Those horrifying photos of San Francisco after wildfires could be even worse than they look – because phones aren’t able to capture them

Automatic white balance on iPhones and Android smartphones is changing the photos

(Philip Pacheco/Getty Images)

Photos taken of the orange skies, caused by the current wildfires happening in California, may not look as bad as they really are. 

In fact, they could be worse, because of the software on iPhones and Android phones.

The wildfires have so far raged over two million acres of land, burnt houses to the ground and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes. 

The resulting blazes have turned the sky in many west coast cities a deep orange or a dark red.

However, many people attempting to take photos of the sky with their iPhones are finding that they cannot capture the glow due to the software in their Apple device.

Freelance artist Teri Archibald posted on Twitter pictures of the sky in Daly City from both her Canon camera and her iPhone.

“My phone keeps auto color correcting it and doesn’t show just how gross outside it actually is”, she tweeted.

Jessica Christian, a photojournalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, observed the same thing, as did Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier. 

The reason for these muted images is because smartphone cameras - whether they are made by Android or Apple - are set to automatically correct the white balance in photos and make images look ‘natural’.

The ‘white balance’ of a photo is a metric used by cameras so objects that appear white in person are rendered white in photos, because most light sources such as the sun, light bulbs, and the camera flash do not emit purely white light.

"The Apple built-in photo app does a great job with most things because it’s automatically doing adjustments and making everything look pretty by smoothing faces and balancing out shadows,"  Maurice Ramirez, the official photographer for the town of Alameda, California, told SFGate.

"But when you’re in a crazy situation like this, it’s going to take that crazy color and average it out."

In order to get accurate photos, photographers will need to use a third-party app that gives manual control over the white balance.

Scientifically, the reason that the sky has become such a unique red is due to the smoke particles from the fire.

Nasa explains that smoke particles from fires, such as those in Siberia in 2015, allow longer wavelength colours in the light spectrum such as red and orange to get through easier than shorter wavelengths like blue.

That is also why sunrises and sunsets are redder; because the sun is near the horizon, the light has to travel through more of Earth’s atmosphere, which filters out blue, green, and yellow wavelengths,

"I’ve never seen anything like this before," said Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Bay Area office in Monterey, about the red skies.

"This is not a common sight across the Bay Area because this takes very specific conditions in order for this to happen. Obviously you need fires that have ample smoke production. Then you need wind to bring that smoke in over the Bay Area."