Pro-quality camera apps
SOFTWARE
The pro camera app market is crowded with a host of apps vying to give you more control over your photography
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 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.
Get tooled up
Using the iPhone’s Camera app you can tap on an area such as a bright sky to prioritise 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 analyse a location’s lighting so that you can manually tweak exposure to capture detail in brighter or darker areas.
The pro camera app market is a crowded one, with a host of apps vying to give you more control over focus, exposure and composition. Some apps also offer post-production editing tools to help you fix common picture problems, or even mimic the distinctive colours and tones of analog film stock. We’ve put five of the best pro apps to the test to compare their toolsets and ease of use.