The best camera apps for iPhone

Take manual control over a host of photographic settings

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Your iPhone's ‘point-and-shoot’ Camera app produces great-looking results. It automatically chooses a fast shutter speed to capture sharp detail and avoid shake-induced motion blur. AWB (Auto White Balance) ensures accurate colours by adjusting light’s colour temperature to remove blue or orange casts.

However, experienced photographers may want to take manual control over their iPhone camera. By choosing a slower shutter speed, they can add dramatic motion blur to passing traffic, for example. In different lighting scenarios they may want to choose a specific white balance preset to keep certain colour casts at bay.

Your iPhone's native Camera app creates masks that adjust each subject's exposure independently, but the results can look a bit fake and over-processed. The third-party camera apps in our group test enable you to manually set a balance between capturing detail in shadows and highlights, leading to more realistic-looking results. They also boast other Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR)-style tools for greater control over the look of your photos.

How we tested

> We didn't test with a top-of-the-range iPhone 16 Pro as we wanted to see how our third-party camera apps could help users of lower-specced iPhone models. Instead, we used an iPhone 16 Plus, which benefits from being able to shoot in the higher quality Raw DNG (digital negative) files that pro photographers use to capture more information about tones and colours. Many of our apps shoot video as well as stills, but we focused on their ability to take manual control when capturing photos.

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