This year, Apple finally added what it calls “pro controls” to the Camera app, eliminating the need to use one of those apps for most photographers who want more than just point-and-shoot style control. You get menus to adjust white balance, focusing distance, shutter speed and lens aperture, and can display a histogram in real time.
Foundry
It’s hard to believe 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 are only available on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, rather than coming as a software update for previous Pro models. There’s nothing about any of these controls, other than the aperture adjustment, that should be exclusive to this year’s models. And in fact, most of them are already available in third-party applications.
About that opening configuration. That’s right, 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 to previous iPhones, and performs roughly the same. But it’s great to see him move!
Foundry
The f/1.48 is wider and lets in more light, so it works during low-light scenes, but such a wide aperture on such a small sensor results in slightly less sharp photos. So it wouldn’t be a good setup for a fixed aperture lens on other iPhones, but it’s nice to have in a pinch.
