Apple iOS 15 Beta could auto-remove lens flare to make your photos look better

The Camera app in the latest iOS 15 beta can possibly eliminate unwanted lens flare in photos you’ve taken – though there will still be limits to how effective it is. Lens flare has long been an issue with the best iPhone cameras, with its pesky way of spoiling your beloved photos before you've even realized what’s happened. 

Lens flare can be nothing short of a post-processing catastrophe, so it's good news that Apple seems to have gone some way (maybe) to solve the problem. Photographs shot from within the Camera app on the latest beta release exhibit an impressive level of automatic lens flare removal.

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This was spotted by a user on Reddit, who noted that the latest iOS 15 beta auto-removes lens flares when post-processing images. Developers of the popular camera app, Halide, shared the findings on Twitter.

To back up these claims, two images have been used side-by-side to demonstrate that Apple now seemingly recognizes and removes lens flare from images during post-processing. As you can see from the two images, lens flare has automatically vanished in the original photo, while still being present in the Live Photo. Though some people may actually like lens flare for, say, the unique artistic value it can bring to images, we think most would agree it's a nuisance and that this feature would be a real boon to users who snap lots of pics.

So, what's going on here? Apple hasn’t officially verified this apparent lens flare removal feature, so it’s hard to know if it’s an intentional improvement – though it would appear to be that way instead of some collective glitch impacting lots of users at once. 

And while there's been a lot of back and forth on the internet over the arrival of this removal feature, another Reddit user notes that a lens flare-tainted photo they captured one morning on their Apple iPhone 12 Pro had mysteriously vanished when they revisited the same image later that day, possibly suggesting that it was auto removed by the iPhone somewhere in between.

Either way, we're happily signed up to any feature that generally improves our photo-capturing prowess by making our photos look better after post-processing, be it deliberate or not. If you'd rather steer clear of iOS completely, though, then we've got a rundown of the best Android phones to help you choose your next non-Apple handset.