IPhone 12 Pro Max Lens flare

It is not normal nor expected.

Apple ***. My next phone will be a Samsung. Apple products are defective.

Low quality. People also complained they had troubles hearing me when I put my iPhone 12 Pro on speaker.

I would not buy any more products from Apple. Good luck with their EV development LOL.

I doubt if the next iPhone will have a fix, apparently this has been an issue through a number of previous versions so Apple are aware but just choose to do nothing about it. Absolutely ridiculous IMO considering the price of the phone. I have the 12 Pro Max, it’s my first iPhone since the 4, back to Android for me I’m thinking. No issues with them.

I have been conducting a bunch of tests and I think I know what the problem is. The "flares" are exactly the same color as the sensor. Light, coming in through the lens, is reflecting off the sensor onto the rear of the lens, then reflecting off the lens back onto the sensor. The only solution would be to move the sensor further away from the lens, which would make the phone considerably thicker and heavier.

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.

thegrifter59 wrote:

Well, I just sold a Galaxy S20 Plus to buy this POS and I never had lens flare with it. How kind of you to give your permission for me to go back to Android. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Since you feel iPhone is a ***, no one here cares if you go back to Android, to be honest.

The reality is no matter what camera you're using, photographing directly into the sun with water reflection is EXTREMELY difficult. On my Nikon DSLR, with a $1,000 lens, I'd make sure to use my lens hood to minimize the suns reflection against the sensor. That's not an option on a cell phone, so some flares are simply unavoidable.

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

That’s a common lens flare which is caused by the light entering the front lens element at a sharp angle. Easiest way to get rid of it is to use your hand to prevent the sun from hitting the front of the lens. The sun is out of the frame so your hand will not be in the frame.

This issue happens more in low light settings, when there is a high light source facing the camera.

The lens on the inside is round, the lens on the outside is flat.

The outside lands reflects the light off of the glass that is flat.

The inside or inner lens is round and captures the reflection off of the flat glass outer lens.

To prevent this you should aim your phone directly towards the light source in order to cancel out the glare as you move your phone you can see the glare moving in the screen move the glare towards the light source in order to cancel it out of your photo it will reflect into itself when the picture is taken and it will not have a glare

Seriously? After all your posts you think the problem is with common glare that is a result of light hitting the front element at a sharpe angle. Say it isn’t so. What everyone has been talking about is the green/blue/white dots. You know better.

I am having the same issue with my iphone 12 . The lens flare issue is very terrible in night mode pictures. Will they fix it by ios 15? im not sure because it is a hardware problem. In fact all iphone 12 models having same issue.

There's nothing to fix, it's normal.

There are photos here of it occurring on iPhones, Androids, DSLRs and, in the post immediately above yours, on a $50,000 professional digital cinema camera with a $10,000 lens.

I have the same problem, just on iphone 11. The thing is, when taking pictures at night, ok, I get it, it's a lens flare, it can happen with other cameras as well. Maybe not as noticeable as on newer iphones, but still. What I was really surprised about, that it happened, and looked even worse than in a night time, in the morning taking a mirror selfie in a room with no lights on or anywhere near and no direct sunlight. And it's not the brightest room either. None of my other phones did that, not even a dslr camera in the exact same position. The lense was clean and the picture came out with green sort of stripes in various shapes and sizes. Is that also considered as a normal lens flare? We're all talking how the camera is still a great one, but can we really say it's so great when we cannot even use pictures taken in certain situations? Pictures might be sharp and great quality, but the point is that we still cannot use them because of the excessive lens flare even when there is no strong source of light.

No it's not normal, the glass that covers the lenses needs some special coating to fix this, I never had any of these lense flares on my older iphones like the 6 and 8 plus. So something has def. changed with the newer models. Some also suggest that maybe the lenses are placed to close to each other and thats what causing the problem maybe because the light is being reflected from one to another. Thats why if you look at the iphone 13 the lenses have been seperated a bit more, so im exited to see if maybe this will fix some of the problems with lense flares.