
Ask HN: Why do iPhone cameras color correct? - erehweb
With the fires in CA, sky is orange, but phone  washes that out. Why not just have the default be what you see - WYSIWYG? Or have a WYSIWYG filter?
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ironmagma
Generally speaking, what you see is not what you are looking at. We as humans
do our own color correction all the time, so it’s natural that a camera would
do the same. Otherwise, you end up with photos that look e.g. very green when
you weren’t expecting it, because your eyes had adapted to the ambient colors.

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anigbrowl
All consumer digital cameras color correct by default because people don't
want to white balance manually any more than they want to adjust the focus or
aperture manually; they just want a nice photo and if they don't get it will
put the blame on the camera rather than spending more time learning
photography. Pro photography apps let you configure that yourself.

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sjy
The phone is trying to achieve WYSIWYG and failing because it’s a hard
problem. It’s difficult to reduce the continuous experience of visual
perception to a fixed image obtained from a digital sensor at one moment in
time, but skilled photographers can outperform the default algorithm in a
point-and-shoot camera app.

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brudgers
It’s the iPhone Camera App, not the camera. Control of white balance is
available in other Apps. For example, the Adobe Lightroom App provides white
balance control when taking pictures in the “professional” mode. The App is
free in the App Store.

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mxxx
Shoot with something white in the frame so it knows how to white balance. I’ve
had a similar experience in the past during a wildfire and the shot that most
accurately represented the colours I was really seeing had the fluoro lights
of a gas station in the frame.

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nkristoffersen
Better to use an iPhone camera app that captures RAW. Then you can set your
own white balance after.

