With Apple opening up controls to iPhone’s native camera in the soon-to-be-released iOS 8, allowing access to manual photo controls, and the fact that the iPhone camera is already the most popular camera phone, we might just see a significant uptick in the quality of all those selfies and your coworkers lunches, cats, and margaritas (well that depends on how many margaritas I suppose). Most people that use their iPhones as cameras use the native app, and with that comes no controls other than aspect ratio and front or rear facing camera, and most third party apps that offer some version of manual controls proving either clunky or digitally over-ambitious at best. But now, with iOS 8, they're going to see a lot of options that they may have never even heard of before.
“To be clear, iOS 8 will expose just about every manual camera control possible,” a recent AnandTech report states. “This means that ISO, shutter speed, focus, white balance, and exposure bias can be manually set within a custom camera application. Outside of these manual controls, Apple has also added gray card functionality to bypass the auto white balance mechanism and both EV bracketing and shutter speed/ISO bracketing.”
As the uninitiated shutter-flies begin messing with these controls out of curiosity, or even perhaps simple boredom, they'll notice two things:
1. Some of their pictures are getting better.
2. Some of their pictures are getting worse.
And if you really stop to think about it, that's the same thing that happens when an aspiring professional photographer begins using manual controls, leading him/her to really discern what the differences are in those settings in order to get a higher percentage of images to their liking. If all goes well, this can inevitably lead to a higher percentage of better images being shared! A good thing for Apple, a good thing for their compeition, and most importantly, a good thing for photography.
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