That's not sharpening, that's the HDR trying to match the blue sky (which will be basically blown out white if taken in a single frame) with the dark stick.I'm no photo buff, but I'm always intrigued.
Photos I've taken on the 12 Pro Max native camera app seem to have some sharpening applied, even with plenty of light/outside. And this is really annoying to me. So, I'm going to try out Halide II and see how I can learn a bit, and hopefully capture photos without the sharpening or as much noise reduction.
Example below. The ghosting around this branch/stick is just so obvious to me. Frustrating.
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Halide Developer Does Deep Dive Into iPhone 12 Pro Max Photographic Capabilities
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These are usual hyperbole to promote the sales. Next year iPhone 13 camera said to have 60% improvement over the prior generations(without being specific) and make the owners of 12 Pro Max faces dumb.....camera improvements are subjective based on various factors. If you want stunning images there are compact mirrorless cameras at competing price points. Having said that all last 3-4 generation iPhone cameras more or less equal for more than 90% of the population whose primary objective is to share it in web & social media. Owners of older generation need not get sleep over with these reviews.imho
I completely agree iPhone XS Max, 11 Pro Max video image quality is the best in the industry. I am sure 12 Pro Max would easily match or exceed. Photography seems to be a different ball game it seems.
Only tricky lighting situations pros win over others since rest of us use auto focus and can't fix parameters in the Pro mode to capture best shots since each photo may require varying parameters and manually adjusting them for each shot going to be a big problem for ametures. All these finer improvements may not make huge difference if you prefer taking pictures in good lighting conditions....even older camera phones can take good quality ones. Only challenging lighting, contrast, shadow, dof, focus may give slight advantage wrt overall image quality.
In what industry? If you just say "industry" then you claim that iPhone video image quality is better than ANY camera.
"With a traditional DSLR, nobody would dare take a one-second photos handheld. Yet the iPhone 12 Pro Max can take sharp images at ridiculous exposure times."
With body or lens stabilization you can do actually do this.
It always amazes me how so many people have trouble with stuff like this. Even professional camera app developers talking about the cameras they develop for.
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Weird thing on my 12 Pro Max is the night mode photos look better on my 11 Pro. It was pretty consistent too. It was an extreme low light situation, so maybe that affects things? The 12 Pro Max was all blotchy and blurry. Maybe it just wasn’t focusing right, but I was focusing on trees 30ft away.
People keep posting up sample photos (with and without the HDR) to show the 12 off, and about half are horrifying. The crappy night shots that look like they were shot in daylight is one of the main reasons I haven't pulled the trigger. Even if you needed that novelty, the Chinatown photos in the article wouldn't be usable.
I haven't seen photos of busy foliage that looked acceptable either. Backgrounds with a lot of detail lack any natural separation. It's so processed and digitized looking.
I'll try again asking this... Will third party apps override whatever is making photos hyper saturated, facetuned, over-sharpened and other effects? I'm starting to get the sense Apple's software is too intrusive, so is there a way around it?
I haven't seen photos of busy foliage that looked acceptable either. Backgrounds with a lot of detail lack any natural separation. It's so processed and digitized looking.
I'll try again asking this... Will third party apps override whatever is making photos hyper saturated, facetuned, over-sharpened and other effects? I'm starting to get the sense Apple's software is too intrusive, so is there a way around it?
I also thought "well, actually..." when reading that line but in all honesty very few camera/lens combinations can shoot sharp images with a 1 second exposure. I have a few stabilized lenses for my Canon 6D (including a 24-105 which is the closest to your 24-70) and the only lens that *may* be able to pull 1-second exposures semi-consistently is the 10-18mm IS. No way I can do a 1 second exposure with the 24-105, not even @ 24mm.
Apple's software is too intrusive indeed* but not for oversharpening photos. Quite the opposite, they use a very aggressive noise reduction. Sadly, it looks like ProRAW already has some of that noise reduction applied (albeit not all).
*for professional photographers, that is. It's fine for the vast majority of people.
I see both, often in the same photos.
Is it fine for the vast majority though? From what I'm seeing, a not so inconsequential percentage of shots are being degraded by post auto processing in conditions where old iPhones were already capable. If the camera is a major draw, then you're going to notice.
Exactly this. I look back at some pictures I took with various low to midrange Android phones around 2013-2015, and honestly some of the good light landscape shots look terrific. The lower light shots, indoor pictures, shots with lots of movement, etc - that's where it all falls apart. I kind of see the difference between the XR and the 12 Pro Max (or even the 11 Pro) as similar - it's largely about edge cases, particularly low light.
One little detail that I think is a bit under-rated on the Pros: Using the telephoto lens (especially now it's x2.5) close up to create a natural bokeh effect (i.e. not the software version in the portrait mode, which is fun but unreliable). This isn't a particularly well composed photo or anything, but I love the soft background without the exaggerated portrait effect.
Yeah I always found the ”X camera is still better“ posts to be disingenuous.
I disagree! I feel Halide have done everything they reasonably could have to make it affordable. It's basically $1 a month on subscription, or there's a one-time purchase option for folks who can't stand subscriptions (I don't mind them myself, but c'est la vie), there's a free trial, and a pretty generous 12 month free subscriptions for people who bought the previous version...I mean, what more do you want?
I sometimes feel like expectations around software pricing are totally out of kilter, like Halide could sell a $1 licence that lasted until the heat death of the universe and some people would still be outraged.
What is important is to have real photographers, successful photographers share their stories and it has to be their own desire, not some sort of deal with Apple.
I like using iPhone 11 Pro for my day to day shots here and there, but I am sticking to my FF system for real things. IPhone photos only look great on a small screen and are lacking resolution when it comes to bigger screens or print.
Taking quick pics it's a damn good camera. Taking pictures you want to keep forever? I'll stick with my RX100, especially for traveling.
Exactly what my wife, who also makes her living (and mine right now as a med student!) as a photographer. iPhone pictures look amazing on small screens, but on a laptop or even her iPad Pro, don’t hold a candle to her FF cameras. But they aren’t supposed to either. The remarkable thing is how amazing the pictures are coming out of the iPhone on top of every other great thing it does for us.
This is definitely fair. I've taken some brilliant photos with Halide, but it's certainly has a learning curve. I tend to use it when I have time to stop and think through what I'm trying to do - 90-95% of the time, the regular camera is more practical.
I have found their 10 day tutorial thing informative though.
I've seen this as well. In some scenarios the aggressive HDR has helped, but in a lot of others it was a bit unnecessary and takes away the depth of the situation for sure.
I'm not sure I agree that night mode is better consistently either, for the same reasons.
I also see some over-sharpening going on, something that started with the 11 line (though it had a good balance of it), but now seems to be getting into Samsung territory at times.
I don't know the answer to your question, but I agree with this general trend (being too intrusive). This is the first time I think I've ever thought the iPhone's camera software was doing just a bit too much on a consistent basis.
I am hopeful that ProRaw will help with some of this. Obviously it's still in beta so hard to judge. I wonder if there also might be some more general tweaks to how the cameras work. If I remember correctly, iOS 12.1 (or was it 12.2?) tweaked the software for the XS cameras.
I do like Halide for getting less smoothed, less saturated pictures. For instance, I like the flatness and graininess of this pic (taken with a 11 Pro)
Generally, yes. On the iPhone 12 Pro Max, I don't know. I don't have one. The author of the article seems to think that it is fine for most people, and points to some possible improvements (less unneeded noise removal for night pictures).