Improving iPhone and Pixel Photos

MKBHD’s video about blind camera comparison concluded with a baffling result. The most interesting thing is not the winner, but the phones that got to share the last place: iPhone XS, iPhone X and Pixel 3.

Although their cameras are superior on technical level¹, people prefer pictures from other cameras because of increased brightness and saturation.

Of course there is nothing that stops iPhone and Pixel to do the same thing at the cost of losing information rendering further post-processing inflexible. That being said, I can imagine that being beaten by a Blackberry in a photography test must hurt.

Solution

The solution is simple. I am sure that if pictures after auto-enhance have been thrown in the competition, the results would be different. The winner might stay the same, but I doubt that iPhones and Pixels would remain dead last.

What Apple and Google should do is to add an option to turn on auto-enhance by default. This way no information would be lost and people who prefer pictures without it could disable it. It would make the pictures coming straight off-camera punchier.

But first Apple would need to fix their auto-enhance algorithm which makes everything orange.