Latest news with #iPhoneCamera
Geeky Gadgets
04-07-2025
- Geeky Gadgets
A Complete Overhaul: iOS 26 Transforms Your iPhone Camera Experience
Apple has unveiled a fantastic update to the iPhone camera app with iOS 26, blending a minimalist design with advanced functionality. This redesign emphasizes simplicity, usability, and a sleek aesthetic, making it easier for you to capture high-quality photos and videos. The update not only enhances the user experience but also hints at future innovations, signaling a new chapter in mobile photography and videography. The video below from AppleDsign gives us more details on the new camera in iOS 26. Watch this video on YouTube. Streamlined Interface: Simplicity at Its Core The iOS 26 camera app introduces a refined two-mode layout, focusing on Photo and Video modes as the primary options. Other features, such as Slow-Mo, Time-Lapse, and Cinematic, are now accessible through intuitive swipe gestures, reducing visual clutter and allowing seamless navigation. This approach ensures that you can quickly switch between modes without disrupting your creative process. A key highlight of the redesign is the 'liquid glass' dynamic interface, which enhances both the app's visual appeal and usability. This fluid design creates a cohesive experience, allowing you to focus on capturing the perfect shot without unnecessary distractions. The interface adapts dynamically, making sure that essential tools are always within reach. Advanced Photo Features for Greater Precision iOS 26 introduces a suite of new tools designed to give you greater control over your photography. Settings such as resolution, aspect ratio, and exposure, which were previously buried in menus, are now easily accessible within the app. This improvement allows you to make quick adjustments to key parameters, making sure a smoother and more efficient workflow. One of the most exciting additions is the 3D photo feature, which enhances depth and detail in your images. This feature creates a sense of immersion, making landscapes, portraits, and other scenes feel more lifelike. By adding a new dimension to your photography, the 3D photo tool enables you to capture moments with unprecedented realism. Upgraded Video Capabilities For video enthusiasts, iOS 26 delivers a range of notable enhancements. Adjusting resolution and frame rate is now more intuitive, with these options integrated directly into the interface. Whether you're shooting in 4K resolution or experimenting with cinematic frame rates, these settings are just a swipe away, making the app more user-friendly for creators of all skill levels. The introduction of the Action mode is a standout feature, designed to stabilize footage during movement. This tool ensures smoother, professional-quality videos, even in dynamic or fast-paced environments. Additionally, settings like filters and aspect ratio adjustments can now be accessed with a simple swipe-up gesture, streamlining the editing process and enhancing usability. Centralized Controls for a Cleaner Experience Apple has reorganized the camera app's controls to improve accessibility and reduce complexity. Features such as flash, filters, and aspect ratio adjustments are now centralized within the interface, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple menus. This decluttered approach ensures that you can focus on capturing the moment rather than searching for settings. The redesigned layout also incorporates context-sensitive controls, which adapt based on the mode you're using. For example, video-specific tools are highlighted when in Video mode, while photography tools take precedence in Photo mode. This intelligent organization enhances efficiency and ensures that the tools you need are always at your fingertips. Speculation About 8K Video Recording Although Apple has not officially confirmed it, the redesigned interface and enhanced resolution controls suggest the potential for 8K video recording in future updates. This feature, if introduced, would represent a significant leap forward in mobile videography, allowing for ultra-high-definition footage with exceptional clarity and detail. The inclusion of such a capability would further cement the iPhone's reputation as a leader in mobile video technology. Balancing Simplicity and Innovation The iOS 26 camera app exemplifies Apple's commitment to delivering a user-friendly experience without compromising on functionality. By simplifying navigation, centralizing controls, and introducing innovative features like 3D photos and Action mode, this update enables you to capture stunning visuals with ease. The modern design, combined with forward-thinking enhancements, sets a new standard for mobile photography and videography, making sure that the iPhone remains at the forefront of creative technology. Master iPhone camera redesign with the help of our in-depth articles and helpful guides. Source & Image Credit: AppleDsign Filed Under: Apple, Apple iPhone, Top News Latest Geeky Gadgets Deals Disclosure: Some of our articles include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, Geeky Gadgets may earn an affiliate commission. Learn about our Disclosure Policy.
Digital Trends
24-06-2025
- Digital Trends
Adobe made the best iPhone camera app you haven't tried yet, and it's free
A year ago, a rather interesting camera tool came out from the house of Lux, makers of the fantastic Kino and Halide apps. The tool is called Process Zero, which essentially ripped the images of Apple's computational adjustments and delivered a pristine photo. I even compared the current-gen iPhone with the iPhone 6s and realized the ills of computational photography. What I noticed repeatedly was that algorithmic processing makes the photos look sharper and more colorful, but they aren't always accurate. And in doing so, they lose their natural charm. Recommended Videos That's one of the reasons why vintage camera filter apps are popular, and film photography is also having its moment. The latest name to throw its hat in the iPhone camera arena is Adobe, and the solution is called Project Indigo, a camera app that wants to replicate the 'SLR-like' look on your iPhone. What's it all about? Indigo is what you would call a distilled pro-grade container. You get a healthy few manual controls, and even the ability to decide the number of frames that must be fused. On the other end of the rope, you get a custom image processing, aka computational photography pipeline, developed by Adobe's team. It allows only photo capture, and throws a dedicated night mode into the mix, as well. The fun part is that despite the manual controls, the app keeps capturing pictures even before you hit the shutter button. Those 'extra' frames are a part of the fusion system to ensure that your photos don't have motion artifacts or look blurry. On the qualitative side of things, Adobe says it performs 'mild tone mapping, boosting of color saturation, and sharpening.' Adobe claims it doesn't perform smoothing effects, and even retains noise in the pictures to deliver an authentic shot. The most alluring aspect of Indigo's image capture is the multi-frame super-resolution, which kicks into action as soon as you kick beyond 2x or 10x (aka the natural zoom range of the lenses). For zoom capture, there are a few compromises. For example, if you're pushing the iPhone 16 Pro's 5x telephoto lens and electronic stabilization is enabled, Adobe says the frame is cropped by 10%, and some drift also happens, though image quality remains unaffected. Moreover, it's an AI-based scaling, so the results might not always look as refined. On the positive side, zooming in on long-range shots shows less grainy textures than a picture clicked using the pre-installed iPhone camera app. Moreover, all the images clicked by Indigo are saved in a DNG format, which is lighter than Apple's ProRAW files, but contains nearly as much detail. Plus, DNGs are ideal for editing, so there's that. Now, let's talk about the Pro-grade controls. There's a histogram at the top to display sensor data, but you can also enable the timer, composition grids, a level indicator, and zebra-striping from the settings section. You can play with exposure time and ISO, focus, white balance, and exposure compensation. Indigo can't lock the exposure at the moment, but Adobe says it will land soon in the Indigo app. How is the output? Right off the bat, the iPhone's camera would seem to capture sharper photos with a more vibrant color profile. But when you compare the shots clicked by Indigo, a few differences become apparent. First, surface textures start looking a tad unrealistic due to the sharpening done by the iPhone. Moreover, the approach it takes to rendering highlights and shadows is rather brute, because the focus is always on delivering brighter pictures with more surface details, so you often miss out on how light reflections and darker areas of a frame naturally looked. Indigo's clicks look a tad softer, and they take a more mellow approach to reducing noise even in daylight shots, so the pictures seem like a more accurate rendition of the real frame. When we talk about realism, it's not just the light behavior, but also the color chemistry. As the iPhone prefers higher exposure, elements like the tree foliage tend to look overtly vibrant. Indigo takes a more subtle approach to the image processing, and as a result, the leaves look more natural, albeit a tad subdued at saturation. The real gem is the editing pipeline. Indigo captures the same frame in two formats: JPEG (with HDR and SDR looks) and DNG. From the app's built-in gallery, as you export photos to Lightroom, the DNG files are imported automatically, which gives you a lot more headroom with editing. Take a look at the image below, where I achieved that look in just about 15 seconds: The situation is not too different during low-light capture. The iPhone tends to go with a higher exposure, and as a result, struggles with color realism, especially when there are light streaks of different colors coming in from different directions. Indigo does a much better job at handling colors atop reflected surface light, especially at high zoom range when frame fusion kicks into action. In the images below, which are taken at a 10x zoom level, the iPhone struggles with containing noise not just around the light source, but also the wall. There's a lot of grainy texture, and the real coat of paint looks entirely different, muddying up the contrast. It has more elements to see, but at the same time, it also looks chaotic. The frame captured by the Indigo app shows much better control at separating strong illumination from the object's boundary, giving it a sharper look in total darkness. Moreover, it has a far more restrained grain output, and most importantly, the wall's color is true to the real shade of paint coat applied over it. Fixing the iPhone's camera flaws Here's another sample. Take a look at this shot of a cloudy day. Once again, the iPhone goes for a warmer color tone, with a high level of sharpening done to the cloud texture. The color of the sky, however, is bluish and more accurate in the shot captured by the Indigo camera app. Moroever, it also does a better job of exposing the foliage in the trees. Yet, it's not a straightforward victory for either. If you zoom in, you'll notice that the iPhone retains a tighter control over sharpness and texture, and as a result, the windows on the building and the tree leaves appear a lot sharper. In the picture clicked by Adobe's app, you will notice a lot of grainy texture in the background elements and a lack of clarity with lines and shapes. Indigo really shines where the iPhone runs into its limits. Take a look at the low-light shots below, which were captured at 10x zoom range from a rather dark alley. The iPhone struggled with handling noise and produced a lot of grain in the picture. Almost everything, including the direct and indirect light streaks, looks fuzzy. Indigo benefited from using the Multi-frame super-resolution tech. I manually set it to merge 32 shots while still in handheld mode. The resulting shot was a night and day difference compared to the native iPhone camera app. The image is smoother, with far better contrast, color output, and subject sharpness. It lacks the typical characteristics of night mode photography on smartphones. Finally, this is my favorite sample, where I put macro capabilities to the test. Once again, the iPhone defaults to a yellowish color tint. In doing so, it couldn't properly highlight the color of the iris. At close range, it also gave a fuzzy character to the fur above the eye region, and there's a lot of noise around the nose area. In the shot captured by Indigo, the fur texture is cleaner and looks more natural. The app also did a fantastic job at bringing out the eye color and the subtle pink on the nose, without giving it the same tint as the rest of the frame. Should you jump in? Now, before you get too excited by the premise of a free camera app made by Adobe, and one which offers a superior output compared to the iPhone, there are a few aspects you must keep in mind. The Indigo app tries to solve one of the iPhone's biggest camera woes: the algorithmic processing. Most of the time, it does a fantastic job, but there are a few gaps that apps like Indigo try to fill. Color realism, better night mode output, and pro-grade controls are just a few of them. But to get the best out of it, you must know the basics of frame composition controls. Moreover, the secret sauce is simultaneous DNG capture, a file format that is tailor-made for post-processing and editing in apps. Specifically, Adobe Lightroom which is loaded with fine-tuning tools, but pretty expensive at the same time. Then there are a few technical hiccups. Image processing takes a lot of time, and if you close the app, the progress is lost. Moreover, the app is quite demanding on the local resources, and I regularly got 'iPhone overheating' warnings while taking pictures. If you like to tinker with pictures, go ahead and play with Indigo. Otherwise, for an average iPhone user, it's just another camera app. You just might end up liking it. Otherwise, the pre-installed iPhone camera app will serve you just fine.
Tom's Guide
21-06-2025
- Tom's Guide
I've been using the new iOS 26 Camera app — and it finally address by biggest annoyance
Apple's certainly putting a lot of effort into overhauling the iPhone's look in its upcoming iOS 26 release, which should officially arrive this fall alongside its iPhone 17 announcement. In the interim, though, I've been using the iOS 26 developer beta to get a sneak peek into what Apple's packing into its iPhone software update. I will say that I'm particularly happy that the iPhone Camera app is getting a big makeover, but I'm even more excited about one particular change that makes it much more conducive to my workflow when shooting photos and videos. In addition to adopting all the visual elements of Apple's new Liquid Glass interface, the iOS 26 camera app is filled with new features that finally elevates it to nearly the same usability I get in some of the best Android phones and their camera apps. After trying out the Camera app on iPhone for the past week, here's everything new and different about it in iOS 26. And I know you'll be excited for these changes as well. The biggest complaint I've had with the iPhone Camera app is how some of the camera's settings are buried in the general Settings menu. With iOS 26, however, Apple is making those controls accessible from the app itself — rather than going into the Settings app and then to the camera settings from there. To put it another way, I'm now able to quickly (and conveniently) switch the video recording resolution from within the Camera app. This one simple change makes a huge difference in how I use the iPhone Camera app going forward because I don't have to exit out of the app to change them. With photos, I can switch between JPEG and RAW formats — in addition to choosing 24MP or 48MP. It gets better in my opinion with video recording — now I can switch the format, resolution, and frame rate. When you shoot as much video professionally as I do, having access to these controls from within the app iteself is much more intuitive and saves me time. The only options that still require me to go to the general settings menu to activate are the grid and level guides. I can live with this because generally speaking, I don't ever disable them. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. With its Liquid Glass material design, the iOS 26 Camera app looks cleaner than before, as the only options that show up after launching the app are Photo and Video. By scrolling to the left and right of this, I can still switch between all the other modes — like portrait, panoramic, slo-mo, and more. In order to access some of the other settings within each respective mode, you have to perform a swipe up gesture from the bottom. When I do this in Photo mode, I can access settings for the flash, live photos, timer, exposure, styles, filter, and aspect ratio. I can also access these tools as well by tapping on the icon with six dots in the upper right corner. If you happen to own an iPhone 16 model offering the Camera Control, you'll want to adjust this one setting. That's because by default, Apple has disabled many of the Camera Control options. Obviously, pressing down on the Camera Control instantly launches the Camera app, but swipe gestures only allow me to switch between its four different cameras. Although it might seem like a zoom control, it really isn't because it's only switching between the different cameras — so I can't get to something like 3.5x zoom using it. In order to access Camera Control's full potential, I had to go into the Camera Control settings in the general settings menu and enable "camera adjustments" for exposure, depth, zoom, styles, and tone control. I honestly don't mind this setting being disabled by default because in my experience, it actually slows down my workflow rather than helping it. I'm really happy that Apple has finally listened and fixed my biggest gripe about the iPhone Camera app. Now I'm no longer annoyed about exiting the app just to adjust some of the camera settings. However, I still crave even more functionality out of the app. In particular, I would like Apple to open up manual controls to let me adjust the ISO, shutter speed, and focus with the camera — much like how some Android phones let me change those settings in their Pro or manual modes. iPhone users, still need to use a third party camera app to get these controls, even with iOS 26. Apart from that, though, the iOS 26 Camera app is much more functional and cleaner looking than ever before. I'm looking forward to using it with the iOS 26 beta and beyond.
