If you've noticed over the past few years that your iPhone photos have become increasingly flashy, unnatural, and just plain weird, you're not alone.

Photos from phone cameras look incredible, especially from the iPhone and high-end Android phones like Google’s Pixel. To get such great images from such small image sensors, they have to do a lot of clever processing to create the final image. The problem is that processing can go too far, and that’s exactly what’s happened in recent years.

"[I've been] disappointed with a lot of photos since upgrading to an iPhone 12 mini. In general, they look better than with previous iPhones, and in general they look better with Smart HDR turned on. But sometimes Smart HDR underperforms, making things look artificial and over-processed, and there's no way to 'undo' that and get an unprocessed photo," said Michael Tsai, a technology critic, on his blog.

Compared to dedicated cameras, phone cameras have tiny sensors with small pixels that pick up a lot of noise along with the actual light in the image. To compensate for this, the phone typically takes multiple photos in very rapid succession and combines the results. This can reduce noise in dark scenes and capture stunning detail in the highlights (a bright sky) and shadows at the same time, something that is impossible without processing.