This year, Apple has finally added what it calls “Pro controls” to the Camera app, which eliminates the need to use one of those apps for most photographers that want more than point-and-shoot style control. You get menus to adjust white balance, focus distance, shutter speed, and lens aperture, and can display a real-time histogram.
Foundry
It’s hard to believe that it took Apple this long to provide these basic manual controls, at least for the “Pro” iPhones. And it should be a scandal that they’re only available on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, instead of coming as a software update to earlier Pro models. There’s nothing about any of these controls, save for the aperture setting, that need to be exclusive to this year’s models. And indeed, most of them are alredy available on third-party apps.
About that aperture setting. It’s true, the main camera (and only the main camera) now has an adjustable physical aperture. It only has four settings: f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4. It defaults to f/1.8, which is a similar aperture wideness to earlier iPhones, and performs about the same. But it’s neat to see it move!
Foundry
The f/1.48 is wider and lets in more light, so it kicks in during low-light scenes, but an aperture that wide on a sensor this small results in slightly less sharp photos. So it wouldn’t be a good setting for a fixed-aperture lens on other iPhones, but it’s nice to have in a pinch.
