Wallpaper auto darkening?

[Soundburst]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Hey,

I got a nice Mario style iPhone wallpaper from a nice wallpaper site and it's nice and bright when I view it in photos.

http://mantia.me/wallpaper/super-mario-bros/

However when I set it as my wallpaper it automatically darkens.

Is there a way to stop this? I prefer the bright vibrant colours

 

[MacDevil7334]

Sadly no, iOS automatically applies a gradient over the wallpaper image. I think this is done intentionally to make the home screen icons "pop" off the background. I think this is totally unnecessary since iOS already draws a large drop shadow for each icon and behind the dock. The wallpaper gradient just makes the picture look dark and muddy.

Short of jailbreaking, there is no way to remove the wallpaper gradient. However, I have noticed that if you loaded your desired wallpaper image onto the phone via iPhoto and iTunes, iPhoto darkens the image slightly before putting it on the phone. The image then gets darkened again when you set it as wallpaper. However, if you send the image to the phone via email, mms, or photo stream, that first round of darkening doesn't happen. So, one way to reduce the darkening of your wallpaper is to email it to yourself and then download it to the phone that way instead of via an iTunes sync.