As Apple prepares to roll out the iOS 15 operating system to millions of iPhone users this fall, the latest beta version of the update seems to improve the way the iPhone takes photos and processes photos under certain lighting conditions.
The camera hardware inside the iPhone plays an important role in the quality of the photos taken by the user, but another factor that affects the image quality is the processing done by the iPhone image signal processor (or ISP). In the latest iOS 15 beta, Apple may have improved the way the iPhone processes photos to avoid lens glare that users don’t want on photos.
This change was first exposed on Reddit and further promoted on Twitter by the popular iPhone camera app Halide. Two side-by-side photos show that in the latest beta version, Apple removed lens flare during the post-processing of the photos. Apple officials have not yet commented or promoted this, so it is not clear what happened.
However, the latest beta version may be improving the way the iPhone detects different indoor and outdoor scenes, and uses this information to compensate and eliminate unnecessary lens glare. A Reddit user pointed out that he could see obvious lens flare after taking photos with the iPhone 12 Pro.
However, when he re-examined the photo later, he found that the lens flare had been automatically removed from the photo. This means that automatic post-processing has become smart enough to eliminate lens glare.