Page, Arizona
November 16, 2020
I found this answer through Google. I’m still learning!
The iPhone makes a lot of decisions for you. Unless you turn off all of the automatic processing in the iPhone the pictures display with increased color saturation and contrast. Apples designers decided what you want the picture to look like before you bought your phone.
With a real camera creative decisions are totally left up to you. By default in jpg modes a good camera doesn't make any decisions for you. While some processing is required to turn the raw data into a jpg, as much as possible the camera gives you an unprocessed picture.
If you don't like this you can turn on and off dozens of settings to achieve they same type of processing the iPhone does for you. Actually adjusting all of the settings to achieve the same image your iPhone gives you will take some learning. In different lighting conditions you will have to use different settings. The iPhone does this for you. Additionally, the white balance settings on an iPhone is smarter than the camera. My Nikon is pretty good at finding the right white balance but under some conditions it gets it wrong. This can be fixed later but out of the camera the color will look wrong. If you are unfamiliar with white balance then i suggest you do some research. Knowing what white balance to set to achieve specific results is really important. Also, you should learn when to used automatic settings and when manually adjusting the camera will achieve better results.
A good camera should perform better than an iPhone under all conditions except when being used by a novice. The iPhone is smarter than the photographer while the camera is just a tool that only does what you tell it to do.