The camera apps on your iPhone is more powerful than it’s ever been! With the right camera apps, you can take incredible photos! We select 5 of the very best!

ProCamera

Sleek, full-featured, and regularly updated, ProCamera is now at version 12.1 and is the secret sauce behind many of the best photos you’ll see taken on an iPhone. Out of the camera apps, this one has a sleek interface that gets out of the way while you’re shooting, and yet provides all the photo and video features you could possibly ask for. It features dedicated modes for Portraits, Video, HDR (High Dynamic Range), Lowlight, and Selfies, and selfies and an excellent built-in photo editor. This is the one ring, and it rules them all.

Pro Camera

Hydra

Less popular and not quite as well known as ProCamera, Hydra has two magical tricks up its sleeve; it can take stunning low light photos with very little noise or grain, and it can take photos at a higher resolution than any iPhone lens allows. It performs both these tricks by quickly taking a series of photos and aligning and stitching them together to give you otherwise impossible results.

Photo of the at night Burj taken with Hydra

Filmic Pro

In the last few years, iPhone cameras have gotten so much better at shooting video that in 2014, Bentley shot an advertisement entirely on iPhone, and the results were spectacular. Last year, director Steven Soderbergh, known for Erin Brockovich and the Ocean’s film series, shot a feature film, ‘Unsane’ entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus. For serious filmmakers, Filmic Pro is the best out of all camera apps. Filmic provides all the controls a professional would expect and allows you to shoot 4K video at a data rate of 100mpbs, reducing compression artifacts and making your videos eligible for Sundance, Cannes. If you have another iPhone on hand, you can also download the Filmic Remote companion app that allows you to monitor and control Filmic Pro on a remote phone, so you can mount that one anywhere and still be fully in control.

Filmic Pro

FOCOS

Since the introduction of dual camera iPhone, Apple has introduced depth mode photography, which not only allows you to take great looking photos but also allows you to emulate DSLR photos by using a depth map to blur the background of photos, as seen in the Studio Portrait modes on newer iPhones. FOCOS is a camera app designed specifically to take DSLR-like photos using depth mode. It can not only give you that magical bokeh effect but allows you to customize it in ways that the default camera just can’t. You can go beyond circular bokeh effects, and as a bonus, it also allows you to choose your focus point after the shot has already been taken. It’s not magic, just very clever science.

FOCOS Camera App

PhotoPills

When is a camera app not a camera app? PhotoPills does not take photos, but it does help you take better ones! PhotoPills is primarily an app designed to help you plan your photography. It includes widgets that help you keep track of the sun, the moon, and the milky way. Perhaps most often used is the Augmented Reality assistant that’ll show you the sun’s path through the sky, so you can know exactly when and where the sun will be and make shooting decisions accordingly. It also includes various photography calculators that you’ll find invaluable even if you’re using a DSLR to take photos and not your phone. It doesn’t take photos, but it’s the Swiss Army Knife of camera apps!

PhotoPills Camera App