I’ve experienced this with half a dozen phones. Even when you try to edit the photo, you can almost never recover the actual colors that were in the sky.
In: Technology
For the same reason why an old turn of the 20th century photograph doesn’t look right. It’s a crude representation of what we actually see. Don’t fool yourself into thinking your phone is different, it’s still a crude representation. Just a better one, much better. No photo your phone takes, nor an image it displays is correct, it’s a crude attempt at it. A few reasons why it is still crude though.
To start with, you’re viewing this on an screen. The screen can’t show all the colours you can see, nor all the contrasts you can see. [See here for various red-green-blue (RBG) colour gamuts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/CIE1931xy_gamut_comparison.svg/1280px-CIE1931xy_gamut_comparison.svg.png). That funny shape is all the colours your eyes can see. The colors are obviously on the screen so are washed out from what they really could be, but gives an idea.
As you can see, RGB three primary colours only draws a triangle that captures part of the colours we can see. That whole thing you were taught in school about three very fundamental and fixed primary colours? A total lie. It’s good enough, most of the colours we name are on there. But not all their shades, not all their hues. Some RGBs are better. Different and more pure blue, green, and red pixels can get more covered, but never all. A four primary colour based display and image would be better, but would also make displays much more expensive and files much larger.
You’ll note the one RGB triangle actually goes outside of the visible gamut, and its triangle tries to cover more of it. It relies on an impossibly red red, but that’s fine for the mathematical storage of the image, just means you need to select values that are possible to actually display, and this imaginary extension allows for more of those. Assuming you have a display that can do it, which you probably don’t. A very high quality printer, with a lot more than three primary colour inks, might be able to.
The rainbow pure colours are actually the curved edge of that shape, not a single true rainbow can be show on a RGB screen. They all look wrong, faded out. The red, green and blue colours a screen can make aren’t as pure as a rainbow, and anything they make through combination won’t be as pure either. That means a small triangle within that fill possiblity of colours. Why do some displays look better? Because they use high quality pixels that push more to the limits of a very pure red, green, or blue on the edge, a larger triangle.
And that’s assuming an analog view of just colours. Digital information is stored as bits, there’s jumps in it. Not only can you only go within that triangle, you can only go within a grid on it. More missed colours. Then there’s brightness and contrast. Again, it’s digital so there’s fixed brightness steps too, not any brightness is possible. As well, a screen is limited in contrast. Blacks are a dark grey, and whites are not as bright as they could be. A high dynamic range, HDR, display can improve this, both with more bits (so more fine steps) and more brightness on the actual display output.
And that’s just the display and the file being shown on it, this would all apply to only a computer generated image. Next is the camera. Again, same issues doubled up now. It’s digital, it has RGB based sensors. It has all the same limitations. On a phone, your display is probably better than your camera, photos taken with real cameras (or ‘shopped) will look better than what it takes. Additionally, the RGB sensors are just best approximation of human cone cells. They don’t have the same sensitivity to each colour, and they don’t even pick up the same spectrum. Go aim your TV remote at your phone camera and hit a button, you’ll see a purple glow that your eyes can definitely not see. There’s IR light out there, especially from a sunset, and your camera is going to pick this up and it’s going to distort the colours.
Then there’s more photography related tricks. There’s things like white balance, focal length, field of view, saturation. Adjusting all of these makes for better photos. You with your phone are a bad photographer. A professional photographer could get a better photo by playing with these, even without better equipment.
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