I find my iPhone 11 is really bad at capturing some blues, purples, and neutral tones in some situations. Purples sometimes almost look gray, especially if I’m capturing them up close. These are under LED overhead lights.
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Because phone camera are just bad. They’re these tiny little sensors with tiny lenses just trying it’s best to collect enough light. There’s a reason why professional lenses alone are bigger than your entire phone.
So to overcome the shitty hardware, phones use software processing to get actually decent photos. But the processing won’t be perfect. Maybe it just messes up and gets the colors a bit wonky. Maybe it’s not exactly accurate on purpose, to get more “vibrant” photos. Maybe it’s tuned in a way that you just personally don’t really like.
Phone cameras in generald uses small camera sensors and lenses, which gives quite poor quality in the frist place.
For both phone cameras and professional cameras there are done a lot of post processing, that is software that compensates and improves the image.
One of the most common post processes are white balancing. White balancing is a process that tries to make something that is white in color white color to become white the image as well.
White balancing is more difficult than one would think, becasue it is very dependent on the lighting conditions and our brain adjust very well to the changes in lighting, so the camera needs to follow.
Professionals could manage to adjust the white balance manually them selves, but phone cameras often uses an automatic white balance process called gray world or an upgraded version of gray world.
Gray world assumes that the average color of a picture is gray, so it would adjust the picture in such a way that the average becomes gray. So for a picture with grey, white or a combiantion of red, green and blue, this would often work great.
On the other hand if the average of the picture is not gray, but red, green or blue, the picture would become very grey.
If you go close up, meaning no white light sources in the image and larger areas in the image with one color, most auto white balance would fail, and you would most likely end up with gray images.
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