Flagship phone cameras are more or less universally pretty good anymore. The photos a Pixel 9 takes will have a different character than the ones a Galaxy S24 does, which will look different from pictures taken on a OnePlus 13 — but for an average user who just wants decent pictures of friends, kids, pets, and maybe the odd concert, any phone worth its salt will do.
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Today, the nuance is increasingly in the post-processing different manufacturers apply: one phone may accurately capture dynamic range but struggle with color temperature, while another might have true-to-life colors alongside unrealistically bright shadows. There are ways around these issues. Pixel phones offer on-the-fly access to sliders for brightness, shadows, and color temperature; many phones offer pro camera modes with lots of manual control; and there’s always after-the-fact editing in apps like Google Photos or even Lightroom. For my money, though, only one manufacturer really has this aspect of mobile photography figured out.
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Android needs something like iPhone’s Photographic Styles
Apple introduced a feature called Photographic Styles to the iOS camera app in 2021, with the release of the iPhone 13. In a nutshell, Photographic Styles let you choose how your photos are processed before you take them, allowing for greater control over the resulting images than you’d get simply editing them after the fact. Photographic Styles are persistent, so they apply to every photo you take in the default camera app, without any additional fiddling required.
There’s a set selection of Photographic Styles available, which Apple describes as follows:
- Rich Contrast: Darker shadows, richer colors, and stronger contrast create a dramatic look.
- Vibrant: Wonderfully bright and vivid colors create a brilliant yet natural look.
- Warm: Golden undertones create a warmer look.
- Cool: Blue undertones create a cooler look.
The set of Styles available provides a decent selection of alternatives from the iPhone’s default photo processing already, but users also have the option to customize each of them further. You can tweak the tone and the warmth of each preset, making for effectively endless customization in how the photos your phone takes come out.
If I have a few seconds to set up a shot on my Pixel 9 Pro before taking it, I’ll turn down the brightness and nudge the warmth up a little bit — partially because I think those changes tamp down Google’s worst photo processing tendencies (Pixel phones love a cool, bright shadow), but also warmer, darker photos are just my aesthetic preference. Turning on “quick access controls” in the Pixel Camera app’s settings makes this process less onerous, but it’s still three extra taps versus simply pointing and shooting. If you’re trying to catch a shot of something in motion, those extra milliseconds can make the difference.
Were Google to take a page from Apple’s book and build in a way to customize the camera’s settings in a persistent way, I’d take more photos that look more the way I like them to. To me, it’d make my Pixel a significantly better camera — much more so than upping the ultrawide sensor resolution, or improving AI zoom upscaling, or adding a hardware shutter button, or any of the other half-measure imaging tweaks we typically see in new smartphone camera generations lately.
An upgrade waiting to happen
Compared to any number of other changes that Android phone manufacturers could feasibly make to their camera setups in the near future, implementing a spin on Apple’s Photographic Styles that would suit my needs seems like a comparatively simple task; all I really need is a version of the sliders in Google’s camera app that remembers my tweaks when the camera app is closed then opened again. Sure, it would detract from the drop-dead simplicity that the standard smartphone camera experience is built around (open app, take photo) — but it seems both easier to understand and more useful than the faux-manual pro modes available on many smartphone cameras already. And it’d be optional besides.
Tech enthusiasts can get a little tribal about their ecosystem of choice, quickly calling out when one company steals a concept from another. But as smartphones grow both more homogenous and increasingly mature as a form factor, moving the ball forward for the industry at large is necessarily going to require iterating on ideas that others implemented first. In the case of Photographic Styles, Apple’s really onto something — and I don’t think it’s somehow beneath Android OEMs to take the idea and run with it. Whether it’s Google, Samsung, OnePlus, Sony, or whoever else, I’m eager to see someone take a crack at something similar on our side of the fence.
