For the Best iPhone Photos, Upgrade the App, Not the Phone

Apple didn’t have a lot of upgrades to give its new Pro iPhone range this year. The big hardware changes are reportedly coming next year, for the iPhone’s 20th anniversary, and if you wanted this year’s premium, exciting iPhone, you’re probably waiting to preorder the folding Duo.One of the most hyped features of the 18 Pro range is the enhanced version of Photographic Styles — filter-like color and light grades that quickly change the look of your photos. Styles arrived with the iPhone 13, but the new texture controls, exclusive to the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, make them function a bit more like film cameras. There’s Glow, meant to work like a mist diffusion filter by adding a soft halo to bright spots; Grain, which does exactly what it says; and Film, which makes photos look apparently more cinematic — though without grain, the change is small. There’s also Soft Skin, which makes you look a little smoother, but is far subtler than the skin smoothing on Samsung or Xiaomi phones.And the tweaks are fun. iPhones take clear, crisp, colorful photos, and with the new Style settings, you can give them some more personality. There’s a small, growing online community recommending “recipes” for them, too — as with Fujifilm’s X cameras, a series of settings that create a unique, stylish look — and it would be cool if Apple added a way to save several as presets. One I have been using came courtesy of an Instagram recommendation.If you already take great photos using your iPhone for sharing on Instagram, these will be a great tool in your arsenal. But fundamentally, they’re really small tweaks, and they still look like unmistakably digital iPhone photos.If you want to take stylish, artistic, film-like photographs instead, you should just download !Camera, a quirky third-party camera app that applies its own processing and LUTs to the iPhone camera hardware. And with its various LUTs, you can immediately get a range of highly styled, film-like shots with a single press. Altman evokes 1970s New Hollywood; Mono Expired and Mono Tokyo are black-and-white styles made with the Tokyo collective AgBr; and Cinematic adds a lush rich nostalgic look. And if those are too much for you, Standard is a great neutral look, and Neutral is as close to the raw look of the sensor as you can get.From there, you can edit them in its Photo Lab to dial in your look, or export them to Lightroom, or not — they look great with a single press.In short, if you want really cool, film-like shots out of an iPhone, you can do that with an 18 Pro. But you can also do it better with many older iPhones, much more conveniently, by just downloading !Camera.

For the Best iPhone Photos, Upgrade the App, Not the Phone

For the Best iPhone Photos, Upgrade the App, Not the Phone

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