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

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.

Mine is still doing it/ it’s awful and starting to hate this phone and thinking of leaving apple phones for this reason. And apple doesn’t care. Only way around is to us the Snapchat camera and save it. But what the processing does is awful! You can’t play with shadows or anything!

Guysss, I finally solved this issue. Go to Photos app settings and turn off ‘View Full HDR’. Now, none of my photos looks dull and overexposed. Might be the solution to your problem as well.

Turn off View Full Hdr in settings of photos app. This will resolve your issue.

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

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.

Nope , live mode disabled

Just got 12 Pro Max and am experiencing this with the native camera app. I tried everything, so I’m just using Camera+ 2 now.

But it is a change that occurs only in the screen display of the iPhone. If you download the image to your computer, to your Mac, that artificial contrast is not produced.

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.

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.

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.

I have the same problem. The photos look so ugly after auto-adjustment. I want to turn it off

I have the same exact problem