iPhone 7 Plus Camera - Pictures are bad

For now I tested that the lightroom RAW saves JPG to camera roll and they are around 3 to 3.5 MB and when compared to 900kb photo from stock camera app they are exactly what I want. I just would rather use the system app and not lightroom. For now...#sigh

I would venture to guess all the US web site in the Apple world are well aware of the issue. Ask Ben Lovejoy at 9to5mac there is a distinct reason why they haven't picked it up.... after 60 days of sales in the millions and their own testing shows no issue to speak of unless your at 100% pixel for pixel which is what we do with Nikon D4/5 and same with Canon's those are full frame bodies with corresponding good pro line sense in the low $2,000 and up.

Apple never developed this to be used for pixel peeping. And many groups on Flickr and elsewhere have very nice prints at letter size and below which is more in line with expectations for a camera phone. I don't care how many pixels you cram on the chip only so much you can do.

Now its a shame many here aren't happy with their iPhone 7's as so many shots taken and tested ahead of release along with known fact since version 6 that Apple bumped up the noise reduction a bit too much. That is what their engineers came up with I disagree with them on that along with over sharpening of the jpegs.

Either way just my opinion and I hope you all find a resolution to this. I have googled using many search terms about bad pictures on iPhones etc and only get this thread.....

On another note 2 days back this thread was up to 20 plus pages so 4 disappeared.

You do know you can bypass auto focus and lock focus on something that will give you correct white balance? I do believe its in the manual (page 307 {iBooks} in iPhone Manual iOS 10.1 basic instructions so your not relying on face detection or other automatic settings that work but only in the best of environments).

I am pretty sure that photos I was taking before were all really bad and this is why I ended up on this forum. In the meantime I did one thing. I had apple call me and the consultant asked me ton of questions about what is up and she was understanding and really listened to me and regiestered the issue. She also wanted to diagnose the phone and asked me to "reset all settings", not to restore but to reset those settings because that was needed to diagnose the phone properly. Of course it all went ok and she did not see anything wrong with it. The only thing was that I lost my settings like alarms, ringtones, wallpaper and stuff like that. She told me to go to a store where they fix apple products so that someone more experienced could have a look at this and she asked me to take some photos to present him/her what is wrong. So I started taking those photos and I am sure they were better. Before every photo was like a painting. I remember taking photo of my kid and being shocked about how awful the photo was. I did a similar shot yesterday and it was fine with me.

When I take photos of objects that are away from the camera and with low light? Yes it s*cks but then I took out the other phone which I treat as a benchmark here, and it s*cks as **** too

I do not know if I fixed the issue but it will not hurt to give it a shot? It took me some time to write that because I know it sounds like black magic but maybe there is something to it...

well.. I also reset the settings few days ago and noticed some improvement in the images too, but was skeptical if it was only me who is feeling the change. Yes I lost all the settings and had to get them setup again but it hardly took 5 mins of mine. Can anyone else try to reset all settings and confirm if there is any improvement? I'm using iPhone 7 (not plus).

Finally, I know what's the problem and got the problem totally solved!

There is a great difference when you view the photo using windows default photo browser and professional photo browser like Photoshop CS and Lightroom.

I use Photoshop CS to view the photo taken by my iPhone 7 plus and the image quality is totally different, all details came back and the color tone is accurate!

The reason behind is that starting from iPhone 7, Apple use DCI-P3 instead of sRGB to enable wider color range. You have to use hardware / software capable of 'decoding' DCI-P3 'format' in order to show the image in true color.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert and therefore I just write as much as I know and please correct me if there is anything wrong as mentioned above.

Just wanted to add my thoughts on this problem.

I picked up a 7 Plus in September and returned it 3 days later. I must have had a dud unit as the images produced by it were awful. I returned it as I just did not want to go through the process of proving it to Apple for a warranty claim.

Here is a small album of photos compared to my Nexus 6P

https://imgur.com/a/f3OSq

The photo of the Guinea Pig is the wrong colour, the hay and cage is the wrong colour, his fur is blurry and blotchy. The image is full of digital noise.

Same for the photo of the Ford engine, wrong colour and blurry in parts. Whole image looks soft.

Disregarding DCI P3 / SRGB, the images produced by the 7 Plus are worse than would could be produced by my old iPhone 6 Plus with its 8MP sensor.

It's not a huge issue for me anymore as I pitched the phone but wanted to confirm for others that yes this problem exists.

@chevysales,

This issue is not the way the picture is taken. Do you own a 7+? If so you will notice a watercolor effect on most photos especially in slightly lower lighting, as if the contrast level is boosted strangely. And also there wouldn't be a 33 page thread from people all over the globe if this wasn't a legitimate issue. We are comparing apples to apples here - how the picture looks right on the phone compared to previous iPhones, and actually the 5S exceeds in that. Which does not make sense. I'm used to being able to take crisp, sharp photos and videos and view them across all my apple devices and now they look terrible. Now a video taken indoors in good lighting in "HD" looks grainy and washed out.

As to now Apple centric pages picking up this issue, check: http://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/196561

Same problem here, and my take on it (have two 7plus phones between my wife and myself), is that the new camera lense is very soft and requires huge amounts of sharpening to look anywhere close to passable. I have same blurry softness when taking DNG RAWs with Lightroom, just without the oversharpened "watercolor" effect. To tell the truth I don't think the previous iPhone cameras were any better, they were lower resolution besides. Bottom line: as Apple is again playing its game of sourcing cheap components for its "hi-end" phones (to keep insanely high profit margins, highest in the industry), and we keep buying them, this is the image quality we are stuck with. No software update is going to fix crappy hardware!

Although it is not common, I've serviced iPhones with this issue, it could have different causes.

If you've already tried General>Reset>Erase All Content and Settings and this did not resolve the issue, you should take it to your local Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.

After reproducing the issue with you, they will set up the device as new, ensure it has no outstanding updates, attempt to replace the camera module, and if all of that fails they will replace the device provided there is no accidental or physical damage.

I was active here a few weeks ago and I will chip in again. This is not a new problem for iphone 7 or 6s. Look at this topic from almost a year ago.

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-takes-bad-quality-muddy-paint-like-ef fect-photos.1954983/

This issue has been for a long time but few people notice that since they look at the screen and never look at the images on their laptops/desktops. If apple is aware of that then they do not fix that for reason. This is how they decided to make that ;(.

I myself did all settings reset over a month ago and my photos turn out better. At least in good conditions. Before that even with the best light I was getting painings instead of photos. The best tests I did were with lips and they texture. I compare before and after and this is much better now...

Here are 3 photos taken recently which are quite ok in terms of detail and the depth of field which used to be patchy before. Maybe the quality is the same but I stopped seeing that? Not sure any more

http://imgur.com/a/HMDsg

Yep the iphone 7 cameras are terrible but it's not the actual camera it's the smoothing cartoon effect that it puts on by adding a mega dose of noise reduction and highlight / shadow compensation.

This is another example of the steve jobs effect where they just tell you what you want without asking you.

apparantly you can control this by getting another app and shooting raw but then, why pretend that the iphone is a camera, it's a phone. if you want a good camera then get a **** camera.

I've got this fujifilm camera, it's really good with vintage lenses.

I have even sent this problem as a bug report, with samples, but with no reply. The image processing algorithms are bad, really bad. On my iphone 8 the situation is better than on my previous iphone 7, but not stellar. Compared to a GS8 for example, low light shots on my i8 are worse, and daylight shots look ok, but when you zoom in AFTER you took the photo, in Photos Gallery, the level of details is much lower than on many Android phones.

I think my iPhone 6 took better pics also. Many of my iPhone 7 Plus pics are just out of focus. And it is worse if you use that LIVE function. My 7 has a lot of trouble inside with low light. I will never use LIVE and think of getting yourself one of the polarizing filters that fit over your iPhone lens. It will make your pics better if you know when to use it. [ Inside a museum taking pics of items in glass cabinets. It will reduce those reflections in the glass. ]

Same here, thank you piotrek!

I reset all settings, and photos look better.