iPhone 13 pro lens flare

It’s considered a form of flare called sensor reflection and is common to all iPhones since at least the 6, Google Pixels, Samsung Galaxies, as well as DSLRs, mirrorless and cinema digital cameras.

Here you can see the reflection of the bright chandelier overlaid on the floor area:

There are ways to minimize or eliminate it but it involves camera placement, hoods and other techniques.

Interesting. I am testing in on the light in my kitchen and I notice the reflection does not happen with the ultra wide lens (0.5x). Do you know why that is? You can see it above to the left of the light in the normal shot.

So I did more testing on my iPhone SE (1st gen), 12, 12 Pro Max, and 13 mini (images shown in this order below). The reflection shows on all the phones. I suppose that because the SE camera has lesser specifications it does not capture as much detail and therefore the reflection is not as pronounced. The reflection shows in more detail on the newer phones.

Completely not true, and I've posted several photos in this thread alone disproving this.

The iPhone 13 family of phones is no worse in this respect than the iPhone 12 family of phones, which was no different from other premium smartphones.

I just posted this on the last page, but I'll post it again, as it directly compares the Samsung Galaxy S21 and the iPhone 12 Pro Max:

Yes it is possible to solve changing the angles, but this show the limit of this lens.

Usually could happen with wide angle lens.

I used to take night pictures also with 10-24 Fuji lens and Samsung S21, and Note20 Ultra and 12-24 Dx Nikon.

Here a shot where there it a monitor mirrored in the night sky.

It is clearly not a flare. My dougther was near me with her S21 and her picture was perfect.

here another picture where there is reflections three-dimensional perspective. This is not flare

You can say it’s not normal all you like but there are photos here taken with every iPhone back to the 6 along with Google Pixels, Samsung Galaxy S21s, Panasonic video cameras and even $50,000+ ARRI cinema digital cameras with $10K lenses proving that yes, it is normal.

The bright object will be mirrored, whether a pinpoint light source or a brightly lit sign.

Here’s a shot from a professional production for you.

Look at these two photos I took.

First photo with the flare dots from the reflection of the lights against the sensor:

Angling the camera relative to the reflections, which by the way, were plainly obvious on the screen before I took the photo, I was able to completely eliminate the dots:

I didn't change my actual position at all. I simply angled the camera better to eliminate the flare. This demonstrates there's nothing wrong with the cameras. We, as photographers, need to be more careful when we take photos of bright lights in dark settings.

Finally, if you take a photo which shows these flares and you don't have the option to retake the photo, you can do what all professional photographers have at their disposal and that's photo editing tools such as Lightroom for iPhone and use the healing brush to remove anomalies you want to remove.

The lens flairing happens because of how the lens is constructed. The size, shape and placement of the different components in the lens determins how the light is going to bounce and shine on the sensor.

There is not really anything you can do about this, accept from maybe angling the camera in such a way that makes the flairing less noticeable.

In my oppinnion, lens flairing is super cool, and i often use it to frame my photos. Here are some of my photos, taken on my iphone 13 pro max, where i've integrated lense flairing to make the pictures a bit more spicy! Hopes this inspires some of you to go out and snap some awesome photos;)

Some are complaining on this and other threads they find the photos the iPhone takes to be “over processed” due to Deep Fusion yet you want Apple to automatically remove what it thinks is lens flare from photos.

That also means missing Christmas lights, incandescent light bulbs, perhaps buttons on clothing and so on. I can’t imagine what it would do with something like Nashville’s lower Broadway where the landscape is full of neon signs full of bulbs that would look like lens flare to AI software.

Some third party photo apps claim to be able to remove it, and that’s where the ability should remain.

Betty Rogers wrote:

f i use a different video camera handycam type, NO FLARES.

Funny, this is a still from video taken with a Panasonic digital video camcorder by a very popular YouTube blogger who discusses the equipment he uses regularly:

Hello ~ This is a good example of lens flare “from any other camera ever made in the past almost 200 years” great point! This is a picture taken with a “shoe box” homemade camera taken from online. The “shoe box” could have repositioned a bit to avoid the flare but a unique picture was taken anyway. So really any camera is susceptible to flare and knowing the limitations and how to work with those are key. The iPhone keyword “phone” is no exception. I enjoy my iPhone camera and have captured many wonderful moments and excellent pictures that I never would have had otherwise so my thanks to Apple.

~Katana-San~

Same - it never happened with my 8 plus or any before. I was very disappointed with this camera … I was thinking it would be so much better and it’s awful.all flash photos look like this. The light whitens everything smh.

Hello guys,

I'm following this thread and read it as much as I was capable to.

I got my first iPhone, a 13, about 3 weeks ago. I made some shots at a Christmas market and a friend of mine saw them first and said: this looks not normal. I'm referring to the annoying green (LED-like) chains of green light. Since then I'm trying to find out why these ugly green dots appear. Yes I have other cameras, also a Nikon Z6, had a Nokia 8 Sirocco before and I also never had such big issues. I understand that lens flares are something common BUT how they look in my example they don't look natural. It appears in photos and on videos it looks like an annoying laser pointer, depending on the situation it is simply not possible to avoid or even detect the source of the noise. In other words I cannot make any video against the sun with this 1000$ phone?

So if many users in this thread claim this is normal and say it is because of apple's great architecture then I think most of the user's like me find it irritating since apple makes products for a wide audience. However my understanding of lens flares is to have a natural effect and on these images I see it as highly artificial, especially the colour, "other" lense flares at least adopt the colour and gradient of the true environment.

This thread is so long because people play with their new phone, especially in night mode, and see things they didn't notice before and decide it is the "fault" of the phone, where in reality it's optics due to more complex lens design coming into play.

Meanwhile, here's a photo from a Google Pixel 5 if you don't believe it's across vendors.

Lens flare is normal when takin photos in direction to bright light(sun etc) but that stupid little bright dot is NOT!!

I see in coments many “Experts” talking that’s normal .. you don’t know how to take photo properly… well, “Experts” tell me what about this little bright spot that you cannot avoid .. and don’t tell me that i don’t know about photography and lens etc. I worked as photographer for 15 years. This is hughe problem with new iPhone lenses and it is time to talk about it and find resolution at least to move of that stupid litle dot.