iPhone 13 Camera is blurry

This is due to depth of field.

• iPhone 13 Pro: ƒ/1.5 aperture
• iPhone 7: ƒ/1.8 aperture

This means less of the frame in front of or behind the focus point will actually be in focus due to the wider aperture of the iPhone 13 Pro's "wide" lens.

Using a third party app only solves half of the problem and additionally introduces a new problem:

1. The soft lens effect remains, despite the oilpainting gone. My perception is as if the sensor is able to capture details but the lens do not feed it good angular resolution
2. Third party apps cannot replace the swipe gesture at lockscreen which defies the point of having a point-and-shoot camera replacement in the pocket. That's one big marketing point of iPhone. If I have to unlock first then postprocess, this is no longer a "point and shoot" concept.

DXOMark outlines these things. you need to check reviews and when they talk about details preservation. when processing is smoothing the picture we lose fine details.

In their reviews they have nice examples of this.

The score that you can see is an overall consideration based on many thing.

• e.g. in the cons they outlined : Limited level of details in long range zoom shots

You can check the camera analysis here.

Another aspect is that many reviewers are considering "noise" in digital photography a problem.

Many brands are aligned on this and create processing to remove it as much as possible, sometimes in a more aggressive way.

Personally I think that an organic noise would give better feeling thana strong smoothening process.

The perfect solution would be giving the possibility to shoot without this additional processing or HDR.

I thought that Pro would mean having control of all the features but i was wrong.

Let's see what 14 models will bring!

Take a look at this for instance the first pic taken in portrait mode car was perfectly still and I snapped a shot if you zoom in its good quality and in focus. Now take a look at the second pic it was taken with standard lens in normal mode straight afterwards if you zoom in its out of focus and blurry. This is happening with the main lens all the time for me its just not crisp that's not down to me not focusing properly as everything works fine in portrait mode.

It all works perfectly for me.

What are you telling the camera to focus on? Are you setting a manual focus point? A manual exposure? For example, the moon is likely too bright for night mode without modifying settings. The same is true for DSLRs.

But to be able to take astrophotographs like this with a phone is completely insane.

Do not use the 3x lens in anything less than full light or it will be a digital zoom using the 1x lens which is likely what you do not want.

The cameras are good but not omniscient.

My wife and I both have the same problem as reported here with our iPhone 13 Pro cameras. Very bad picture, unfocused and strange colours. Is this a hardware issue or a software issue that can be fixed in a future update?

This is known as "depth of field. "

In photography, the more light the lens lets in, the less of the image not at the precise focus point will be in focus.

As Apple has worked to improve night mode, they've also gone to lenses with higher light sensitivity, with the downside that depth of field is slightly reduced.

So when you say that areas far from the focus point of the photo are sharper on your iPhone XS, you are actually somewhat correct:

iPhone 13 Pro Max Wide: ƒ/1.5 aperture

iPhone XS Wide: ƒ/1.8 aperture

This isn't completely accurate, but it's a rough simulation.

Say you focused on a model 9 meters from the camera; this shows approximately how much of the image would be in perfect focus based upon distance:

iPhone 13 Pro Max:

iPhone XS:

If the model is further away, 25m, you can see that for the iPhone 13 Pro Max, objects closer than about 9.5m would start to blur:

For the iPhone XS, objects wouldn't start to blur until they were closer than about 8.5m:

The bottom line is all these devices are photographic tools, and whether it's an iPhone or a $3000 professional camera with a $2000 lens, for best results you need to work within the optical parameters of the system you have in hand.

These images are from my new iPhone 13 Pro (left), and my older iPhone 11 Pro (right).

Similar lighting situations, nearly identical settings. The wide camera focal length was the exact same.

The watercolor effect is horrendous. Absolutely appalling and disappointing. I want to keep my 11 but the 13 was a gift and I don’t have that option anymore.

I thought perhaps that it was just something to do with the camera app, and while it partially is… not entirely.

This is the same image. I took the left one with the camera app, and that was the resulting image. I ran it through Halide, and converted it to a JPEG in the app, and saved it. It spit out the right picture. There is quite a loss on the clarity. The left clearly has higher levels of saturation, contrast, and sharpness. The right looks kind of softened, kind of fuzzy. I prefer it because it is more natural, but it is nowhere near the crisp quality of my 11 Pro. My argument here in bringing this up is that, I am afraid that the cameras themselves are not good quality. That they do not have the clarity they should have. This is a problem. If it is simply software, and Apple adjusts it with new updates, maybe then I will be forgiving. But if this is a hardware issue, I think this justifies recalls and replacements.

Furthermore, I think the argument of, “well, just keep your 11 Pro” is lazy. I bought a new phone with the expectation of having improvements in all facets of its functionality. So far, I’ve met quite a few issues that are too significant, and should not be evident in an item put on the market and sold to consumers. I was promised a better quality camera, and instead I’m met with low quality that is being compensated by some post-shot adjustments that I cannot get rid of.

More evidence that this phone is a half-baked and released product is that it should be able to connect to Apple CarPlay with no issue. When I connect it via lightning cable, CarPlay will open and show the display, but once I try to use any apps or even play music it immediately crashes.

This simply reminds me of how the most recent Animal Crossing game on the Nintendo Switch was released half-baked as well. It lacked so many interesting features, and after a short period of time I had done everything there was to do. I had to wait for updates to experience anything more. $50 up front to be given a half complete game. Cyberpunk 2077 had a VERY similar, and significantly worse problems with its functionality. The game was rushed because the creators kept pushing the date back, and probably got anxious and instead of telling people to be patient and wait, they released it too soon. The game was basically unplayable because of its multitude of unavoidable bugs. Now that’s like $50-$60. This was about $1000+ good quality should be guaranteed for that price.

I hope Apple starts paying attention and starts listening. There are too many people here in this forum experiencing this problem, and I keep getting email notifications about more people experiencing it too.

isazavakos wrote:

These images are from my new iPhone 13 Pro (left), and my older iPhone 11 Pro (right).

Similar lighting situations, nearly identical settings. The wide camera focal length was the exact same.

The focal length of the lens is the same.

What's not the same is you used digital zoom to zoom in much further on the iPhone 13 photo (121mm vs. 50mm, never use digital zoom if you want clarity, I don't know how many times that needs to be said!) and in poorer quality light (ISO 800 rather than ISO 640.)

The software is trying to do what it can to give you a usable photo in horrid lighting conditions using digital zoom - that's a recipe for disaster and it's amazing the photo looks as good as it does.

Lens covers on iPhone are not good buddies. If you really want to protect the cameras (which is only important when you're not using the cameras) try something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/imluckies-Compatible-Protective-Protection-Scratch-Resistant/dp/B09F9L4NXF/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3GMX57OOQYR6&dchild=1&keywords=iphone+13+pro+case+with+camera+protector&qid=1634605944&sprefix=iphone+13+pro+case+with+camer%2Caps%2C228&sr=8-3

Same problem here.

However this post processing / rendering which clearly mess up the sharpness, focus and overal photo quality, doesn’t apply to the front camera only but to all of them! Results are awful.

I

Fair enough.

The 3x lens only gets used in conditions bright enough for its ƒ/2.8 aperture.

If I buy a Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR Lens for US $17,000, I can only use it in quite bright light, but in those conditions where it is usable, it's magnificent.

But with a ƒ/5.6 aperture, if I tried to use it indoors, I'd get nothing but image sensor noise.

I have just switched from an iPhone 11 Pro Max to the 13 equivalent and am very concerned with the poor quality of all pictures taken either wide or close up. The automatic switching from the normal to the wide camera for close ups is horrible. this should never have been implemented without allowing the user to decide what lens to use.

In addition to this, the post processing is diabolically bad. even in good outdoor lighting, the post processing is shockingly bad. How on earth did this get signed off on for retail? I am close to returning my 13ProMax and switching back to my 11 till this is resolved.

Here is a great example of the lack of detail taken of my friends timepiece first with the wide camera and second finding the sweet spot and using the standard camera in comparison.

Thanks for the tips but the reason photos are turning to crap apparently has to do with Apple making the frame auto switch to wide lens for macro photos? but shows a visible lag inbetween the switch when adjusting. Making the photos look blurry and hard to adjust.

They’ve allegedly addressed this and will be fixing this issue next update. I think this is what many of the users are talking about. I screen recorded what my lens is doing but I can’t post videos on here, so here is a screenshot from the screen recording I took. Top SS is how the image looks for a split second on my camera - aka a normal, good resolution image and then (bottom SS)- with 0 prompting on my end, switches to this blurry ****. All auto settings have been turned off, nothing has been selected- it just does it on its own and it looks terrible. And it just keeps switching back and forth. No visible movement from my hand, it’s the camera.

The fact that it looks like a good quality image at first only to self adjust to whatever this is is ridiculous. And it’s not just me, as my fiancés new 13 pro does this as well. I just want to take a normal *** photo of my ring, I shouldn’t have to jump through a million photography hoops to do so. Point and shoot- I was able to do that on every iPhone I had previously and I would like to do the same with this one without having to continually make adjustments. If I wanted to learn photography or mess with camera settings all the time, I would buy my own DSLR and take lessons. This is about just wanting normal decent iPhone quality photos without it going to potato mode every time something gets close to the lens because “aPpL kNoWs bEsT”

not here to argue so please don’t tell me to take my phone back for a refund or come at me sideways for this response. I enjoy my new iPhone, but this aspect is incredibly frustrating for non-photographers.

Why do you read “my pictures on (phone three generations behind) looked better” and assume people are inexperienced photographers or somehow wrong in their perception?

Here are two sections of the same photo, same magnification, about equal distance from the center of the frame. One has a really surprising amount of detail, the other is a pixelated nightmare of post-processing.

I can surprisingly get same/slightly better results from my wife’s Pixel which is at least 3 generations behind (and less resolution):

And it’s not that the 13 takes *awful* pictures, rather the pictures look off in a really unnatural manner (especially skin/faces).

My working theory is the larger aperture lenses are less sharp, especially at the edges (not a surprising result), and Apple, to compensate has relied heavily on AI post processing (my guess is something built on GANs) to improve results. However, like all generative algorithms, the results can depart widely from expectations and end up looking “weird”. The HDR processing can’t be toggled off either, which may end up flattening out the photos in a way that isn’t expected or desired.

Like this photo of my kid: amazing detail in the shirt/darker areas of the image, face (especially the forehead) has been smoothed to death.

So maybe listen?