iPhone 14 Pro Max taking unclear photos compared to iPhone 11

The bright “blob” around the sun in your iPhone 14 Pro Max photo is caused by lens flare and sensor blooming—a combination of optical and digital effects that happen when photographing an extremely bright light source like the sun.

Here’s why it happens on the iPhone 14 Pro Max:

1. Lens Flare from Multiple Elements
   1. The iPhone 14 Pro Max uses multiple lens elements for the main camera. Bright light hitting these glass surfaces can bounce internally, creating haze or blobs.
   2. The flare in your image looks like a circular halo because of how the light refracts and reflects inside the lens assembly.
2. Sensor Blooming: The camera sensor struggles with extremely intense light. The pixels capturing the sun can “spill” excess charge into adjacent pixels, making the bright area appear larger and causing a white blob.
3. Protective Sapphire Lens Cover: The iPhone’s sapphire crystal lens cover is durable but reflective. At certain angles, it can cause extra ghosting or halo effects.
4. Atmospheric Haze: It also looks like the sun was photographed through a slightly hazy or dusty sky, which scatters light and accentuates the halo.

How to Reduce It:

• Use your hand, a tree, or a building edge to partially block the direct sunlight from hitting the lens.
• Adjust your shooting angle slightly.
• Clean the lens before shooting. Even a thin film of dust or oil can amplify flare.
• If possible, lower exposure manually to reduce sensor blooming as explained by léonie

Lens flare refers to a phenomenon wherein light is scattered or flared in a lens system, often in response to a bright light, producing a sometimes undesirable artifact within the image. This happens through light scattered by the imaging mechanism itself, for example through internal reflection and scattering from material imperfections in the lens. Lenses with large numbers of elements such as zooms tend to exhibit greater lens flare, as they contain a relatively large number of interfaces at which internal scattering may occur. These mechanisms differ from the focused image generation mechanism, which depends on rays from the refraction of light from the subject itself.

How did you set the exposure time?

You may want to try this -

• Zoom in on the Moon, tap it to decrease the exposure until you can see the details on the lunar surface
• then zoom out agin and take the shot.

I am using an iPhone 15 Pro Max, but the same problem. Without manually adjusting the exposure for the lunar surface the Moon will be terribly overexposed.

Here is recent photo of the Moon taken with my iPhone in full daylight, showing the dark patches on the surface. It is easier for the half moon, the full moon is now very difficult to capture with the iPhone.

The full moon at night, with an exposure reduced by -0.5 ev: I could not reduce the exposure time more, so it is slightly over exposed:

The iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPhone 11 have very different camera hardware.

Here’s why you see it on the 14 Pro Max but not the 11:

1. Larger Sensor & Brighter Lens
   1. The 14 Pro Max main camera has a much larger sensor and a wider aperture (f/1.78) compared to the iPhone 11’s f/1.8.
   2. A larger sensor collects more light, but it also means that when something extremely bright (like the sun) hits it, sensor blooming and flare effects become more obvious.
2. Computational Photography Differences: The 14 Pro Max uses Smart HDR 4 / Photonic Engine, which aggressively lifts shadow detail. This can unintentionally make lens flare blobs more visible compared to the more “natural” processing of the iPhone 11.