Why does my iPhone 12 Pro Max Photo auto adjust exposure of a photo taken with the Camera app?

Check to see what is enabled under ‘Preserve Settings’ in Camera settings. If either ‘Creative Controls’ or ‘Exposure Adjustment’ are enabled, switch them off. Enabling these settings tells the Camera to preserve the last adjustment and/or filter selection you made, and apply it to every photo until you change settings. By disabling these features, camera & adjustments fully reset after each photo.

My images also looked terribly over-processed on my new iPhone 12 pro max and that was related to "View Full HDR" setting being activated in the Photos app. After turning it off, the images look more natural and well balanced, as usually known from iPhone.

This was Apple Support’s reply when I contacted them about this: “After researching this, this is an expected behavior for that device, it shows the image preview and it's followed by the fully processed image.”

I’m facing the same problem, I noticed that today. I thought so it may be due to the "View Full HDR" setting being activated in the Photos app. I’ll try turning it off, but now the existing photos are already changed and there’s no way to revert them to original?

it improved some videos I believe, but made so many photos look dull, the brightness or exposure is changed terribly.

The "View Full HDR" option shows the full dynamic range of the photo taken, but doesn't change the image. You can easily test this by taking look at the images with any 3rd party iPhone App with viewer function or with the Photos App on Mac.

If you don't see improvement on existing images, I'd suggest to try different Camera settings. I only keep the "Intelligent HDR" function and I switched off "Scene Detection" and "Prioritize Faster Shooting", and with these settings I'm finally happy with the image quality out of the box.

For my issue with the 1-3 second countdown (super annoying), the problem was Night Mode coming on automatically (default setting for my iPhone 12 Pro) which has thankfully been fixed in iOS 15. Night Mode still comes on by default, but you can change settings to turn it off permanently.

In iOS 15:

• Go to settings
• Pick camera
• Pick preserver settings
• Toggle the Night Mode setting to on

That last bullet point sounds counterintuitive, but it will allow your iPhone camera to keep Night Mode off if you disable it for a shot.

Note that you DO need to complete the process by taking another step: take a photo which triggers the night mode into action, and in the midst of doing so, choose to turn Night Mode off. The big difference with the new iOS 15 is that you can now keep this setting and don’t have to reset it for future photos taken under similar conditions every single time.

Apparantly if you want to see the true colours of your picture you have to turn on screen recorder. Otherwise your contrast will keep increasing while looking at the pic. I don’t understand how apple think this is normal. But it takes your option to edit the picture away. I am trying to return my 12 pro Max but Apple doesn’t care either.

Ok thanks I’ll try that. But something definitely happened. I clicked the images and saw them after coming home. And in a while the photo which was bright became dull and the video which was dull became bright. 1st I thought maybe it’s the screen brightness that is changing, but I sent the pic to my wife’s phone (android) and seems like the image actually changed.

I have the same issue, as well problem that the phone are not focusing and when taking shots in front of the sun the picture appears to look like a dirty full of spots. I took to apple service they said all the models are like this and they can't do anything about it. So little that they care.

luckyly i have iphone 12 pro max and ip 11 pro max to make a comparation. And i found out that the auto enhanche and exposure only happen in iphone 12 pro max.

the photos i taken in ip 11 pro max does not have same problems, it looks very nice like the original. So could it be hardware issue?

for info i running in the same update 14.4 in both phones n same setting , “view hdr,scene detection on”

please apple fix this issue

visitor123 wrote:

This was Apple Support’s reply when I contacted them about this: “After researching this, this is an expected behavior for that device, it shows the image preview and it's followed by the fully processed image.”

Are you shooting RAW? Apple Pro RAW files need developing after the photo has been taken to create a final image version from the RAW file. And the finished and developed version may look different from the first, basic preview of the RAW file.

Apple ProRAW (iOS 14.3) On iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, you can take photos in Apple ProRAW to edit images with higher levels of creative control. See Take Apple ProRAW photos.

About Apple ProRAW - Apple Support

Slightly off topic, but do you know how I can preserve the way an HDR photo shows in the Photos app with the "View Full HDR" option on and carry it over to any 3rd party app? Currently, HDR photos only show the dynamic range in the native Photos app and look flat and stripped from the dynamic range when opened in any 3rd party app, such as Instagram.

Any ideas? I posted this separately here too: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252586160

Just to be clear, the iPhone AI always applies changes to the images. Multiple images with different exposure values are taken in milliseconds and multiple algorithms are running in the background to get the best out of a scene. If you want to see the ordinary output, take a picture of high contrast motive in RAW format. The low light areas are too dark and highlights look overexposed. You need to develop those images to make them look nice. Exactly this happens when shooting JPG - the iPhone SW does the post-processing and develops the pictures. If you feel your iPhone is doing too much optimization, try to tweak the camera settings as mentioned before. If this won't help, I'd suggest to check the device by Apple Store staff.

I’ve been having this problem for quite some time now on my iPhone11. Im now on the Iphone13 and the problem persists. Unfortunately some of the setting mentioned on this thread no longer apply to iOs 15 as the camera settings have changed. Really starting to get annoyed by all of this.

As you can see the image below of my dog looks as if her hair is greasy and dull - in reality it’s much fluffier and softer (looking) irl and in the photo preview

No it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with HDR. It’s a post processing process that we have no control over.