A Few More Thoughts on Smartphone Cameras (Premium)

With my Pixel 9 Pro XL review complete, I set out to make the sometimes painful shift to another smartphone, in this case the iPhone 16 Pro Max I’ll review next. I had spent some time with the Max the previous weekend during a trip to visit our son in upstate New York, but other than that, I’d pretty much focused my attention on the Pixel. But that has to change, as it must.

I wasn’t planning or expecting to write about smartphone cameras now. Heading into this shift, I was thinking more about the best ways I might compare the AI features on each platform, and how that might be complicated by Apple’s slow-boil Apple Intelligence release schedule. Apple and Google couldn’t approach AI more differently, it feels like a big story.

But then I got bogged down by some forgotten realities. I’m on Google Fi, and while activating the eSIM on a Pixel is as seamless as seamless can be, doing so on an iPhone requires specific manual configurations, and I must have screwed up something on the first pass because MMS texts weren’t working properly. So I re-copied and pasted each setting, rebooted the phone, and tried again. And then started why this was even necessary. And why, conversely, when I move in the other direction, there’s always something wrong with text messaging despite me closely following Apple’s instructions for that process.

Anyway, I think it’s OK. But I also needed to install a few apps I had somehow missed in my initial pass–United, as we’re flying tomorrow, and Hue, for our smart lights–which reminded me that I also need to download music so I can listen to it offline on the flight if needed and … I don’t know, maybe I’m not as ready as I thought.

But all this, in turn, made me look again at the iPhone Camera settings: After a short work trip to Dallas, we’re going to be in Mexico City for 6 weeks, and I will be using the iPhone daily for most or all of that and want the photos to be as good as they can be. And I was not happy where I left things. This is especially true with the new Photographic Styles. Which I find confusing.

Photographic Styles trades power for complexity

This is overly simplistic, but when I think about the top three flagship smartphones, all of which I currently own, all perform an astonishing amount of computational photography processing to varying degrees of success. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra delivers overly-saturated shots, to my eyes. The iPhone is a bit dull by default, or no doubt what Apple would call “natural” or even “realistic.” And the Pixel delivers this Goldilocks-like perfection, with just a bit of HDR contrast bump. I love how Pixel photos look, and I love that I don’t have to do anything to make it happen. It just works.

Apple addressed my complaints about the dull default iPhone photos by adding the Photographic Styles feature to its Camera app a few years ago. Until recently, these were simple presets you could configure, on the fly or permanently, to change the look of the photos the device takes. And one of those presets, called Vibrant, was exactly what I was looking for: I could enable that permanently and the iPhone would take Pixel-like photos. (Photographic Styles aren’t filters: They are applied at the time of the shot.)

When Apple announced the iPhone 16 series earlier this month, it mentioned its “latest generation of Photographic Styles” during the iPhone Pro segment, noting that it had been improved to understand skin tones and adjust color, highlights, and shadows in real-time. This, Apple said, would let Pro users personalize how each photo’s subject appears, rather than using a “one-size fits all approach.”

This didn’t trigger any alarm bells at the time, but as I wrote in Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max Preview, this was the first time in iPhone Pro era I had really considered getting a non-Pro model: Apple’s marketing for the Pro devices seemed a bit over the top, and mostly aimed at literal creative professionals. That’s not me: I love photos, and I rely on my phones for that. But I take snapshots. There’s something special about nothing having to think about anything when I use a Pixel. And Photographic Styles had enabled that freedom on iPhone. So I guess I didn’t understand what Apple was changing here.

Apple’s “latest generation” Photographic Styles are no doubt more powerful and versatile than the old versions, and they are definitely more configurable, not that I ever wanted that. But I add assumed that the new capabilities, the new Styles, were additive. And I was happy to see that one new feature would benefit me: You can now edit the Photographic Style in a photo after the fact. It’s not baked in. Furthermore, these Style integrate with the new Camera Control button, which I assumed would be a nice upgrade too, given my photography needs.

None of this panned out.

The Photographic Styles interface in Camera settings bears no relation to the previous interface. Each time you enter this interface, it behaves as if you’ve never used it before. You select some sample photos to test with, and it only lets me use the first several I had one day one. And then the choices are all different. Instead of Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool, each with their own tone and warmth customizations, it now has Standard, Amber, Gold, Rose Gold, Neutral, and Cool Rose, most of which seem like ridiculous choices. And there’s nothing there to help you map one of these things to a previous Style.

Worse, what this interface doesn’t explain is that what you configure here is your default Photographic Style. (I learned this by Googling it: On its Support website, Apple explains that “the Photographic Style you select will be specific to the skin undertones your camera captures. After you select a default style, you can always adjust or choose a different style in Camera before you take a photo.”) Once you’ve made a selection–in my case, only “Standard” makes any sense–you get a strange new Tone & Color control that you can configure in whatever way by dragging on its surface. Settings never explains what you’re doing, but you can see the contrast and color change as you slide around.

With that done, you can now adjust or change your Photographic Style … in the Camera app. This won’t change the default setting, apparently, though it seems like testing this configuration on real-world objects would be useful. To do this, you tap the new Photographic Styles button–it looks like that grid/control thing. When you do, you get additional information, like the values for Tone and Color. If this information were in Settings, and you still had your old iPhone, you could conceivably replicate the Photographic Style you used previously. But it’s not. And I don’t. And this is bizarre.

As for the ability to edit the Photographic Style after the fact, that happens in the Photos app, which is understandable. But when I tried to do this, I didn’t see a Style button under any of my photos. Apple tells me it should be there, and I assumed it would look like that grid/button thing. Here’s why: Editing a Photographic Style after the fact requires me to use the weird and strangely incompatible HEIF format, and not normal JPEG. And I am, of course, using JPEG. To confirm this, I switched the capture mode to HEIF, took one photo, and checked. Yep.

So, that is actually understandable as well. It may even incent me to switch to HEIF. In fact, I think it will: The editing interface looks straightforward, and I like how you can see previews of each change in thumbnail form.

This explains, too, why I don’t see anything other than the first five shots I took when I go into Photographic Styles in Camera settings: When I first set up the phone and tried that, it must have just worked because I hadn’t yet switched to JPEG. So I guess that’s sort of on me. But still. There’s some interesting power here, for sure. But a lot of complexity.

Camera Control Confusion Continues

Tied to that, I also previously noted my initial excitement to try the new Camera Control button that’s common to all iPhone 16 series devices, and then my initial confusion when I tried it. There are at least three forces at work here, assuming we ignore basic unfamiliarity with something new. One, it’s a bit dodgy. Two, it’s perhaps even dodgier when using a case, and I am using a case. And three, all the features Apple promoted aren’t yet available: The most obvious feature, a half-press to focus, is one of them, as is Visual Intelligence functionality that will arrive in some future Apple Intelligence drop.

OK, fine. But I’m not a huge fan of how this thing works, with a case or without. The chief criticism being that it’s always easier to just use the on-screen controls. And that’s because this thing is too sensitive in most cases. Pressing it once to bring up the Camera app works fine, as does pressing it in the app to take a shot. But everything else is borderline pointless.

To access the available controls, you “lightly press Camera control twice,” which requires training and feels borderline unnatural. Once the controls are on-screen, you then slide your finger on the Control to scroll through them–you can’t see them all at once–which requires some precision, and, no, you can’t scroll on-screen too. When the right control is selected (colored yellow)–Exposure, Depth, Zoom, Cameras, Style, and Tone are all in there–you lightly press again to access the control’s settings slider. And then you slide your finger again to adjust that thing. Whichever controls you use last will be the default the next time you do this.

That is a lot of work, and a lot of new dexterity to practice, for what feels like a minimal to nonexistent payoff. It reminds me of the Action button that arrived a year. I had wondered for years why Apple even had a hardware Silent/Ring slider previously and that I couldn’t wait to configure that to do something else. So I experimented with the available choices. And then ended up leaving it on Silent mode. So I use it just like the old Silent/Ring slider. Progress.

I will keep trying, but looking through the controls in there, I just don’t see a use case for this, a time or scenario when making those changes will be easier or better than just using the on-screen controls. It feels vaguely crushing, sort of like that Action button thing. But it’s worse in a way: Whether I want to admit this or not, the Camera Control button–Apple does not call it a button by the way, but it’s absolutely a button–is reminiscent of the Windows Phone hardware Camera button and its incredible (for the day) “pocket to picture” capabilities. But if done right, Camera Control would be even better, and that would soften the blow of the nostalgia a bit.

Right now, it’s not better. But it is as good. And if the coming half-press to focus feature actually works–part of that is on me and my ability to adapt to this thing, of course–than it will be better. And I guess that will be OK. Someday in the future.

So …

Whatever happens with these features, I’m a bit troubled by a simple truth here: I want things to be simple, and to just work. And neither of these delivers on that. Yes, I will likely come to understand Photographic Styles in time. But that doesn’t make it better, let alone intuitive, and I feel like Apple has given up something but not offering a simple interface for this too, something like the old interface. Camera Control I’m almost more sure of. It will get better, I think. But I don’t need it. And it makes me wonder why something this esoteric made its way onto all new iPhones, an added complexity and inelegant design. It feels like something Samsung would do, not Apple.

And yet there it is. I will try to adapt. But I’m looking over at my cast aside Pixel 9 Pro XL and wondering whether–or when–simplicity and “it just works” wins the day in this competition. It makes sense to me that it would.