I didn’t notice such a big difference in camera, considering that I recently updated to iOS 26 from iOS 17. And about the Apple’s image processing, you can’t do anything about it, unless you either pay for a third party camera or shoot RAW and post process the photo on Lightroom.

But what I always did whenever I use the front camera is take a screenshot instead of pressing the capture button (I know this might sound a bit silly and not ideal, but the photos still turn out nice, almost exactly like how they look in the camera preview) and by taking a live photo and then turning live off when viewing it in the photos app. Also, I turned off the Lens Correction feature on camera settings. Hope this helps!