iPhone 16 Pro Max Issues with ProRAW 48 and stock camera app

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

No there will be no damage on the lens from restoring. That is simply a snapshot of your previous settings that will be restored. My question was simply, given the observation that the in-store model produced sharper results, what is the difference between that one and yours? It could be the software version. It's unlikely that the in-store models run on a beta. Most likely, they run on the latest stable build, which yours should do too. In that case the imaging pipeline should be identical. So unless its a hardware defect, the only other option that remains is some settings that are affecting the imaging. The cleanest test would be to reset the phone. Only sign up via iCloud and set up as a new phone. Don't restore from a backup and dont do a transfer from an older phone. take pictures and see if there is any difference.

There is little hope that this works given that @nunolikeapple tested some devices in store, and they didnt show much better imaging results, if I remember correctly. But it might be worth a try, to rule out some scenarios.

they both ran the same build, I checked it. same numbers.

but I have a hard time telling whether the issue is still present after I reset the settings

 

[miemo]

they both ran the same build, I checked it. same numbers.

but I have a hard time telling whether the issue is still present after I reset the settings

To my eyes the image on the left is clearly worse, looks out of focus or otherwise blurred (and no, not in the way of just lacking additional sharpening effect). Quite clearly visible e.g. on the globe sticker on the blue phone.

 

[nunolikeapple]

What a weird set of issues… 🤨 Today I did quite extensive testing outside in a VERY bright sunshine, and surprisingly all photos from my 17 Pro looked really good in ProRAW – regardless of the lens used. Didn't see any of the previous issues I've experienced.

Tested the 14 Pro alongside as well, but this time the differences between the two devices were relatively minor and indeed mostly probably down to slightly less agressive sharpening on the latest imaging pipeline which is just fine. Some image quality drop in the absolute corners on both devices but that's expected with lenses this tiny. If the 17 Pro cameras behaved like this all the time, I'd have no complaints.

The fact that all the the previous issues have been in more subdued light is probably hinting that the issue boils down to either image stabilization (not really needed with shutterspeeds in 1/1000…1/6000 range I saw today) or noise reduction / image stacking behaving erratically. Which I guess is a relatively positive signal as it seems to be leaning more towards this being a software issue, which could be fixed with an upcoming dot-update.

I'll be opening a support ticket to Apple with all this info, let's see how it goes.

I still have much worse performance even in bright day.
Very disappointing.

16PM vs 17PM.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

To my eyes the image on the left is clearly worse, looks out of focus or otherwise blurred (and no, not in the way of just lacking additional sharpening effect). Quite clearly visible e.g. on the globe sticker on the blue phone.

yeah that was pre-reset, easy to tell, but now it's a bit tougher, I'mma send you more pics hold on a sec.

 

[BlackrazorNZ]

One more proof that 12 MP Bayers Raw is miles better than ProRAW.

So, after watching this video, I may have just had a small breakthrough.

Like the Youtuber, I use the ProCamera app so that I get much better manual control. I noticed during his video that under-exposing the 17 Pro and then pulling up the exposure results in a completely blurry slurry of information that is unusable. So I wondered, what happens if you do the opposite?

So I took a photo out the window here at work using the 4x Telephoto. The first photo, I took using the normal 'auto' exposure settings that the iPhone applies. The second photo, I pulled down the shutter speed as far as I could without causing massive clipping at the highlight end, and retook the same photo. I then imported both into Lightroom and pulled the overexposed photo down to a more normal level. Have a look at the outcome:

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Auto Exposure (shutter speed auto-set to 1/400th sec)

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Overexposed through longer shutter speed. (shutter speed set to 1/120th sec)

Check out the Hilux and SRS Cruiser text. As you can see, forcing a slower shutter speed and letting more light in essentially completely resolves the issue. The over-exposed photo is pretty much tack-sharp at full zoom and 1:1 pixel ratio. (Incidentally, it also renders much more natural colours without the yellowish overtone that seems to plague ProRAW).

So that, for my phone at least, confirms it is 100% a software issue - I suspect the default exposure settings are essentially under-exposing the image and the computational pipeline is then trying to compensate, resulting in a blurred image.

Give it a go yourself - push the shutter speed as slow as you can without completely ruining the highlights, and then compare to a normal exposure.

 

[BlackrazorNZ]

So, after watching this video, I may have just had a small breakthrough.

Like the Youtuber, I use the ProCamera app so that I get much better manual control. I noticed during his video that under-exposing the 17 Pro and then pulling up the exposure results in a completely blurry slurry of information that is unusable. So I wondered, what happens if you do the opposite?

So I took a photo out the window here at work using the 4x Telephoto. The first photo, I took using the normal 'auto' exposure settings that the iPhone applies. The second photo, I pulled down the shutter speed as far as I could without causing massive clipping at the highlight end, and retook the same photo. I then imported both into Lightroom and pulled the overexposed photo down to a more normal level. Have a look at the outcome:

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Auto Exposure (shutter speed auto-set to 1/400th sec)
View attachment 2561649

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Overexposed through longer shutter speed. (shutter speed set to 1/120th sec)
View attachment 2561650

Check out the Hilux and SRS Cruiser text. As you can see, forcing a slower shutter speed and letting more light in essentially completely resolves the issue. The over-exposed photo is pretty much tack-sharp at full zoom and 1:1 pixel ratio. (Incidentally, it also renders much more natural colours without the yellowish overtone that seems to plague ProRAW).

So that, for my phone at least, confirms it is 100% a software issue - I suspect the default exposure settings are essentially under-exposing the image and the computational pipeline is then trying to compensate, resulting in a blurred image.

Give it a go yourself - push the shutter speed as slow as you can without completely ruining the highlights, and then compare to a normal exposure.

Supplementary finding to the above : Over-exposing to the same level through decreasing the ISO sensitivity (in this case, to the minimum setting of 25, which the iPhone then decided to increase to 40 through its infinite wisdom) also improved the situation - but nowhere near as much as lowering the shutter speed did. It also retained the yucky yellow ProRAW tint.

I guess no amount of computational trickery or sensor sensitivity can compensate for just letting in more darn light in the first place

 

[krvld]

This is what ProRAW for Photos could've been.​

Instead they've added these attributes to ProRes RAW for Videos... Source​

 

[krvld]

This is what ProRAW for Photos could've been.​

Instead they've added these attributes to ProRes RAW for Videos... Source​

View attachment 2561671
View attachment 2561668

If Apple wants to call this format "ProRAW" they need to do a couple of changes:

• Completely remove all denoise algorithms. Removing noise by stacking/merging is ok but don't apply any denoise algorithms that remove detail from the images. Let the end user denoise it in post processing to their own liking
• Don't perform any artificial sharpening on the image data (it looks particularly bad after the heavy denoising)
• Don't perform demosaicing - let the user do this in post processing as there are many better methods for this than the one Apple is using

@jajo.j I think Apple listened but not in the way we would like 😂 Maybe ProRAW 2 will have it?

 

[Ultraslan]

So, after watching this video, I may have just had a small breakthrough.

Like the Youtuber, I use the ProCamera app so that I get much better manual control. I noticed during his video that under-exposing the 17 Pro and then pulling up the exposure results in a completely blurry slurry of information that is unusable. So I wondered, what happens if you do the opposite?

So I took a photo out the window here at work using the 4x Telephoto. The first photo, I took using the normal 'auto' exposure settings that the iPhone applies. The second photo, I pulled down the shutter speed as far as I could without causing massive clipping at the highlight end, and retook the same photo. I then imported both into Lightroom and pulled the overexposed photo down to a more normal level. Have a look at the outcome:

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Auto Exposure (shutter speed auto-set to 1/400th sec)
View attachment 2561649

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Overexposed through longer shutter speed. (shutter speed set to 1/120th sec)
View attachment 2561650

Check out the Hilux and SRS Cruiser text. As you can see, forcing a slower shutter speed and letting more light in essentially completely resolves the issue. The over-exposed photo is pretty much tack-sharp at full zoom and 1:1 pixel ratio. (Incidentally, it also renders much more natural colours without the yellowish overtone that seems to plague ProRAW).

So that, for my phone at least, confirms it is 100% a software issue - I suspect the default exposure settings are essentially under-exposing the image and the computational pipeline is then trying to compensate, resulting in a blurred image.

Give it a go yourself - push the shutter speed as slow as you can without completely ruining the highlights, and then compare to a normal exposure.

Wow. Nice work. Not only the clarity and sharpness improves, but the disgusting yellow tint vanishes. Do you happen to have Halide on your phone. They have 3 options, zero processed, apple processed and apple proraw. I wonder if they choose a different shutter speed for apple processed and get rid of these issues as well. that would then be a viable alternative for the stock camera app, until apple fixes this issue. sadly, we are then limited to 12MP JPEG files rather than the standard 24MP.

Also, it would be really helpful if this information somehow reaches apple support.

 

[BlackrazorNZ]

Wow. Nice work. Not only the clarity and sharpness improves, but the disgusting yellow tint vanishes. Do you happen to have Halide on your phone. They have 3 options, zero processed, apple processed and apple proraw. I wonder if they choose a different shutter speed for apple processed and get rid of these issues as well. that would then be a viable alternative for the stock camera app, until apple fixes this issue. sadly, we are then limited to 12MP JPEG files rather than the standard 24MP.

Also, it would be really helpful if this information somehow reaches apple support.

I don't have Halide sorry - just ProCamera.

 

[BlackrazorNZ]

I've done some further investigation / detective work:

It appears that the issue resolution is not, as I suggested above, as simple as decreasing the shutter speed. I took some photos outside in bright light, of the scene I had already posted earlier in the thread to demonstrate the blurriness, and as you can see, there's no 100% correlation between shutter speed and clarity.

What their IS a correlation between, is the phone using its native ISO of 16 and/or 40, and clarity. Annoyingly, even when using an app like ProCamera to force a certain ISO, the phone will just arbitrarily decide to ignore that and use an alternative ISO it favours.

For example :

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Auto Exposure (shutter speed auto-set to 1/950th sec, ISO auto-set to 16)

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Manual Exposure (shutter speed manually set to 1/390th sec, the phone arbitrarily decided to take the photo at ISO 50 despite the slower shutter)

The top image is very sharp; the bottom image, where the only differences were me changing the shutter speed and the phone deciding to use a different ISO, is a blurry mess. It's definitely not because of any motion - 1/390th of a second is more than fast enough to ensure a clear shot, even without OIS factored in.

There's obviously something serious funky going on in the ISO selection and/or processing logic behind the scenes - and with the phone seemingly deciding to just ignore manually set ISO's and just picking what it feels best, I have no idea how to ensure you're going to take a clear picture... other than perhaps taking 2-3 pics at differing exposures and hoping for the best.

 

[Ultraslan]

I've done some further investigation / detective work:

It appears that the issue resolution is not, as I suggested above, as simple as decreasing the shutter speed. I took some photos outside in bright light, of the scene I had already posted earlier in the thread to demonstrate the blurriness, and as you can see, there's no 100% correlation between shutter speed and clarity.

What their IS a correlation between, is the phone using its native ISO of 16 and/or 40, and clarity. Annoyingly, even when using an app like ProCamera to force a certain ISO, the phone will just arbitrarily decide to ignore that and use an alternative ISO it favours.

For example :

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Auto Exposure (shutter speed auto-set to 1/950th sec, ISO auto-set to 16)
View attachment 2561825

17 Pro 4x Telephoto 48MP ProRaw 1:1 @ Manual Exposure (shutter speed manually set to 1/390th sec, the phone arbitrarily decided to take the photo at ISO 50 despite the slower shutter)
View attachment 2561826

The top image is very sharp; the bottom image, where the only differences were me changing the shutter speed and the phone deciding to use a different ISO, is a blurry mess. It's definitely not because of any motion - 1/390th of a second is more than fast enough to ensure a clear shot, even without OIS factored in.

There's obviously something serious funky going on in the ISO selection and/or processing logic behind the scenes - and with the phone seemingly deciding to just ignore manually set ISO's and just picking what it feels best, I have no idea how to ensure you're going to take a clear picture... other than perhaps taking 2-3 pics at differing exposures and hoping for the best.

That's weird. In my samples, both images had an ISO of 80 with a shutter speed of about 1/2200 (for the 15PM) vs. 1/2400 for the 17Pro, with the 17Pro turning out to be smudgy and having that yellow tint. I guess they really need to work on that imaging pipeline.

 

[SumYoungGai]

I just tested with my 17 Pro Max on 26.0.1. Same issue as iOS 18.0 at release, same workaround - ProRAW 48 has artifacts while HEIC 48 does not (or is at least appreciably better)

 

[nunolikeapple]

Yes, the blurriness still present.
Lets hope they improve it

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

I really need your help guys. I got 1 last day to decide whether I have to return my 17 pro, and I can't make up my mind. i took a lot of pictures in an apple store. the first pic is MY unit, second one is the store. same pattern for every picture .

(1st is mine, 2nd is store, 3rd is mine, fourth is store, etc etc)

could you help me figure it out please ?

it seems both have issues with blur and focus, be it heic or raw, but mine seems to be more frequent? idk it doesnt make sense to me
@ToddH and @BlackrazorNZ what do you think ? i inserted a lot of pictures from the exact same angle just to be sure and concistent

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[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

it's weird because on occasions the 17 pro from the store would be blurrier than mine, but it seems to happen 1/7 shots, whereas usually mine was blurrier in 6/7 shots . and in some cases it's not really visible

im pulling my hair off with this thing

 

[SumYoungGai]

it's weird because on occasions the 17 pro from the store would be blurrier than mine, but it seems to happen 1/7 shots, whereas usually mine was blurrier in 6/7 shots . and in some cases it's not really visible

im pulling my hair off with this thing

I feel like the difference between 2646 and 2647 would be enough for me to consider returning the device. 2646 is your phone and 2647 is the store model?

My 17 Pro Max is softer in some areas but not out of focus, those paired photos seem like it's a focus issue

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

I feel like the difference between 2646 and 2647 would be enough for me to consider returning the device. 2646 is your phone and 2647 is the store model?

My 17 Pro Max is softer in some areas but not out of focus, those paired photos seem like it's a focus issue

as you can see it does happen with the one from store, just MUCH more rarely (as i said in 80/90% of the cases, mine comes out blurrier). for example here, the blurry one below is store's , sharper is mine . it's so odd.

yes that is correct , 2646 is mine, 2647 is store

also in some shots it's unvisible (like the one with airpods max on the wall, i can't see a difference)

 

[BlackrazorNZ]

I really need your help guys. I got 1 last day to decide whether I have to return my 17 pro, and I can't make up my mind. i took a lot of pictures in an apple store. the first pic is MY unit, second one is the store. same pattern for every picture .

(1st is mine, 2nd is store, 3rd is mine, fourth is store, etc etc)

could you help me figure it out please ?

it seems both have issues with blur and focus, be it heic or raw, but mine seems to be more frequent? idk it doesnt make sense to me
@ToddH and @BlackrazorNZ what do you think ? i inserted a lot of pictures from the exact same angle just to be sure and concistent

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Personally, I wouldn't regard the difference between the two photo sets as statistically significant.

If it was a hardware fault (which is the only thing that trying a different version of the same phone would verify), it would be consistently bad, not sporadically bad. And using the examples of mine further up, you wouldn't be able to 'fix' it just by taking photos at slightly different settings - hardware would infer a fault with the lens or the sensor, and either of those would cause replicable, reliable issues, rather than occasional ones.

My gut says it's a software issue and therefore it won't really matter which physical phone you purchase - it will need to be resolved through software.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

Personally, I wouldn't regard the difference between the two photo sets as statistically significant.

If it was a hardware fault (which is the only thing that trying a different version of the same phone would verify), it would be consistently bad, not sporadically bad. And using the examples of mine further up, you wouldn't be able to 'fix' it just by taking photos at slightly different settings - hardware would infer a fault with the lens or the sensor, and either of those would cause replicable, reliable issues, rather than occasional ones.

My gut says it's a software issue and therefore it won't really matter which physical phone you purchase - it will need to be resolved through software.

It seems nearly concistent no? In 90% of the cases it's blurrier on unit A and clear on B

In 10% of the cases it's blurrier on unit B

I've read your post and it's definitely intersting but in MY case I think there might be both a software and hardware issue , seeing how bad most pictures look

 

[Ultraslan]

If you’re on the fence and have your old phone as a backup, just return it. You can buy it later, if these issues are ironed out. With that being sad, i dont think you have a hardware defect but a software issue. So, any replacement you will get, will have the same issue until this is being acknowledged and fixed by apple. So either wait for a fix, or return and wait until it is being fixed.

 

[SumYoungGai]

If you’re on the fence and have your old phone as a backup, just return it. You can buy it later, if these issues are ironed out. With that being sad, i dont think you have a hardware defect but a software issue. So, any replacement you will get, will have the same issue until this is being acknowledged and fixed by apple. So either wait for a fix, or return and wait until it is being fixed.

I agree and the safer option would probably be for them to return the phone and revert to the old phone to see how this plays out. But if it were software-related, shouldn't it be more of a coin toss as to whether either phone is more clear?

 

[Ultraslan]

I agree and the safer option would probably be for them to return the phone and revert to the old phone to see how this plays out. But if it were software-related, shouldn't it be more of a coin toss as to whether either phone is more clear?

If it is software related, every phone should be affected in more or less the same way, in contrast to a hardware defect, were just one phone would show consistently worse performance. I have to admit that I am puzzled as well. Saw the review from Becca Fersace on YT. She is usually very thorough when it comes to cameras, but even she didnt mention this issue. I sent mine back and am waiting a few weeks, to see if this issue is more wide spread or not and if apple comes up with a fix, in which case I will be ordering a new one.

 

[BlackrazorNZ]

FYI I’ve been getting reasonably consistent good results in 48MP ProRaw on the 4x Telephoto, even in low light, since I started manually focussing (rather than auto or tap focus) and keeping the shutter and ISO as low as realistic.

This was staring right down the barrel of a sunset and was already in full shadow. Check the detail in the crop of the transmission lines on the hill. The full scene was shot on the 4x Telephoto, would upload the original image but the forum doesn’t support uploads that large.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

If you’re on the fence and have your old phone as a backup, just return it. You can buy it later, if these issues are ironed out. With that being sad, i dont think you have a hardware defect but a software issue. So, any replacement you will get, will have the same issue until this is being acknowledged and fixed by apple. So either wait for a fix, or return and wait until it is being fixed.

As I've asked already and as @SumYoungGai pointed out, is it that easy to rule out a hardware issue and say that it is software, when the issue happens 9 out of 10 times on one unit, and 1/10 on another unit ? Doesn't this sound a lot like hardware ? The odds should iron it out to fifty fifty or at some something resembling that pattern