iPhone X Close Up Photography Issues

I have had an iPhone X since last fall.  It has an excellent camera system both hardware and software for most situations.  This time in the area where I live we have a super abundance of flowers and I take lots of shots of my yard flowers, public gardens, and wild flowers.  Using the iPhone X for this can be frustrating.  It is certainly possible to get excellent shots with sharp focus and good color rendition.

These were all taken in the late afternoon, but not all on the same day.  When using the Adobe camera app I activated the zebras to avoid any overexposure.  With the Apple camera app you just have to guess on exposure.  I usually turn down the exposure as Apple shows you in their camera videos.  These photos show that things can work out well with this camera.  But I have to say that many times the results are poor.  The Adobe camera app has a much harder time focusing using the longer lens on this camera than with the wide angle.  And the Adobe app has a great deal of difficulty in bright mid day sun.  Why?  I have no idea.

The Apple camera app does seem to have more difficulty during mid day bright sun to focus too, but not as bad as Adobe.  The issue with using the Apple camera app that comes with the phone is that the Apple software sometimes smears the heck out of the finished image file.

This flower was too bright so I turned down the exposure.  When I brought it back up in Apple Photos the computer smeared the image significantly.

You can tone down the noise reduction smearing some by importing the photo into Lightroom CC and doing the edit there.  But there is still some of the smearing issue, just less.

So what is my solution?  Right now the most reliable solution is to use my DSLR during the day for better focus and raw output.  That camera has no problems with getting good focus in any sun conditions.  I am also thinking about finding another raw camera app for the iPhone X and giving that a try.  I suspect that the reason the Adobe app does not focus as well as it should is that Adobe has just not tweaked their software as well as they should have for the iPhone X.