iPhone Photographers' Triumph: iOS 8 Manual Camera Control
The Apple company is working to open up new camera controls in iOS 8. The default camera app has a very limited set of controls available, with a simple AE/AF lock and several toggles: HDR toggle, the one to switch to the front-facing camera, and the one to switch to video recording mode. Manual camera control will now be available through the application programming interface (API), and the users now access more functionality than ever before.
“To be clear, iOS 8 will expose just about every manual camera control possible,” Joshua Ho reports. “This means that ISO, shutter speed, focus, white balance, and exposure bias can be manually set within a custom camera application. Besides these manual controls, Apple has also added gray cardfunctionality to bypass the auto white balance mechanism and both EV bracketing and shutter speed/ISO bracketing.”
The next-generation iPhone 6 is expected to continue this vogue with iOS 8 camera improvements (such as further feature like time-lapse mode). The new iPhone camera hardware will amaze with optical or electronic image stabilization, a wider aperture, as well as an ARTON filter to minimize CMOS color shifts. But it’s the custom camera app that will take advantage of all the camera controls Apple has open access to.
It's outlined in the AVCaptureDevice API that the camera delivers specific green, red, and blue values from the scene in order to calculate the neutral white point for determining white balance.
iOS 8 does a lot for iPhone and iPad camera-lovers. Let's remember a simplified navigation, provided iCloud photo album, and new photo editing functions. Furthermore, it is known for certain that new improvements are around the corner.
