iPhone 13 Pro over-sharpening

The iPhone 13 Pro’s camera application drastically over-sharpens photos during post-processing. The over-sharpening occurs whether shooting HEIF or ProRAW. With HEIF the over-sharpening is unrecoverable. With ProRAW, however, it is possible to defeat the over-sharpening by performing a null edit on the image in the Photos app on the phone.

To illustrate the severity of the issue and the possibility of defeating it, I took three pictures of my 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro screen displaying apple.com on the evening of March 18, 2022. The pictures look slightly orange because my screen is slightly orange; I use f.lux to lower the display’s color temperature at night.

I took these using the “3x” zoom setting from roughly the distance of the laptop’s lower case. Since the 3x camera hardware cannot focus that close, the phone uses the 1x camera and digitally zooms in. This digital zoom actually looks fine once the over-sharpening is defeated.

A screenshot of the web site:

An over-sharpened HEIF, converted to JPEG. Notice the weird ringing around the black text as well as the loss of color in the links:

An over-sharpened ProRAW, converted to JPEG. The ringing and loss of color are identical:

A ProRAW that looks decent, converted to JPEG. The ringing is gone and the links show up in a nice blue:

Tap or click to compare the oversharpened and decent ProRAW images:

In order to defeat the over-sharpening, I performed a null edit as follows:

1. Take the photo.
2. Open the Photos app on the phone.
3. Tap “Edit”.
4. Tap “Exposure”.
5. Drag the slider off of zero and then back to zero.
6. Tap “Done”.

It’s also possible to defeat the over-sharpening by allowing the photo to sync from the phone to a computer via iCloud Photos, and then perform a similar null edit in Photos on the computer.

This deficiency is exasperating; a software bug compromises the otherwise sensible defaults offered by the iPhone 13 Pro imaging pipeline.