William Gallagher
Within certain limits, the Camera app in the new iOS 15 beta 4 is able to remove unwanted lens flare in photos.
Lens flare has always been an issue with smartphone photograph, but reportedly Apple has fixed — or at least reduced — the issue. Photographs taken in the Camera app on the latest iOS 15 beta 4 release show that a certain degree of lens flare is now automatically removed.
"So I've noticed something that I haven't seen reported elsewhere," said Redditor Doubleluckstur in a discussion thread. "[Whilst] out and about I took this photo and thought it was ruined/needing to be edited later due to the lens flare (as I've done numerous times in previous photos with the iPhone 12 Pro as it's so prone to lens flares)."
"However, I got home and noticed the lens flare has automatically gone in the original photo despite it being obviously there still in the Live Photo," the poster continued, "meaning the automatic post processing has gotten smart enough to remove lens flares now!"
The lens flare remains in the original Live Photo photograph, but exporting it to another, single-image format, shows the flare being removed. There are other alterations to the image, such as it being more zoomed in, which are consistent with how iOS exports Live Photos.
Further discussion in the Reddit thread shows that results are variable. It's reported that where the lens flare is especially prominent — and perhaps intentionally so — iOS 15 does not attempt to reduce it.
Users have found the new flare removal, or reduction, is working across devices from the iPhone 12 Pro to the iPhone XR.
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9 Comments
I don’t like the way the entire picture changes in an attempt to reduce lens flare. It’s like the picture was taken with a tinted lens. The entire picture is darker. In this sample pic the color of the grass has been changed . The sky is not as blue. Is there a setting to toggle this on and off?
Don’t tell JJ Abrams
More than lens flare, I have issues with internal reflections in the lens/camera causing a teal dot on pictures. It'd be nice if that could be automatically removed.
The “before” and “after” labels are reversed. The lens flare is the small, slightly greenish dot near the left edge of the full-sized “after [sic]” pic. (The flare was cropped out of the pic shown in the story header.)