halo effect

There is frequently a rainbow coloured halo around the sun because of the refraction caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, also bright patches around the sun caused by the scattering in the fog. These halos can be very faint and barely visible to the naked eye.

However, the recent iPhone models can amplify the colours in the halos by the automatic HDR the Camera.app is using whenever possible. Automatic HDR can create great pictures in high contrast situations. On older iPhone models and with older iOS versions, we could turn it off, when we did not want the highly saturated colours or highly detailed objects. This is no longer possible on the most recent iPhone models, see: Adjust HDR camera settings on iPhone - Apple Support (English)

Turning off "Show Full HDR" under Settings > Photos might help a bit. The iPhone will no longer use the full dynamic range of the display, so yummy no longer notice the halos. But the Camera.app will still take HDR pictures by taking nine separate images with a different exposure time and combining the with Deep Fusion to a HDR image (whenever it decides this will give the better picture because of strong contrasts ).

Here are two examples of trying to fix a blown_out sun with Luminar Neo on my Mac.

I used the "generase" tool to erase the sun and the halo and replace it by a similar structure.

Then I used the "Sundays" tool to add an artificial sun, less overexposed, without a coloured halo.

My pleasure. 😊

I would be already satisfied, if the iPhone would save the normal version of of each HDR photo in addition to the HDR version. Then I could decide later which version to keep.

I kept using my iPhone 5s for a long time, because it has been the last model, where we could keep the normal version when taking HDR photos.

Now that I am having only the iPhone 15 pro Max, I have lost some great photo opportunities because of HDR artefacts that have spoiled the photo.

In the case of the pictures with the sun in the photo, I do not mind the halo so much, but the overexposed white patch, where the sun is. I am usually using an external editor on my Mac to darken the overexposed highlights.

Thanks, mariposa4633, I hope the issue gets resolved as well. I'm not too hopeful. I tried making a post about my camera having the issue but apple removed the post because I already responded to yours. No offerings of help or where to go, just deletion. Thanks Apple!

[Edited by Moderator]

I noticed it when taking aurora pics last night. Most of the pics have a multi-circular artifact, dead center. Didn't have any issue using a Canon G16.