Earlier this month, Google unveiled its new Pixel 11 lineup. The phones themselves were rather similar compared to the previous Pixel 10 lineup, though they offer a few delightful quality of life improvements. One of those is a new set of camera processing options – allowing you to have far more control over what your photo will look like.
On the cusp of the iPhone 18 Pro release, I’m hoping Apple offers something similar to this.
Pixel 11 adds a new camera feature called Camera Looks. It’s a bit like Photographic Styles on the iPhone, where you can make adjustments to how the camera captures the photo. These edits occur prior to the capture, so it’s more than just a filter.
Google has many default preset options similar to Apple’s, and they even let you granularly adjust what each preset does. Beyond that though, there are a few more options that capture a new trend in mobile photography: Editorial, Velvet, Classic, Digi, Black Tie, and Minimal.
These looks stray away from the highly processed look of smartphone photos, and try to capture the essence of older photos. Digi, as the name suggests, goes in on the low dynamic range, contrasty, and noisy look of those smaller, pocketable cameras from the 2010s.
Minimal, on the other hand, goes all in on providing a low-processed look. Many of the HDR pipelines don’t run, and you just get what you’d expect if a smartphone sensor actually showed you what it captured. You can see somesample images over on 9to5Google.
With ProRAW on iPhone, it’s certainly possible to get your iPhone photo back to a state where it doesn’t look like it went through too much post-processing. That kind of defeats the point of a smartphone photo, though.
Wrap up
If Apple wants to build the best camera in your pocket, it needs to accept that not every user wants the same thing. Photographic Styles were a good first step, but the company should go further. At the end of the day, photography is an art of self-expression, so giving users more options over how processed their photo looks would be a great step. Apple should take a page out of Google’s playbook, and add a ‘Minimal’ style to the iPhone.
How do you feel about the current state of iPhone photography? Are you a fan of Apple’s most recent implementation of Photographic Styles, or are you left wanting more? Let us know in the comments.
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