iPhone 16 Pro Camera
The reason Apple calls it “Camera Control” and not just “shutter button” is the capacitive controls on the top, which should ideally let you adjust various settings with a quick swipe. I was really hoping I’d find myself using the capacitive controls to adjust things like exposure and focal length, but it’s all a bit fiddly switching between everything with the light presses and far too easy to end up changing things you weren’t intending to. The whole thing would be greatly improved if a second light press dismissed the control; once they’re open, they tend to stay open, leading to inadvertent changes when your finger slides along the button.
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The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro hit a kind of tipping point — they produced photos so aggressively processed that all kinds of people started noticing and complaining about it. I have been reviewing phones and cameras for a long time, but I will never publish a review as efficiently devastating as Alix Earle asking her 7 million followers why her iPhone 15 camera sucks. If people who’ve built multimillion-dollar content businesses with their phone cameras aren’t loving the cameras on their new phones, something’s gone wrong.
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The bad news is that, by default, the iPhone 16 Pro camera is even more aggressive about evening out shadows and highlights than the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s subtle, but it’s there — you can see it with basic photos of plants, with pictures of people, with street scenes — it’s all just a little bit brighter and a little bit flatter.
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The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro allow you to exclude yourself from this narrative entirely with a huge upgrade to the Photographic Styles feature that allows you to adjust how the camera processes colors, skin tones, and shadows, even after you’ve shot a photo. […] The tone control is semantically aware — it will adjust things like faces and the sky differently, so it’s still doing some intense computational photography, but the goal is for you to be able to take photos that look a lot more like what a traditional camera would produce if you bring the slider all the way down.
Though the tone control happens in software, it’s not available for older iPhones. He says, “it’s possible to argue that this one single camera adjustment makes upgrading to an iPhone 16 or 16 Pro worth it.” The styles data is stored in the HEIC file so that the effect can be undone after the fact, though only using Apple’s app.
Apple seemingly doesn’t ever refer to Camera Control as a “button”, but it is a button. You can see it depress, and it clicks even when the device is powered off (unlike, say, the haptic Touch ID Home button on iPhones of yore and the long-in-the-tooth iPhone SE). But it isn’t only a button. You can think of it as two physical controls in one: a miniature haptic trackpad and an actually-clicking button.
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Just writing that all out makes it sound complicated, and it is a bit complex. (Here’s Apple’s own illustrated guide to using Camera Control.) Cameras are complex. But if you just mash it down, it takes a picture. Camera Control is like a microcosm of the Camera app itself. Just want to point and shoot? Easy. Want to fiddle with ƒ-stops and styles? There’s a thoughtful UI to enable it.
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Camera Control is designed to be used in both wide (landscape) and tall (portrait) orientations. Moving it more toward the corner, where my finger wants it to be, would make it better for shooting widescreen, but would make it downright precarious to hold the iPhone while shooting tall.
It seems to be better placed for camera use than the Action button.
But, when your iPhone is locked and the screen is off, or in always-on mode, clicking Camera Control just wakes up the screen. You have to click it again, after the screen is awake, to jump to shooting mode.
But this is what I love about the Action button—no matter where I am I can press it to get to shooting mode.
There are now 15 base styles to choose from, most of them self-descriptively named (Neutral, Gold, Rose Gold), some more poetically named (Cozy, Quiet, Ethereal). The default style is named Standard, and it processes images in a way that looks, well, iPhone-y. The two that have me enamored thus far are Natural and Stark B&W. Standard iPhone image processing has long looked, to many of our eyes, at least slightly over-processed. Too much noise reduction, too much smoothing. A little too punchy. Natural really does look more natural, in a good way, to my eyes.
The upgrade of the Ultra Wide camera to 48MP was by far the feature I was most excited about at the keynote.
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An added bonus is that the iPhone’s Macro mode also uses the Ultra Wide camera, meaning Macro shots are now 48 megapixels as well. The detail is remarkable, and the iPhone 16 Pro might just be my new favorite camera for macro photography.
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I’ve also been surprised at how useful the extra shutter button has been. I find I use a combination of the on-screen shutter button, Action button, Volume button, and Camera Control—depending on the scenario and how I’m holding the iPhone to capture it.
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In our extreme use cases—shooting from a helicopter and bouncing around in a safari vehicle—I occasionally found myself accidentally bumping the Camera Control adjustments (like inadvertently zooming in or changing exposure settings). For these situations, I went to Settings > Camera > Camera Control to explore my options.
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Photographic Styles don’t work in Burst mode, which I learned after shooting a few bursts with Craig.
Previously:
- Glowtime Ennui
- iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
- iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus
- Halide 2.15: Process Zero
- iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max
- iPhone Camera Over Processing
- iPhone 14 Pro Camera
- iPhone Cameras and Computational Photography
Update (2024-10-01): Sebastiaan de With:
If you want a quick verdict: the iPhone 16 Pro is a tremendous camera because between Camera Control, Zero Shutter Lag and its advanced Photographic Styles, it will capture more moments than any iPhone ever did by a huge margin — and that in itself makes me recommend it over any previous one.
Popular camera app Halide was today updated with new features for the Camera Control button available on the new iPhone 16 models. Halide already supported opening the app with Camera Control, but now users can also make adjustments.
Photographic Styles aren’t new, but with prior iPhone models, there were only four options: Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. On the iPhone 16 , there are several more pre-set styles to choose from.
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Update (2024-10-03): Adan:
- [Camera Control] Gesture controls are very finicky. You’re better off using the on-screen controls.
- It takes a hard press to capture, which causes shake and can blur the photo.
- It’s position is just fine in portrait mode, but pretty poor in landscape.
Only thing it’s good for is opening the camera quickly, but Apple could’ve easily integrated that functionality some other way, like double-pressing the Action Button.
Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten (via John Gruber):
For this first podcast of our new Design Tangents series aptly named Nerdy Details we sit down with Johnnie Manzari from the Apple Human Interface team and Rich Dinh, Senior Director of Product Design, to talk about cameras and photography through the lens of the new control on “the world’s most popular camera.” Camera Control represents years of collaboration between Apple‘s design and engineering teams and the unassuming feature packs a punch, elevating the iPhone’s photography capabilities through a combination of hardware and software innovations.
Your Camera Control verdict thus far[…]
Update (2024-10-04): Kurt:
One more note on Camera Control: The stiffness of the button doesn’t just shake the phone, it causes a loud audible click in all Live Photos taken with it. The volume or action buttons did this too, but the Camera Control is so much louder.
This has pushed me to just use it for launching the camera app and that’s all. I’ve always used the on-screen shutter button (on past phones) to reduce phone movement anyway.
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Update (2024-10-10): Joe Rosensteel:
However, two things that are still baked into these HEIF files are denoise and sharpening, with no option to reduce or disable them in the Photographic Styles pipeline. Like many people I find that the sharpening on the iPhone can go a little overboard, and in low light these upgraded cameras still produce impressionistic results.
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I know that this isn’t really specific to the iPhone 15 Pro, but it has way more Camera settings than any iPhone that came before it, and they’re all located in terrible places. You should be able to get to the Camera Settings from the Camera app, because there are really big, and very important things in there, that affect the app, including things like your default Photographic Style, file formats, and what settings should or shouldn’t be preserved.
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At the moment it has strong TouchBar vibes. I never really loved the TouchBar, and it was a product that was also an incomplete thought. This Camera Control has the same hallmarks.
Update (2024-11-13): Chance Miller:
iOS 18.2 beta 3 adds another new toggle for personalizing the iPhone 16’s Camera Control. Now, you can open the Camera app with a single press of the Camera Control even if your display is off.
This setting would have changed the Camera Control narrative on so many of the iPhone 16 reviews, if the phones had launched with it.
If anything, after two months of daily use of an iPhone 16 Pro, I feel like the recessed inset of the Camera Control button makes it a little too hard to click. I sort of wish it were raised, more like the Action and Side buttons. That Camera Control is effectively flush with the sides of the iPhone is protection enough — again, for me at least — against accidental presses.
