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iPhone 13 ProMax HDR photos oversaturated (i.e look fake)

I just got my iPhone 13 Pro Max last night and all my outdoor photos are oversaturated, look fake, and I can't find a way to edit the HDR layers or even turn HDR off. The only solution is to turn down the saturation, but they still look fake, just less saturated.  


Am I missing a setting? 

iPhone 13 Pro Max, iOS 15

Posted on Sep 25, 2021 8:25 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 16, 2021 2:15 PM

Hi, this won’t help. I spent almost 2 hours trying to figure it out, switching between photographic styles and there’s no way to avoid the fake colors and lights.


Please apple!! We need to be able to turn off hdr!

Similar questions

142 replies

Sep 22, 2022 2:20 PM in response to Kerpie

Kerpie wrote:

Well if they want a filter-less photos they won’t get it on an iPhone 13 then, because it basically imposes a forced over-saturation filter on every photo.

I think you have been in your Instagram bubble too long if you think photography is giving way to anything.


Neither is true.


You can bypass the processing by using an app that accesses raw sensor data, but this will require you to do additional work to "process" it yourself; such apps include Halide, Lightroom Mobile and Snapseed.


As for social media, for 2022:


Users share 6.9 billion images on WhatsApp per day3.8 billion on Snapchat, 2.1 billion on Facebook, and 1.3 billion on Instagram. 

https://photutorial.com/photos-statistics/

Sep 23, 2022 7:56 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

As mentioned before I’ve tried Halide among several other camera apps, and they are all clunky and poorly integrated with the phone itself, (although some of them do take very good photos) ie can’t be opened quickly from lock screen etc.


But that is not the point. The point is you have not given one good reason for removing the ability to turn off HDR in the apple native camera for those who wish their photos to have realistic colour and unsharpened details, especially when a natural light mode is enabled for portrait mode that should therefore be possible for photos mode.

Sep 23, 2022 7:44 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

So why integrate a “natural light” option into ONLY the portrait mode and not the regular photo mode?


The natural light option for portraits is adequate for my purposes as far as the daylight colour rendition goes, although that opinion is starting from a newly low level of expectation, but it doesn’t, by definition, do depth of field for capturing scenery in the background, or restaurant group shots, for which I need the regular photo mode.


And proRAW is not an option on my 13 mini


So far I’ve tried ProCamera, Firstlight and Halide and the best solution seems to be to use the iPhone camera for portraits, in “natural light” mode, where a moving subject isn’t an issue (because it doesn’t allow Live Photo, so not impromptu grandkids or pets) and so far I find ProCamera the easiest to use for quick point-and-shoot that gives the best default images so far, and is easiest to quickly choose focal and exposure points.


I haven’t had an opportunity to test any of the third party apps for hiking scenery etc, but the iPhone photo mode camera is shockingly bad for that, so they would have to be pretty bad to be worse.


My photos of my ghostly-silver husband smiling against a gaudily flouro-painted stage backdrop, on our first walk after buying the new phone, is what prompted me to wonder what hidden setting I’d inadvertently pushed, and to find this discussion.


And it is not the only blog query I found by the way. Reddit is replete with complaints, and the discussion on some

professional blogs I’ve found bemoans the overprocessing and flattened images too.


But if apple allowed customised app launch from the Lock Screen then the main inconvenience for me would be the fact that I need to remember which app is better for what. But capturing a fleeting moment will now be either missed, or relegated to giving a poor colour rendition in the final image, so impromptu nature captures on bush walks or around the garden will be a lot harder.


And before you feel the need to tell me to lodge yet another feedback with Apple, I may just lodge another request to allow customised app launch from

lockscreen.

Sep 23, 2022 11:40 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

“Because the photo processing mechanism is an integrated chain now and you can't just shut off a piece of the processing reasonably any longer.”


Yes, that is the entire problem. But someone has made the decisions about what gets integrated and how, and what can be enabled and what can’t and that is precisely what this thread is critiquing.

iPhone 13 ProMax HDR photos oversaturated (i.e look fake)

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