Group Test: iPhone photo apps
These third–party apps provide a range of ways to make your iPhone behave more like a professional camera
PROFESSIONAL DSLR CAMERAS have a manual mode that enables you to control properties such as aperture and shutter speed. This is very useful as a fast shutter speed freezes the action while a slow shutter adds motion blur, creating very different versions of the same subject.
The iPhone’s “point and shoot” Camera app gives you limited manual control compared to a DSLR. For example, Apple’s Camera app simultaneously sets focus and exposure when you tap on a specific subject. Some third–party camera apps enable you to set exposure and focus independently to suit subjects in different parts of the screen. Other camera apps offer tools to help you manually focus on specific subjects with more precision than you can using the default Camera app.
Using the iPhone’s Camera app you can tap on an area such as a bright sky to prioritize exposure and then swipe up or down to fine–tune it, but you may still lose detail in the shadows or highlights. We’ll examine how some third–party pro camera apps offer tools such as clipping warnings and histograms to help you analyze a location’s lighting so you can manually tweak exposure to capture detail in brighter or darker areas.
There’s a host of apps on the market vying to give you more control over focus, exposure, and composition. Some also offer post–production editing tools to help you fix common picture problems, or even mimic analog film stock. We’ve put five of the best pro apps to the test to compare their toolsets and ease of use.