests the same things I have posted numerous times now, which is to adjust the angle of the camera and if you can't to download and use Snapseed to remove the flares after the picture is taken. Just about any good photo editing software however, will work. I have used PhotoShop Express healing brush with great success too.
Keep getting ghost banned by mods and having post removed.
However, I propose the issue is improperly coated lenses and use of night mode which exacerbates the issue.
Apple store and C/S agreed that looks bad and had my launch 12 Pro Max exchanged. New one is noticeably improved but NOT acceptable for a $1300 phone.
You are not writing Apple here. Just other users on this user to user only forum.
There actually is a solution. Frame your photos better. Simple. Before you ever take a photo you can see the flares plainly. If you can see them, the photo you take will include them. Angle the camera better and avoid taking photos of bright lights which cause flares, not just for cell phones, but for $45,000 Medium Format Professional Cameras.
Otherwise, to believe Apple can change optical physics on small cameras in a cell phone isn't likely at all.
bobneedham wrote:
And a lens hood on this shot would do absolutely. I consider buying a new lens. My less than $1000 dollar lenses don’t have this problem
You're correct; often you have to change your timing.
At this point you may be asking what all the fuss is about since, after all, you dutifully use a lens hood—a product specifically designed to reduce the effects of flare. Unfortunately, if you are shooting in a direction anywhere near the sun, most hoods will have little effect. In particular, the hoods on zoom lenses need to be short enough that they don't cause vignetting when the lens is at its shortest focal length, meaning that they block very little light in most of the lens's range. If the sun itself is the culprit, you can sometimes hold up a hat or card to shield the front of your lens from the most direct rays, but that isn't always practical, and in some cases the sun's glare from the the surrounding clouds and sky create a messy situation all around. In those cases, your only options are post-processing, or some clever use of HDR and image compositing. (I've been known to shoot a scene with the sun blocked out to get a nice rendering of the shadow detail, and then again without it blocked, to fill in the sky.) The two resulting images can be combined into a single image which doesn't have the flare effects throughout.
[ … ]
Often, avoiding lens flare is simply a matter of timing. If you can capture a sunrise early enough, like in this image of the sun rising through the statue of a bull on the top of the Bakong Temple, or late enough as the sun sets, then the sun can become a natural part of the scene. Of course, those images will still have high dynamic range, so they often require a minus exposure compensation adjustment to expose for the sky, which in turn makes the subject a silhouette.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/content/taming-sun-lens-flare-and-how-deal-it
Before you tapped the shutter button those dots would have been plainly seen on your iPhone screen. Had you simply altered the angle of your phone relative to the scene, you could have eliminated them. Always remember that no camera is better than the photographer. The issue with most cell phone photography compared to using, for example a DSLR where one would hold the camera level to their eye to compose a shot is we are holding them out from our faces in our hands and the angles are often less than the best angle and we capture these flares. We can learn to avoid them by looking at the scene on the screens of our phones, seeing the flares and altering the angle of the camera.
If you're really that unhappy with the camera on your phone, you can take it back to Apple and get a replacement phone, which will do the exact same thing. That leaves you with two choices.
Just realize that every other high-end cell phone camera system from Samsung to Google Pixel will do pretty much the very same exact thing.
cjcampbell wrote:
The camera has an obvious design flaw, not seen in similar cameras. I'm sorry, but that is the way it is. Yes, we are all good enough to know how to work around it. The point is, we shouldn't have to. I didn't come here to be talked down to. I came here for advice about the problem and information on whether Apple was going to deal with it. Apparently this is the wrong place to come for that sort of information.
Yet there is photo after photo in this thread of the same artifact on smartphones from other manufacturers along with support links from Huawei and Samsung noting that these artifacts are normal for their devices.
So if you want to demand something common to all high end smart phones is a defect and Apple needs to "do something" to correct something all phone cameras do… you're not going to have much luck.
Once again, if you think it is a defect with your phone, contact Apple Support directly:
Contact - Official Apple Support
If it's that Apple needs to "improve this in the future":
We are all just users here.
No one works for Apple, and none of us can tell Apple to do anything.
Stop taking photos in situations known to cause flare and you won't see these "defects" which are just as easy to reproduce on other phones as well as cameras.
No camera can simply just reproduce whatever you point them at, there will always be skill and forethought involved to achieve optimal results.
Without advances in optics, none of this will change.
As I've mentioned, similar artifacts are seen even on Huawei's devices despite working with highly regarded lens maker Leica to co-develop them.
The Samsung Note 20 Ultra does much the same thing. So do the Pixel phones from Google. Even the Huawei does it, and Huawei partnered with Leica, one of the best lens makes in the world for their phones. iPhone 8 cannot be remotely compared to iPhone 12. iPhone 8 could NOT take Night Mode Photos and most photos taken in darkness were abysmal at best. What you've used in the past cannot be compared to the cameras, sensor and technology in iPhone 12.
If you want to continue to believe your phone is defective and you are simply unhappy with it (Apple is NOT going to release some magic software update for this), then you should return the phone for refund and get something else. It's truly that simple.
In addition to what William suggested, there are apps you can use in post photo processing which are quite good at removing unwanted flares. I've posted a few times in this thread results using one from Snapseed and since I'm Adobe Cloud customer, PS Express for iPhone. Both offer a Healing Brush and you can simply touch a flare with your finger using the Healing Brush tool and the flares are removed. The photo looks a little odd until you save it, then it's impossible to tell the flares were there in the first place.
IPhone 12 Pro Max Lens flare
