iOS 12 has a great new camera filter: Comic Book. It turns your selfies and photos into pretty convincing pen-and-ink-style drawings, complete with flat blocks of color. It even works with Animoji selfies.
But hold on one second. You won’t find this filter in your iPhone’s Camera app, or even in the Photos app. Instead, you need to fire up the Messages app and use the camera there.
Black-and-white photos aren’t just regular photos with the color taken out. Or rather, they are exactly that, but they are also more than that. A B&W portrait can seem to say more about the subject than a colorful version, for instance. B&W is also ideal for showing more graphic images. Take a color photo of scaffolding and it looks super-dull. Take the same photo in B&W, jack up the contrast, and it becomes a stark grid — way more interesting to look at.
There’s much more to taking a B&W photo than just removing the color. For instance, did you know that a color filter will have a startling effect on a B&W photo? Let’s take a look at some of the tricks to capturing and editing stunning black-and-white images.
Last week, Halide developer Sebastiaan de With debunked Beautygate, and introduced something called Smart RAW, all in one blog post. Now, Smart RAW is available in Halide 1.10, and it takes the iPhone XS camera to a whole new level.
Most iPhone camera reviewers are upgrading from last year’s model, the incredible iPhone X. Most iPhone buyers are upgrading from an earlier iPhone, probably the iPhone 6s or 7. This review is for the buyers. In it, I compare the new iPhone XS camera to the iPhone 7 camera, and talk about just how massive an upgrade this is.
iPhone X owners shouldn’t feel left out, though. Camera-wise, the iPhone XS and XS Max might be the biggest iPhone upgrade since the iPhone 3GS added autofocus. One note: The iPhone XS Max has the exact same camera as the XS, so this review goes for both.
If you take a photo inside the Messages app in iOS 11 and earlier, that photo stays trapped in the message thread forever, unless you explicitly long-press and save it to your camera roll. In iOS 12, that’s changed. Now, when you take a photo using the messages app, any pictures you snap are saved to your Photos library. But that’s not quite the whole story.
White balance is one of the most important settings on any camera. It can make the difference between vibrant, accurate colors, and a muddy, flat mess. It is also the setting least likely to be tweaked manually by casual photographers. There’s not even a good way to adjust white balance in the iPhone’s own Photos app.
But don’t despair. Today we’ll learn everything you need to now about how white balance works, and what to do with it.
A few days ago, we learned about the iPhone’s shutter, the part of the camera that “opens and closes” to let light onto the sensor. Today, we’re taking an in-depth look at the aperture, aka hole. The aperture is an opening in the lens that can be made bigger or smaller. Like shutter speed, its primary purpose is to control how much light reacts with camera the sensor (or film).
Also like shutter speed, aperture has some extra effects on how the image looks. Specifically, it can control how much of the image, front to back, looks sharp.
Your iPhone camera is pretty good at taking photos automatically. You just point it, shoot, and the camera works out all the tricky stuff. But what is actually going on in there? How does it take the light that you see and render it as an image on the screen?
In this short series, we’ll look at the physical parts of a camera — the aperture, the shutter, the magnification of the lens, and so on — and see how they affect the final image. Today’s topic: shutter speed.
If you want to shoot great RAW photos on your iPhone, you should use Adobe Lightroom. That’s right. According to tests, Adobe’s excellent photo editing app also has an amazing camera built-in. And best of all, it’s free, provided you don’t mind signing up for an Adobe ID.
For most photos, the iPhone camera proves perfectly adequate. You just hold up your phone, point it, and shoot. The exposure and focus are almost always correct, or at least correct enough. But on occasion, you need to take control.
For instance, maybe that beautiful dark blue sky keeps getting washed out because the iPhone insists on correctly exposing the face of the human in the foreground, when you’d prefer to see the person in silhouette. (Or vice versa.) Or perhaps the iPhone insists on focusing on that tree in the foreground, instead of the person half-hidden behind it?
Both of these can be fixed using the manual controls built right into the iPhone’s own Camera app. They’re pretty well-hidden, so you might never have even noticed them. But rest assured, they are there — and they are very easy to use!
For a huge percentage of mobile photographers — from amateur snappers to creative artists — the iPhone is the camera you always have with you. Every iPhone packs an undeniably great camera. But, as with DSLRs or mirrorless cams, the more you shoot, the more variety you crave.
Swapping out lenses at will helps you create a vast mélange of visual adventures with your iPhone. Our roundup of the best iPhone lenses shows you how to find the right external lens or lens kit for your needs.
You may remember Oilist, a iOS app that takes your photos and turns them into paintings. This isn’t your usual lame-o filters app, either. Oilist actually makes images that really do look like they’ve been painted — with brushwork, paint texture, and more.
And now, the developer is working on version 2.0 of this great app, and he wants you to help.
One lesser known ability of the Photos app on your iPhone is that is can use third-party filter packs. If you install a photo-editing app that supports them, then you can apply that apps filters without ever leaving the Photos app. This makes it super quick to add sophisticated effects to your pictures, and you can revert to the original photo at any time in the future.
Today we’ll see how to use these filter packs, and look at a couple of great apps that have them.
Ever tap the top of the screen in your Photos library and find yourself looking at pictures from way back in 2005? Did you swipe something the wrong way and end up stranded, viewing photos from years ago?
You probably sighed to yourself, then set to scrolling back to the bottom of the list to get to your latest photos. Big, angry swipes, just to show your iPhone how mad you were.
Well, after today, you’ll never need to to that again, because there’s a shortcut to scroll back to the very bottom of your Photos camera roll.
Google launched a clutch of “experimental” photography apps for iOS and Android this week. The ones of interest to us are called Selfissimo! and Scrubbies. They’re both single-purpose apps, and they’re both free. What’s more, the two apps are also a lot of fun.
Portrait mode is an iPhone 7 feature that has been supercharged in the iPhones X and 8, with the addition of Portrait Lighting. Both features use depth data from these iPhones’ dual cameras, either to separate the subject of the photo from its background, or to completely re-light the photo to add drama. Here’s how to make the most of them.
One of the neatest tricks you can do with a standalone camera is the long exposure trick. You may have seen it used to turn the tail-lights of a car into long streaks of red curving through the dark behind a ghostly car, or to blur turbulent waters into a peaceful, misty-looking lake. In a regular camera, you have to finagle the shutter speed to get the level of blur just right, and there’s no second chance. On the iPhone, it’s way easier.
The iPhone’s camera is good enough that it can be most people’s only camera — including professional photographers. The iPhone is a multi-purpose computer, though, not just a camera, so it can sometimes do with a little help when it comes to ergonomics, or to adding a little extra reach with a telephoto lens. These are the iPhone 8 camera gizmos you should buy:
Just calling the cameras in the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 plus “cameras” is like mistaking the iPhone itself for a phone. The combination of hardware and software in these new machines could better be likened to a movie FX or photography studio in the extent of their capabilities. The standout feature on these new iPhone X camera is Portrait Lighting, and today I want to take a look at why it’s so amazing.
The Roland GO MIXER is a little box that improves the audio on your movies. Aimed mostly at musicians, but usable by anyone with a microphone and the need to shoot a video, the little Lightning-powered box hooks together all your musical instruments and mixes them, live, before sending the audio to your iPhone (or Android device).
In photography terms, snapping a photo of the moment the moon drifts in front of the sun is as easy as snapping any other fleeting event. In future-blindness terms, though, it is quite different.
Staring into the nuclear furnace that is our nearest star won’t only fry your own eyes, it could also finish off your camera’s sensor. With a few simple precautions, though, you can not only view the eclipse safely through your iPhone’s lens, but take some great photos.
Did you ever try to take a photo of something flat on the ground, and spend ages trying to line it up right so that it is square in the frame? No, well, humor me here, because Apple just granted everyone’s biggest iOS camera wish: The camera app now has a level that kicks in when you hold the iPhone horizontally, and which will tell you when you’re holding the iPhone, uh, level.
Often, our eye is drawn to something because of its color. But sometimes we’re attracted by a pattern, or perhaps color even detracts from an image (like a row of cars in front of a beatific white building). At those times, we should shoot black-and-white images, which emphasize pattern, texture and shape.
The iPhone — with its giant screen, its great camera and its huge library of photo apps — is fantastic for shooting B&W pictures. Let’s take a look at how to shoot amazing black-and-white photos with your iPhone.
Pete Souza, the Chief Official White House Photographer, just posted a huge album of all of the many wonderful shots he has taken with his iPhone over the last year.
Apple is looking to ramp up its camera technology with the acquisition of Israeli company LinX.
The two companies reached a deal that will see Apple paying about $20 million for the startup, but if the company’s multi-aperture cameras are actually as stunning as advertised, future iPhones could gain SLR-quality images.
