iPhone Photography

Apple shares videos tips on getting the most from iPhone 7 camera

Apple has published a new mini-website with nearly two dozen how-to videos covering iPhone 7 photography. Titled “How to shoot on iPhone 7”, the mini tutorials run about forty seconds each and deal with various topics of interest, including taking depth-of-field images with Portrait mode on iPhone 7 Plus, using tap to focus, adjusting exposure, taking low-light images, capturing selfies with the timer, snapping vertical panoramic photographs, taking stills while filming video and more.

Here are Apple's photography how-tos.

How to shoot action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZnMBnosJk

“Use Burst mode to capture that perfect split second”.

How to shoot without flash

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwMJv0_wa-M

“Make the most of light sources around you to brighten up your photo.”

How to shoot vertical panoramas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY2FqNAk0mM

“Boldly go from base to summit with a vertical pano.”

How to shoot close-ups

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElHnXjbGAm4

“Life looks different from 10 cm away. See how to capture it beautifully every time.”

How to shoot great portraits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvvXIt7XwXE

“Use Portrait mode to take an amazing photo of a friend.”

More photography tips and techniques can be explored via the new mini-site.

How to stop your iPhone from automatically switching lenses when shooting video

iOS decides on your behalf when it's appropriate to use iPhone 7 Plus's telephoto camera and when to switch to the wide angle shooter. This default behavior can be altered, which helps you avoid potentially unexpected results when shooting video.

If the phone switches to or from the second lens while you’re zooming in or out, glitches will probably appear in the recorded video. Thankfully, Apple, in all its wisdom, has provided a toggle in Settings to easily override this behavior at any time.

With its dual-lens system, iPhone 7 Plus is an awesome portable camera for both pro and wannabe iPhone photographers. In addition to powering depth-of-field photography, the dual twelve-megapixel cameras give you the benefits of an 2X optical zoom.

The problem with lens switching

Due to an ƒ/1.8 aperture and optical image stabilization, the wide angle camera captures images that are sharper and stabler than those taken with its telephoto counterpart. The two lenses have a different aperture and physical position, which also affects image quality.

Jarring transitions in your recorded videos are caused by automatic lens switching, which occurs if your iPhone switches to or from the second lens as you’re zooming in or out.

To avoid accidentally running into jarring transitions while recording video on your iPhone 7 Plus, you should disable the automatic lens switching feature.

Here's how.

How to stop your iPhone from automatically switching lenses

1) Launch the Settings app.

2) Tap Photos & Camera.

3) Tap Record Video underneath the Camera heading.

4) Slide the Lock Camera Lens switch at the bottom to the ON position.

Your iPhone will no longer automatically switch between camera lenses while shooting video.

This setting only takes effect when you’re actually shooting video. If you toggle the Lock Camera Lens to the ON position, your iPhone will keep on using whichever lens you started recording with. You'll want to keep that in mind when fiddling with this setting.

By the way, I learned about this feature via the always informative iLounge.

Speaking of which, iLounge explains how this setting affects your video recordings:

In most cases, you’ll simply be relying on digital zoom rather than optical. However, if you begin recording a video while zoomed in to beyond 2X, you may not be able to zoom back out, as you’ll already be using the 2X lens.

iOS uses a number of factors to determine whether it should use the optical 2X lens or simply rely on digital zoom, such as in lower light conditions where the faster primary lens has an advantage, so you won’t always see the impact of the Lock Camera Lens setting.

And that's it, boys and girls.

Any questions?

If you have any questions regarding automatic lens switching on iPhone 7 Plus, please post them in the comment section below and our knowledgable writers will try to answer them.

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How to spoof the GPS location of photos on your iPhone

spoofed location

The Photos app can keep track of where your photographs are taken, assuming the photos in your Photo Library have location-based metadata attached to them. Even images you save from the internet can have this location data baked into them from time to time.

What most people don’t know is that it’s possible to spoof a photograph’s location data to make it look as if it were taken somewhere else. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how you fake the location of your photos in less than a minute with Exif Metadata, an app we developed in house.

Create impressive HDR photos with your iPhone and Aurora HDR

Smartphones have come a long way over the years. With advanced mobile technology we also have amazing and powerful apps. It’s the combination of these two that makes taking great photos with our phones possible. But when it comes to HDR photography, what do you do if you don’t own a camera or you left it at home? Why not use your iPhone for HDR?

We always have our phones with us these days. This means if you’re out and about and want to take a few photos, this is where your iPhone can give you amazing results when it comes to capturing and creating HDR photos.

After all, the iPhone is arguably the most popular camera in the world. Maybe the popular saying is correct: “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

In this post we will use a couple apps to create impressive HDR photos. We will first shoot photos on iPhone using an app called PureShot, and then we will edit these photos using Aurora HDR for Mac.

Google’s Snapseed app picks up new Double Exposure filter + Pose & Expand tools

Google just pushed a new version of Snapseed for iPhone and iPad to App Store. Snapseed version 2.17 includes a new Face Pose tool, the app's second tool that focuses on working with portraits and selfies. There's also a new Double Exposure filter for blending two photos using analog film techniques and digital image processing. You can grab the latest version of Snapseed for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch at no charge from App Store.

Camera+ updated with RAW saving improvements, 3D Touch Peek and Pop & more

Camera+, my favorite iPhone photography app, was updated this morning on App Store with new features putting more RAW power at your fingertips while adding support for Peek and Pop gestures in the app on 3D Touch-enabled devices like the iPhone 6s/7 series. Building on the previous update which enabled RAW shooting and editing, the new Camera+ version 9.1 includes new RAW options for saving and exporting images at the best possible quality.

FiLMiC Pro 6.0 hits with overhauled UI, iPhone 7 exclusive features and other improvements

Anyone who's serious about taking videos on their iOS device would agree that FiLMiC Pro for iPhone and iPad leaves Apple's stock Camera app in the dust.

The filmmakers' go-to app, this ultimate video recording and editing software has become even better thanks to yesterday's update which brought out a redesigned user interface along with a number of new features.

The update includes iPhone 7-exclusive capabilities such as gamma curve controls for Natural, Dynamic, Flat and LOG (a first for mobile video), live adjustments for Shadow, Highlight, RGB, Saturation and Vibrance curves, temporal noise reduction up to 1080p resolution and more.

Save your custom edits and share them as reusable looks via QR codes in latest Snapseed update

Google today rolled out another update to its free of charge photography app, Snapseed. In Snapseed 2.16, you can now save your complex edits as reusable looks.

You can apply saved looks to other images with a few taps or share them with friends and other Snapseed users via QR codes. This Snapseed update also lets you apply the Structure filter to individual areas with the Selective tool.

Camera Tools is an all-inclusive customization tweak for your iPhone’s Camera app

The Camera app is something that a lot of iPhone users will open and use every single day, sometimes multiple times per day. The convenience of a point-and-shoot camera app at your fingertips, anywhere you go, is nothing short of a technological miracle that comes standard on today's modern mobile devices.

On the other hand, as Apple introduces more features into the Camera app with each iOS release, the interface becomes more cluttered with features you may or may not use, and that’s why a new free jailbreak tweak called Camera Tools by developer Justin Petkovic has just been released in Cydia.

Snapseed now gives you precise control over brightness levels and colors

Earlier this week, Google's free image-editing app Snapseed was refreshed with a new tool for adjusting brightness and color levels precisely. A pair of under-the-hood tweaks is included, too. Snapseed is part of my iPhone photography toolkit and while I'm fond of its simplicity, I wish I could say the same for the app's imprecise slider-based controls.

With Snapseed 2.15 for iPhone and iPad, adding drama to your photos has become a lot easier than before.

That's because the new curve-based editing gives you precise control over things like contrast, brightness and color intensity in a given image.

Will iOS be next to mimic Snapchat?

Everywhere you look today, large social media ventures are seemingly ripping a page out of Snapchat’s playbook. Instagram did it, Facebook’s Messenger app has done it, and we are about to witness Facebook itself clone Snapchat’s daily stories big time. As much as Apple are primarily known for their hardware, it goes without saying that this major shift in what consumers want from their applications (or: spike in perceived self-importance) will not have gone unnoticed by Apple’s software department.

Coincidentally or not, Snapchat-like features are spreading like wildfire at a time where Apple are beginning to talk more openly about the prospect of tying Augmented Reality into a future iOS version. Against the backdrop of Pokemon GO’s success with augmented camera images and Snapchat’s unrivalled popularity based on selfie filters, it is not far to seek that Apple will be looking to capitalize on such trends as well - and what better way to jump on the bandwagon than to provide built-in effects for the stock camera?

Like the sound of it or not, it has got to be a proposition almost irresistible to Apple, mainly for two reasons: the ability to deepen monetization of their in-house apps and chance to reel in a whole lot of new Gen-Y customers. Here’s why filters on iOS could happen in 2017.