Today’s Question: We use our Nikon set to the Adobe RGB color space for real estate photography. Sometimes in tight spaces we use the iPhone 17 Pro, but the colors rendered are so different. Is there a way to correct or balance the two in Lightroom or Photoshop? Do you know the color space that the iPhone shoots in?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The difference in colors most likely relates to the in-camera processing done by your smartphone, rather than the color space being used. You would need to adjust the camera captures (whether with camera settings or post-capture processing) to get closer to the smartphone captures with your regular camera.
More Detail: The iPhone uses the P3 wide-gamut color space by default, which is relatively close to the Adobe RGB color space. P3 covers a bit more in the reds and oranges, while Adobe RGB has better coverage of the greens and cyans, but the color spaces are pretty similar in overall capability. This is therefore not likely to cause any issues in comparing images from an iPhone versus Nikon camera, for example.
The real issue is that the iPhone is performing in-camera processing. That includes some processing even if you’re using the ProRAW format for capturing images on your iPhone. This causes the images to generally look better than raw captures from a normal camera, for example.
If you were willing to shoot in JPEG on your regular camera (which is not something I recommend) you could also take advantage of in-camera processing to get photos that are a closer match to the iPhone right out of the camera. However, I recommend taking advantage of raw capture, which in turn means you’ll need to perform adjustments after the fact to get the raw captures looking closer to the iPhone captures.
You could, of course, use a preset in Lightroom Classic (or in Camera Raw) to batch process your raw captures from the regular camera to more closely match the iPhone captures. As a starting point, for example, I would recommend a moderately high boost in Clarity (perhaps around +20 or so) and Vibrance (around +25 or so) to enhance overall contrast and color. But you can apply additional adjustments as part of a preset to get these images closer in appearance to what you get with your iPhone.
