How to fix overexposure issues on iPhone 14 Pro Max Photos?

hello I have found a solution…

it’s not the camera it’s the display…

go to SETTING —-> Photos and turn off view full HDR…

it’s gonna fix the Over sharpening and exposure.

i hope it helps 😊

If you are experiencing over or under exposure in either the Photo Mode or Portrait Mode, check your exposure compensation (EC) setting, icon below. There is a separate EC for photo mode and portrait mode. If you intentionally or accidentally set this off of zero, the offset will stay until you physically reset it to zero. Any offset will show up in the upper left of your screen with the mini histogram. Click on the histogram to open EXC and reset.

No guarantees, but this may solve your problem.

Ok so what has worked personally for me on the 14 Pro are the three things listed down below that resulted in a much better overall camera experience. Experiment with them and see what works for you.

a)Turn on ProRAW if you are a baller and got the 1TB storage. (Easiest option)

b) Keep live photos on when taking pictures. Then, when you are viewing the pictures in the photos app, on the top left, click on the option live and select off. You'll immediately see a difference where the phone will give you a much closer photo to how it was in the viewfinder. If you prefer the super contrasty and HDR-ish look in some scenes then just shoot normally without live and you'll get that style of photo.

c) In addition to the above 2 steps, turn on one of the photographic styles by swiping up in the camera app and clicking the 3 frames icon. Select a photographic style that you want for example, rich contrast then turn the intensity all the way down to 1 or 0 if you don't want it to change the way your photos come out. That should take care of some of the oversharpening in the photos.

I know this is not ideal and that we shouldn't have to tinker around so much to get decent looking pictures from a $1000 phone but what can you do. This is my first iPhone as well and coming from Android I thought this would be the most stable bug free experience but we all know how iOS 16 has been. It has improved but definitely not the buttery smooth experience that iPhones were known for.

Hope this helps!

I have tried every single tip they gave on this discussions, YouTube tutorials or reddit conversations and NOTHING solves this. The only thing that works is to snap photos in raw using third party apps. I personally find the Lightroom built in camera the best for taking photos in raw. It just hits perfectly. 

The only down side of this is that it takes a lot on storage, but after tweaking them you get a pristine picture. All the work is worth it in the end. Of course we just wanted a quick camera for point and shoot moments without having to worry about all of those things but, if Apple itself won’t do it, we have to work with all we’ve got as of this moment 🫠😞

To be honest, I don’t think it’s over exposure issue. It’s the poor hdr processing on your iPhone. iPhones are having this issue from a long time ago… which nobody mentions (strangely) in any reviews.

Possible solution: turn off smart HDR in camera settings.

I have the same issue. I have iPhone 14pro - my first iPhone ever. I upgraded from Pixel 3 (!!!), expecting too see a huge improvement in the picture quality, given the bigger main sensor, triple lens system, etc. Unfortunately, was I mostly got was disappointment: the moment you take a picture it looks great, and then the aggressive post-processing just turns it into garbage. Shadows are crashed and black and highlights are way off, too. No matter what picture style I use and no matter how I twist all those settings, I end up with pitch-black shadows more often than not, especially in low light. And this can’t be repaired by post-processing, because the info in shadows is just completely lost in many cases. It’s really said when you see your Pixel 3 doing a better job in low light than the top phone on the market with such a price tag.

The only workaround I found is shooting raw, then converting to jpegs and removing raws to save space - which takes time and not ideal at all. But you can get pretty decent results with RAW.

I will be returning this phone, most likely, because photo quality was the main reason I got it. RAW is great, but it looks like I just received more hassle for my money. Which is a real pity, because I like almost everything else about the phone. And it’s great to have my phone finally synced with my laptop.

Please make sure to leave product feedback on Apple website and complain about the issue. I really hope they fix it. It could have been such a great camera.

PS. in photo styles, looks like “Tone” increases or decreases contrast. I set mine at -30 and it helps a bit, but just a tiny bit. I’ll leave it here in case someone might find it useful.

I FIXED IT!!! i went to settings>camera>format and unchecked high efficiency and checked off most compatible

i was taking rly good selfies and they weren’t being ruined so i had to figure it out.

(insta @ draculana for the pics hehe)

Wanted to update you guys as I went to the Apple Store and it seemed to help a bit. They updated my software to the newest update and reset my settings. The pictures now look much bette.

Sorry, but you don't seem to understand the problem. While you compare side by side the same scenes on iPhone 11 Pro Max (even 12 PM and 13 PM) and 14 Pro Max, there are huge difference. HDR on the iPhone 14 Pro became very hard, overexposed, lights are lighter, shadows are darker.

P.S. On the iPhone 14 Pro there is NO more SmartHDR button. We can't switch HDR off. I found workaround. Making photos in RAW and then using Automator shortcut, which converts it to JPEG/HIEF (much more smaller!) – is a solution. But we want standart format also :( Without any shamanism to get perfect result.

Here is example of oversharping by iPhone 14 Pro Max in comparison with iPhone 13 Pro Max (see full video)

I have been speaking to apple about this issue for hours + weeks and they are acknowledging that it does process the images but claims this is working "as expected" and shared this link with me Feedback - Camera - Apple encouraging me to share and tell people on these forums to report their issue to that link as they claim not many have the issue.

I'd also like to add a genius bar employee saw it happening on floor models too and agreed it was poor quality.

Strange…

Well i can confirm that my photos Look better after i turned off “full HDR view” in photos settings…

At least the selfies are a lot better… 😅

Sorry. Meant to say make sure software up to date and HDR turned off.

I have the same problem on the 14 Pro. The processing is just horrible. 1 sec the picture looks great on the viewfinder but after the processing the photo is over sharp, over exposed and the contrast is a way off the charts. Hope apple fixes this soon. Luckily the 48MP RAW mode is unaffected and the photos looks great..

What I found really helpful was that after you take a Live Photo, you can click Edit, then click the Live button to select a different “Key Photo” and your photos won’t look overexposed. You have to do this every time after you take a picture though :(

The only thing that helped me was switching back and forth through portrait mode and photo mode. Doing Live Photos helps also because you can use the frame that’s not so over processed. No matter what, these tweaks are very annoying and frustrating to even have to do in the first place but that’s the only things that’s worked for me. Here’s a great example of a food photo I took. In person, the calamari is golden brown and in photos it looks overly highlighted, doesn’t even look like it does in person. And not appetizing. And I thought I took a great photo when I first viewed it in my camera