Have iPhone cameras become too smart?
I found this interesting as I&#x27;m someone who used to travel with at least one camera most of the time, but I&#x27;ve recently come back from a holiday where I used my iPhone 13 Pro as my only camera.<p>Overall I actually found it a great experience – I love having an ultra wide angle lens in my pocket and after a bit of time getting used to it, I find the 3x zoom a more useful focal length than the 2x zoom on my previous iPhone X – but I did find the over-processing (the &quot;painterly&quot; look) frustrating, and even more annoying is that it will often use the wide angle lens and upscale rather than using the 3x zoom (even with ProRAW enabled – see [1]).<p>I understand why the software makes these choices for the &quot;average&quot; user, but it would be nice to enable a &quot;pro&quot; mode which reduces noise reduction and favours the zoom lens in more situations.<p>I ended up using the stock camera app for &quot;snapshots&quot; (e.g. photos where I didn&#x27;t care too much about the quality, or where I was just using the wide angle lens), and Lightroom Mobile&#x27;s camera for shots where I wanted more control, or when I wanted to ensure that the zoom lens was being used (Halide is also good for this, but I found it convenient to have the photos in LR Mobile for processing immediately, even if Lightroom&#x27;s UX is clunkier).<p>This actually worked pretty well for me – you can trust the stock camera to take a photo which will look good at mobile screen sizes even in challenging conditions, so it&#x27;s great for &quot;capturing the moment&quot;, while if you are taking a photo where you care about the details, it&#x27;s usually not an issue to take a few extra seconds to open LR... but it would be nice to be able to do this in the stock camera.<p>The results with RAWs from Lightroom are actually pretty impressive IMO – there&#x27;s more noise than the stock camera, but I prefer this to the smudged noise reduction look and I&#x27;m sure with some processing I can find a happy medium. Even the ultra wide photos are reasonably sharp.<p>This was a long way of saying that if you&#x27;re frustrated by this issue, try a third party camera app and hopefully you&#x27;ll find that you can get more out of the newer iPhone&#x27;s great cameras, while still having the default camera there for quick snapshots!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lux.camera&#x2F;iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-photography&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lux.camera&#x2F;iphone-13-pro-camera-app-intelligent-phot...</a>