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:
