The iPhone camera is more confusing than ever

When I walked into the building that houses the Steve Jobs Theater for the iPhone 16 launch last week, the first person I saw taking a photo of the room wasn’t using an iPhone; they were using a compact digital camera.

I’m not talking about a fancy Ricoh GR III. I’m talking a PowerShot, Cybershot, or a Coolpix — something with 6 megapixels and a CCD sensor that makes anything above ISO 1600 look like confetti. These cameras are in style right now with a certain subset of photographers, tired of phone photos looking “overprocessed,” running straight in the other direction to the hard contrast and blown highlights of those early digital sensors. What’s old is new again, and artificially bright shadows are out.

Apple’s reaction to the little point-and-shoot renaissance and the popularity of things like Halide’s Process Zero is on full display in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro: an unprecedented amount of control over your image processing settings in the form of overhauled Photographic Styles. Personally, I love it. I think a lot of people who miss shadows in their photos will like it, too. But it’s also made the iPhone camera more complicated than ever, highlighting just how tricky Apple’s situation is.

Photographic Styles have been around since the iPhone 13. On a basic level, they’re filters to give your images a certain look — warmer, cooler, brighter, etc. — only instead of sitting on top of the image, they’re baked into the camera processing pipeline. The iPhone 16 updates Photographic Styles in a big way, with new controls for undertones meant to help you dial in skin tones and apply film-like color casts. You can use some preset options, but they’re also immensely customizable, so you can dial in exactly the right amount of saturation and contrast you want. And for the first time, you can apply them to your photos after you take them.

As I spent the past week-plus testing the iPhone 16 camera, the flood of new options gave me a kind of vertigo. What do I want this camera to be? Do I want to wander around Pioneer Square and treat it like a Fujifilm X100? Should I shoot black and white all the time? Do I optimize the undertone for my kid’s skin tone? Or for my skin tone? Should I just shoot in Standard and change the style afterward? If so, which style?

Adding to the confusion is the fact that Photographic Styles aren’t “sticky” right out of the box. If you use one, leave the camera app, and come back, it will reset to your default. You can change this in the camera settings, but I didn’t realize what was happening at first because, on my iPhone 13 Mini, Photographic Styles are sticky.

The camera’s default setting is a “Standard” style that’s basically just Apple’s take on what a camera should be. You can set any of the Photographic Styles as your default, but only by going into the system settings and tapping through an interface where you audition four of your “favorite photos” in the new style.

On top of all this, you have to shoot in HEIF to use the new Photographic Styles, which is Apple’s preferred image file format. HEIFs can store a lot of image data in a smaller file than JPEG, but it’s not as widely supported. Compatibility is a lot better than it once was since lots of platforms have adapted to Apple’s insistence on making HIEF happen, but it has nowhere near the adoption rate of JPEG, which is basically a universal standard.

One day, you might find yourself face-to-face with an ancient government website that won’t accept your .heic file. Apple’s best solution to converting HEIFs to JPEG seems to be “email it to yourself,” which automatically converts the image, but that doesn’t feel like a real solution. I had to use the Files app to convert a bunch of images for my iPhone 16 review, and that is a workflow I would not wish on anyone.

That’s the problem: the iPhone camera has to be all things to all people. It needs to capture the expression on your kid’s face as they blow out birthday candles even when they’re backlit to all hell. It has to take a clear picture of your receipt so you can file your expense report. It’s the camera you have with you on a walk around your neighborhood when the sun is hitting your partner’s face just right. It’s the thing you use to take a picture of that same partner’s very specific allergy medicine before you run to the store. It’s the only video camera most people own.

How do you build one single camera that can please everyone, all the time? Apple’s thesis is, apparently, to make everyone else do the work. The standard mode will do what the iPhone has leaned into for years — boosting shadows, smoothing out skin tones, aiming for a middle ground that increasingly pleases nobody. But if you want more or less, warmer or cooler, flatter or contrastier, the tools are in your hands now.

That’s an entirely reasonable answer, but it puts a lot of work on the individual to sort it all out. It’s not exactly intuitive, either, and as a result, I think a lot of people will give up trying to figure it out. This might be the best, most personal camera Apple’s ever made, but most people probably won’t experience it like that — and that’s a real shame.