Make your next iPhone photo excursion something special by unlocking some of these amazing iPhone applications. Check out our selection of aps that will enhance your iPhone’s camera capabilities and create excellent long exposures, fireworks displays and more.
ProCamera App is also DSLR-controlled with an almost endless number of shooting options. What’s more, images can either be saved in RAW or as HEIF to make storage easier.
1. Halide Mark II
Halide Mark II is a new take on Halide, another app that’s been a MacStories favourite for years – they redesigned it to give users even more control, while still maintaining a professional-grade set of tools, like you might need in an advanced camera setup. This means things like extra controls to fine-tune focus bar focus settings, or Pro View to display information like histograms (which show how much of every tone is in a picture, from brightest to darkest) in an interface that’s easily accessible and controlled by the user.
Halide also includes features like those that will eventually support Apple’s incoming ProRAW feature for the iPhone 13 series onwards, which analyses 14-bit RAW data in real time, to allow the user to better estimate exposure.
It provides a great balance between high tech functionality and user friendliness; it provides the user with indispensable settings, affordances and hints for using the app (like manual focus or shake reducer), and almost unseen teensey affordances for the user. And not only that, Instant RAW applies machine learning to go through an elaborate 17-step process of RAW development – and ‘auto-edit’ them to bring out details with a low noise floor.
2. ProCamera
ProCamera: an all-round camera app for iOS 4 takes full advantage of iOS 4’s cutting-edge camera APIs, to quickly start up and be ready to shoot in less than the time it takes your iPhone or iPad to boot up (the full 5-6 seconds!) cold and supports background processing so all your settings are preserved even if you exit and restart the app!
Among those is separate exposure and focus locks, which can also be locked simultaneously. You can adjust shutter speed and ISO independently and lock them, enabling controlled shooting. And there is the low light mode for taking noise-free photos at night.
The Pro adds in shooting modes such as HDR and manual focus, its autofocus is very fast and can operate even in very dark conditions, image stabilisation is far superior to that of Apple’s, and you get tilt meter and self-timer control, and a QR code/barcode reader it actually reads the QR code in order to tag the photo with a location, date/time information or as-is save an unprocessed Apple ProRAW format image.
3. Firstlight
FiLMiC have made a name for themselves with the pro video camera app FiLMiC Pro, so it is fitting that their photo camera app is called Firstlight – I hope they’ll come up with a clever name for the next film-inspired app! The free version contains a number of features which are either missing or modest in other apps, but to unlock the full potential of Firstlight, you should seriously consider buying the premium membership.
Extra features (with in-app purchase) include adding your own custom function button, burst mode, support for anamorphic adapters, adding your copyright info directly into the exif data of each image, advanced live analytics such as focus peaking and zebra stripes, and cross-swipe manual controls for selecting your perfect shot.
With a front-end to photography unlike any that has come before it, the revolutionary Firstlight photo camera app draws on the same front-end technology that powers my own Filmic Pro cinema video camera app and brings together a level of precision once reserved for the professional digital cinematographer, making the technology accessible to both casual and serious photographers by adding the physical equivalent of film simulations, and the sonic equivalent of their live analytics counterparts.
4. Adobe Lightroom Mobile
Adobe light room mobile is an awesome photo editing app which helps turn your photo in to artwork, download of the app and is use are free, you can check out some features of this app in video below but other features unlocked after a paid creative cloud subscription plan.
Despite this, RAW files from DSLR cameras can be edited with a wide variety of apps such as Lightroom Mobile, synching presets from Adobe Lightroom CC on the desktop (or creating them in the app itself).
What’s more, using the filters in this app will make your pictures look more ‘professional’ with just a few taps – there are loads of filters of different colours and black and white effects!
People View, an app that sorts and clumps together facial images from the photos you take, is a godsend. With its intelligent facial recognition utility, People View makes locating and agglomerating the people you photograph (or have photographed, if you leave your camera running and unattended) easier than ever. Help has the answers to almost every question you might have, plus a ‘how to’ in-app tutorial for the technophobically inclined.
