For many years now, Apple has been making the case that the iPhone is the most popular camera in the world. Part of the appeal, to hear the company tell it on stage, is how the camera leverages the iPhone’s considerable processing power to make capturing incredible images easier than ever before.
Each year brings a new iPhone that finds new ways to convert visual information from a tiny sensor into memories. And with the iPhone 18 Pro, releasing later this week, Apple appears to be focusing on something new: authenticity.
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The case for imperfection
It is true that the breakthrough computational techniques pioneered by Apple and others have changed the way we all take photos. You no longer need to worry about shooting into the sun or blowing out a window from the inside; more often than not, your phone will figure out the scene and make sure everything is exposed and clear.
But this perfect, impossible flattening of the real world has led to a loss of character. The iPhone’s overly sharpened, HDR-heavy image processing is artless and shows little taste for the historical aesthetics of photography. It’s no wonder that Gen Z has embraced cheap point-and-shoot digicams they were too young to use the first time around—the imperfections in the image are what make the memory feel real.
Other phone companies have addressed this in various ways. Google added a feature called Camera Looks to this year’s Pixel phone, for example, offering different styles that are deeply integrated into the image processing pipeline; one of them specifically aims to emulate a digicam. Chinese tech giants Xiaomi and Oppo, meanwhile, have long partnered with traditional camera counterparts Leica and Hasselblad, with modes in their camera apps that are designed to evoke authentic photography.
More freedom
Apple looks to be responding to this by updating its Photographic Styles feature with controls for texture and grain, as well as the existing tone and color settings. The company says this will let you “soften skin details or achieve an artful film look.” In other words, Apple is giving you more freedom to disagree with its processing choices.
Grain is a revealing addition. The speckled quality associated with the chemicals used in film turns an apparent flaw into an aesthetic decision. It introduces irregularity into an image, which Apple has historically strived to remove. Texture, meanwhile, makes the treatment of detail part of the creative process.
We’ll have to wait for first-hand experience to see how effective the extra controls prove to be in practice. To Apple’s credit, though, they’re also coming to the iPhone 16 and 17 lineups, as well as the iPhone Air, as part of iOS 27 rather than being locked to new devices. This is a good move if Apple wants to change the conversation around iPhone photography.
The hardware changes in the iPhone 18 Pro are quite modest, led by a variable aperture system that I don’t expect to make a big difference to most people’s photos too often. But the physical mechanism has prompted Apple to give users more control in another way, redesigning the Camera app with options to manually adjust aperture, shutter speed and white balance, as well as a histogram to assess exposure in real time.
Third-party apps have offered similar controls for advanced users for a long time, of course. But Apple is overdue to including them in its own stock Camera app. As with the new Photographic Styles additions, the controls give photographers creative freedom to make different choices than Apple’s programmers in Cupertino. There’s no such thing as an objectively correct shutter speed for a given photo—the setting is the result of the photographer’s authorship.
Authenticity tools
And that’s related to another new feature: Apple Reference Image, which is designed to prove the authenticity and provenance of a photo. In an optional Reference mode, signed sensor data is cryptographically developed through Private Cloud Compute into an unalterable image. Users can compare that reference with the main photograph in Photos to inspect changes. Apple is also supporting the SynthID standard, which will add metadata to images so viewers can check how they were edited, including whether it was generated by AI.
The new push for authenticity is welcome, not least because Apple has been experimenting with a lot of AI-powered features lately. The most ambitious is Reframe, a new tool in iOS 27 that allows you to alter the angle and composition of a photo after it has been taken—you can make it seem as if someone was looking at the camera when they weren’t, for example, or change where the photographer appeared to be standing. The ability to demonstrate that such tools weren’t used in the creation of an image could prove to be crucial.
Apple is right to claim that the iPhone is the world’s most popular camera. But that status comes with a degree of responsibility, and not just when it comes to ensuring that everyone’s photos are aesthetically pleasing. By adopting features that help to prove the authenticity of images, Apple may do more to help set standards and expectations than any other camera maker could.
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