An example of the yellow/blue banding issue on the iPhone XS.
Ever since I updated my iPhone XS to iOS 13, I’ve gotten strange banding artifacts randomly in some of my photos when using the main camera on the default photo app. Happening primarily under LED or fluorescent lighting, a pattern of alternating yellow and blue lines emerges from one edge of the photo.
This wasn’t evident in the year I’ve used the phone before, and it doesn’t happen all the time, so I decided to investigate. I managed to cause the banding consistently using the LED lights of the office mixed with outdoor lighting. In settings, I turned on Smart HDR, but I also turned on ‘Keep Normal Photo.’
Lo and behold, solved – the ’normal’ photo does not display the banding defect, while the corresponding HDR photo does. The blue and yellow streaks are being caused by some new algorithm in iOS 13.
The banding issue is clearly seen on the bottle in the lower left corner of the HDR image. The ‘normal’ image shows no banding.
Here’s my solution: for now, keep ‘Keep Normal Photo’ on. It’s a pain to have to delete duplicate pictures when everything works fine, but I’ve had several family photos ruined by this defect, and I don’t have any ’normal’ versions of them to fall back on.
I’m relieved that it isn’t a hardware issue, so fingers crossed Apple will fix this sooner rather than later with a software update. If you haven’t updated to iOS 13 yet, this might be a good reason to wait a bit longer if you’re using an older iPhone model.
Searching online, it seems that other people are having this same issue with the iPhone XR and XS starting with the iOS 13 update. I’ve had this issue with every version of iOS 13 so far, and I am currently on 13.1.3. There’s been no official update that I’m aware of from Apple as of October 24.
You must be logged in to post a comment.