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Every year, Apple touts the iPhone as having an incredible camera system — and, yes, the hardware is certainly impressive. The iPhone 14 Pro has the latest advancements that Apple offers in terms of camera upgrades, including a huge jump to a 48MP main camera with pixel-binning technology (four su-pixels to make up one larger pixel), a telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom, faster night mode, and more. Again, on the hardware front, the iPhone 14 Pro camera looks impressive. And it is!

But what good is great camera hardware when the software continues to ruin the images you take? Ever since the iPhone 13 lineup, it seems that any images taken from an iPhone, unless it’s shot in ProRaw format, just look bad compared to those taken on older iPhones and the competing best Android phones. That’s because Apple has turned the dial way up on computational photography and post-processing each time you capture a photo. It’s ruining my images, and Apple needs to take a chill pill and take it down a notch.

To take photos, we need sensors that help capture light and detail to create those images. However, since smartphones are much more compact than a full DSLR, the sensors are pretty limited in what they can do. That’s why Apple, as well as other smartphone manufacturers, may rely on software to improve the image quality of pictures you capture on a phone.

Apple introduced Smart HDR on the iPhone in 2018, and this software feature is now in its fourth iteration with the iPhone 14 lineup. With Smart HDR 4, the device will snap multiple photos with different settings and then combine the “best” elements of each image into a single photo. There’s a lot of computational photography going on with this process, and though the intention is to make the images look good, it actually does the opposite.

You may have noticed this when you snap a photo on your iPhone 14 (or iPhone 13) and immediately tap the thumbnail in the corner to view the images you just took. The image will look like what you captured for a quick second, but then it looks overly sharpened — with colors appearing more artificial, maybe washed out in certain areas and overly saturated in others. Even skin tone may look a little different than what you see in real life. While I loved night mode when it first debuted on the iPhone 11 series, compared to the competition now, night mode makes photos look too “bright” from overprocessing, and a lot of night photos don’t even look like they’re taken at night.

And have you ever tried to take a selfie in lowlight conditions? Sure, the iPhone has night mode for the front-facing camera too, but I haven’t found it to be of much help. Lowlight selfies look horrendous no matter what you do because iOS adds a lot of digital artifacts to the image to try and “save” it. But instead of saving the photo, it ends up looking like a bad and messy watercolor painting. In fact, I try to not take selfies on my iPhone 14 Pro when I’m in a dim environment because they almost always end up looking bad.

I’m not sure when photos taken with an iPhone began to look this way, but I definitely feel like it became more prominent starting with the iPhone 13 series. I could be wrong, but I don’t particularly remember my iPhone 12 Pro images looking this overexaggerated, and especially not my iPhone 11 Pro photos. The iPhone used to take pictures that looked realistic and natural, but all this Smart HDR and computational photography postprocessing has gotten way out of hand, making images look worse than they should be.