This is probably a combination of the lens corrections, the pretty awful auto white balance (warmth), the terrible oversharpening and also a bit of True Tone. P

This is probably a combination of the lens corrections, the pretty awful auto white balance (warmth), the terrible oversharpening and also a bit of True Tone. Portrait mode also wrecks a lot of photos due to the crappy emulation of DOF. Output is clever but shit. Due to the general flatness of the lens there is a lot of distortion around the edges which is digitally removed after the photo is taken. This isn't 100% perfect and causes some rather uncanny looks in some of the photos. You can use this for artistic effect but it looks crap mostly. Generally if you're using a proper camera there's a big chunk of glass in front of it so the main part of a portrait is well outside the distorted edges of the frame so it's not noticeable. Even new cameras use minimal lens corrections in body as well to eliminate this. As for the white balance, Apple never seem to get this right. The colours are always slightly too orange / warm and vivid and never quite match reality in experience. You can crank the warmth down a bit after in photos.app to kill some of it. Oversharpening - everything is too sharp. This makes the image pop out but nothing more. It's a terrible curse on smartphones. Not much you can do about it. Even shooting ProRAW on mine is oversharpened. If you turn the True Tone feature off in Display/Settings it looks a bit better as well. That seems to completely mung viewing any photos later, giving them sometimes an over-blue tone. Urgh all this is why I bought a mirrorless. Smartphones are really not very good. Even good ones (mine is a 15 Pro). Mine gets mostly used to take photos of an AirBnB when I leave it now or where the car got parked.