Edit
To provide some context given the messages below. I was a professional photographer, and understand that getting a good photo is a skill. Exposure time, timing, location, and many other factors come into play when capturing a great image.
Seeing the aurora was a fantastic experience. The purpose of this post is to help reduce FOMO of those who could not see it. Many people who don’t know these things will imagine dancing lights in the sky of brilliance, and will be saddened by what they missed. While they did miss something, it’s important for them to know exactly what they missed.
Edit2 I should also note this is why I enjoy when photographers post gear, conditions, and settings alongside results. It tells viewers what was real.
My photos with my Samusung looked like the top picture and my brother’s with an iphone looked like the bottom picture, neither of us did any manual editing.
This isn’t a comment to disparage nor compliment apple but I suspect the photo app itself does some post processing in addition to having good quality cams on their phones.
Both do I’m sure, but the apple version clearly goes further than the samsung version. It was just an observation mostly.
Most newer Phones do loads of filtering and post-processing on pictures automatically.
Most people think: “Wow, this device has good cameras!”
Some people think: “Wow, my photography skills really improved lately!”
What really happened is that the underlying softwares were changed dramatically in the last years.