Blue smudges when taking picutres

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Blue smudges when taking picutres

Hey all, when I'm taking pictures on my iPhone I have noticed blue smudges in the images. At first I thought it might be something wrong with the lenses, but then when I go to frame shots, those smudges move around and are not located in the same location. I've particularly noticed this when I point my camera at LED light bulbs as the only source of light. The smudge sometimes takes on the shape of the LED element. In one example, I noticed the smudges looked like the LED array of the bulbs (The array looks like a loosely coiled spring, and that's what I see). This is offset from the actual light source, by quite a bit. In another image I am using 12x zoom to just capture the moon and I've noticed a blue smudge, with no lighting to speak of. In this image, the smudge is quite visible. The bright spot is actually the moon.

iPhone 12 Pro Max, iOS 15

Posted on Sep 27, 2021 12:06 PM

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Answer 1

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MrHoffman

Community+ 2024

Level 10

125,923 points

Sep 27, 2021 12:28 PM in response to UserNameIsUsed

That's called lens flare.

Some form of flare inevitably happens with all optical lenses with bright light in the frame.

There are many discussions of lens flare around.

Here is one of the longer threads discussing this, and with some images:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251953166

There are cases when lens flare is deliberately added, as a style choice.

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Answer 2

Sep 27, 2021 12:57 PM in response to MrHoffman

Thanks for the response MrHoffman. Reviewed the discussion, and although slightly dissapointed in this, it looks like it's something that may not be rectifiable by Apple. As for it being a lens flair, it's an ugly one. :)

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Answer 3

Sep 27, 2021 12:59 PM in response to UserNameIsUsed

Every camera will show lens flare when a light source is either in the picture or is off to the side but falling directly on the lens. It will happen on an iPhone, and on a professional camera that costs $thousands.

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Answer 4

Sep 27, 2021 1:04 PM in response to UserNameIsUsed

UserNameIsUsed wrote:

Thanks for the response MrHoffman. Reviewed the discussion, and although slightly dissapointed in this, it looks like it's something that may not be rectifiable by Apple. As for it being a lens flair, it's an ugly one. :)

This is a general issue across all optical lenses, from all sources and all vendors.

If you can figure out how to create a lens immune to flare, you'll make a very tidy profit from ~everybody.

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Answer 5

Sep 28, 2021 10:51 AM in response to MrHoffman

Yah, once you identified the issue I was looking at I did a youtube search and found a YouTuber that did a wide array of reviews on cell phone cameras, including Apple, Samsung, and a few others. The blob stinks. :( But the funny one, was when I was pointing at my garage, and it has two LED bulbs with coiled array, and the blob looked like the array, I could count the coils on the "flare" itself. I'll have to take a picture of that and post to the forum just for the heck of it.

And while posting to the community, I called Apple support and they said it was a hardware issue and wanted me to send in the phone. They hadn't identified the issue during the call. But I was reviewing the posts you mentioned and I could have sworn that some got their issue resolved, and others didn't through sending in their phone. Meh, dunno. But I'll just deal with it. Thanks again, and you take care.

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Blue smudges when taking picutres

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