How do I stop the camera app from automatically brightening people in my photos?

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Level 1

4 points

How do I stop the camera app from automatically brightening people in my photos?

This happens when I take a photo with people in it. It is especially noticeable if the lighting is back lit and the background is fairly bright. When viewing the photo for the first time, the image looks pretty good and then almost immediately a horrible looking adjustment is made to brighten the people in the photo, making them look photoshopped into the background. The whole image also gets an awful flat look to it. The people look worse and more orange. I can’t find out how to get the original image back (before the auto adjust) or turn this feature off. I am using an iPhone SE 2022 and just noticed this happening recently. I downloaded a 3rd party app to bypass this, but should’t have to do that.

Posted on Oct 20, 2025 12:14 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,495 points

Oct 21, 2025 6:58 AM in response to Luloris

This seems to be a result of the automatic HDR. If the lighting has strong contrast, the iPhone is taking automatically several images with a different exposure time and fusing them to one image to bring out more detail in the shadow areas and high lights. This will also increase the saturation.

We cannot prevent this, because the automatic HDR cannot be turned off in the more recent system versions. But you could set your camera to shoot RAW in difficult lighting situations, to prevent the HDR fusion.

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