Android needs to copy this iOS camera feature

Flagship phone cameras are more or less universally very good more. The photos have Pixel 9 The shots will have a different character than a Galaxy S24 does, which will be different from photos taken on a OnePlus 13 – But for an average user who just wants decent photos of friends, kids, pets and maybe the odd concert, any phone worth its salt will do.

Today, there is more and more nuance in different manufacturers’ post-processing: one phone may accurately capture dynamic range but struggle with color temperature, while another may have true colors at the same time. life alongside unrealistic shadows. There are ways around these issues. Pixel phones offer on-the-fly access to sliders for brightness, shadows, and color temperature; Many phones offer Pro camera modes with lots of manual control; And there are always edits after the fruit in applications like Google Photos or even Lightroom. For my money, though, only one manufacturer really gets this aspect of mobile photography right.

Android needs something like iPhone Photography Styles

Apple introduced a feature called Photographic Styles to the iOS Camera app in 2021, with the release of the iPhone 13. In a nutshell, Photographic Styles let you choose how your photos are processed before you take them , allowing greater control over the resulting images than you would get by simply editing them after the fact. Photographic Styles are persistent, so they apply to every photo you take in the default camera app, with no additional fiddling required.

There is a selection of Photographic Styles available, which Apple describes as follows:

• Rich contrast: Darker shadows, richer colors and stronger contrast create a dramatic look.
• Vibrant: Wonderfully bright and vibrant colors create a bright yet natural look.
• Hot: Golden undertones create a warmer look.
• Cool: Blue shades create a fresher look.

The set of available styles already offers a decent selection of alternatives from the iPhone’s default photo processing, but users also have the option to customize each of them further. You can change the tone and warmth of each preset, allowing for endless effective customization in how your phone’s photos take.

If I have a few seconds to set up a shot on my Pixel 9 Pro before picking it up, I’ll turn down the brightness and crank the heat up a bit – partly because I think these changes reduce the worst processing tendencies of photos from Google (Pixel phones like a cool, bright shade), but also warmer, darker photos are just my aesthetic preference. Enabling “quick access controls” in the Pixel Camera app settings makes this process less onerous, but it’s still an extra three taps compared to just point and shoot. If you’re trying to take a photo of something moving, those extra milliseconds can make a difference.

If Google took a page from Apple’s book and built in a way to persistently customize camera settings, I’d take more photos that look more like I like them. For me, this would make my Pixel a significantly better camera – much more so than increasing the resolution of the ultrair sensors, or improving the AI ​​zoom scaling, or adding ‘a hardware shutter button, or one of the other half-measure imaging adjustments we typically see in new generations of smartphone cameras lately.

An upgrade waiting to happen

Compared to a number of other changes that Android phone makers could realistically make to their camera setups in the near future, implementing a round of Apple’s photographic styles that would suit my needs seems like a relatively simple task; All I really need is a version of Sliders in Google’s camera app that remembers my adjustments when the camera app is closed and then opened. Of course, this would harm the simplicity of drop-morteopen app, take photo) – but it seems both easier to understand and more useful than the Pro Faux-Manual modes available on many smartphone cameras. And it would be optional too.

Tech enthusiasts can get a little tribe about their ecosystem of choice, calling quickly when a company fly one concept of another. But as smartphones become both more homogeneous and increasingly mature as a form factor, moving the ball forward for the industry as a whole will necessarily require iterating on ideas that others have put forward. work first. In the case of Photographic Styles, Apple is really onto something – and I don’t think it’s somehow under Android OEM to take the idea and run with it. Whether it’s Google, Samsung, OnePlus, Sony or whoever else, I can’t wait to see someone Take a crack at something similar on our side of the fence.