There’s noise in the shadows here, and the skin look harsher as there is less flattening of the highlights and shadows, but the detail is fantastic compared to the straight-out-of-camera image from the stock iPhone camera app here.

Smart RAW is still in testing and will require a very large amount of photographic proof to ensure it works perfectly in all conditions. We expect to launch it at the end of this week.

Conclusion

iPhone XS has a completely new camera. It’s not just a different sensor, but an entirely new approach to photography that is new to iOS. Since it leans so heavily on merging exposures and computational photography, images may look quite different from those you’ve taken in similar conditions on older iPhones.

But unlike previous cameras, exactly because many of its leaps in quality are based on software, we can expect it to change, and even improve. This is just the first version of iOS 12 and Smart HDR.

Likewise, us developers need to update apps to take full advantage of the new iPhone XS and XS Max’s very capable sensor. Since it is such a different animal, simply treating it as any other iPhone will yield subpar results. We’re almost done doing our first take at it and we’ll no doubt have to work more on it in the future.

If you’re a user that’s bothered by some aspect of this brave new era of computational photography, or some of Apple’s image processing, know that there’s options for you out there: you can disable some of the heavy handed HDR in the Camera settings¹, or you can shoot in RAW.