> Sodium lights are a problem not because they’re yellow, but because they have very spiky spectra.
A side effect of this (and other low-CRI lights) is that it's hard to take pictures in them, because if you take a picture of a person you want their skin tone to look just right or else they look weird and sickly and unattractive.
Regular white balance algorithms are not quite able to handle this. So you might imagine why phone cameras are motivated to do AI processing or people processing or other things that make the picture look overprocessed. Because the people are temporarily literally the wrong color in that lighting, and an AI model may be capable of knowing what color they "actually" are.
(That said, the main reason photos look overprocessed is that for some reason nobody on Earth ever implements sensible sharpening algorithms. They always use frequency-based ones that cause obvious white halos. Learn about warp-sharpen and median filters, people.)
A side effect of this (and other low-CRI lights) is that it's hard to take pictures in them, because if you take a picture of a person you want their skin tone to look just right or else they look weird and sickly and unattractive.
Regular white balance algorithms are not quite able to handle this. So you might imagine why phone cameras are motivated to do AI processing or people processing or other things that make the picture look overprocessed. Because the people are temporarily literally the wrong color in that lighting, and an AI model may be capable of knowing what color they "actually" are.
(That said, the main reason photos look overprocessed is that for some reason nobody on Earth ever implements sensible sharpening algorithms. They always use frequency-based ones that cause obvious white halos. Learn about warp-sharpen and median filters, people.)