It is indeed amazing how the field of photography is currently undergoing another wave of nothing less than groundbreaking innovations. A good deal of that stems from the problem that a smart phone just doesn't have a way to include a 80x zoom lens - the amount of glass needed for a traditional telephoto is just too much - and it gets bigger if you also want it to be a fast lens. Which also means that the depth of field as provided by the tiny wide angle lenses in our phones today is essentially unlimited. So they use multiple lenses and by combining the images create an artificially low depth of field, give you a "designer" bokeh and alter the image in any number of other ways by the creative use of software.
With the good comes the bad - I suspect that your term "some type of auto color adjustment" hits the nail on the head. You seem to have hit on an update of the camera app that unlearned how to leave well enough alone - the setting "as is" seems to have gotten lost.
Things that I would try here include: update just the photo app; find a third party photo app; record your photos in raw mode and play with various software solutions on your PC to get out of your photos exactly what you want - this last one may not be where you want to be on a permanent basis, but it could provide some compelling evidence of what it is you are complaining about - call center support people, much as I appreciate the job they are doing (often in spite of the system they work in) are anything but omniscient. And a series of sample pictures can be very compelling evidence to take to a developer.
A question on the side: Anyone else out there with this problem? My Note 8 and my old Note 3 don't show anything like this (but then I have not yet accepted the most recent update yet - do you think I should?)
Another option might be to downgrade the phone's software (maybe just the photo app) - Does anyone know how to do that? This could lead us to a general discussion of whether it is always best to go to the latest version of everything as the security concerns seem to dictate. After all we are replacing a mature, tested piece of code with something that potentially has been modified under time pressure to fix one thing and may well bring in a host of new problems ...
With a recent update, the camera had gone from taking phenomenal pictures with accurate color to washed-out pictures.
I was trying to take a picture of a tree with beautiful, vibrant fall foliage from inside my bedroom through a window one morning and the result was leaves that looked beige or white instead of the brilliant oranges and reds that my eyes could see.
I contacted both Verizon and Samsung and their support people took me through the predictable scenario of trying to change some settings that I already played with to no avail. The Samsung rep said I needed to send the phone in so they could remove the operating system and reinstall it. She thought the install might not have been completely successful. I told her I couldn't be without my phone for several weeks and that my son had the same problem on his phone and that it seemed unlikely that we both had unsuccessful updates.
Both support people used apps to connect to my phone and could see the problem. I pointed out that a setting that used to let us prevent this auto-lighting adjustment used to be available but no longer was.
Basically if you moved the phone slowly, the color representation was perfect until the entire image was in view and then some type of auto color adjustment took over and washed out the color.
Hope someone can help, because the pictures went from fantastic to terrible.
-- Submitted by Aaron P.

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