I ran into an Apple optical engineer and explained iNat to him. I expressed my dissatisfaction with getting really good images of small insects in the field.
He was interested in improvements that might help iNat members (and maybe help drive iPhone sales). I thought resolution was the most significant issue.
Does anyone have other suggestions ?
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Easy way to not have the camera refocus when taking macro photos with flashāit often messes up the focus, or it takes too long to refocus and the bug has moved
iPhone zoom settings (.5, 1x, 2x, 5x) are calibrated for better focus than other settings. I would like more of that calibration.
Easier, faster more precise way to fine-tune focus.
My number one request is manual focus mode, which is probably a combination of software-hardware improvements.
A good user friendly macro
My biggest gripe is a software issue and boils down to, let me have manual control. When taking macros light is always a challenge. The iPhone default camera app will let you zoom in quite a bit to take what you think will be great macro shots, but instead they are lousy pixelated messes. This is due, as far as I can tell, to the camera app using a different lens than the lens you have selected and digitally zooming (i.e., cropping the image) when it detects low light. Because of this (and other software annoyances) I mostly use a third party camera app (Halide which is wonderful and you should all be using it!) to get around this. But Apple does not make the full set of hardware control available to third party developers so this is also limiting in other ways.
Other than that, please, please, please, keep on building lenses that let us take macros!
Oh, more bit depth or whatever to recover shadows/highlights would be good. Iām always very impressed with how much I can recover out of my Z9. I take insect photos with my iPhone (easier to get multiple angles) and Iād like to be able to recover more if itās overexposed or too dark.
a lot of phones ā not just iPhones ā allow you to long-press the thing you want to focus on to lock focus (and sometimes exposure, too). once locked, itās up to you to keep the phone the same distance from the subject. tap another area on the screen to remove the lock.
itās not the same as manual focus, but it can be useful.
it might be nice to have focus peaking as an option to make sure focus is exactly right. i suppose the argument is that phones have large enough screens to ensure things are in focus just by looking at the preview, but sometimes it helps to have peaking just to know exactly when, say, a bug on a swaying plant, is exactly in focus.
i think my proposed workflow as sort of a pseudo-manual focus mode would be to lock focus and have that automatically turn on focus peaking (as an option), and then from there, move the phone back and forward as needed to acquire fine focus.
this doesnāt handle situations where the phone is stationary (ex. on a tripod), but maybe an additional focus bracketing option would help in that situation and would probably be nice anyway for focus stacking purposes.
In ācameraā focus stacking would be a game-changer for macro.
Yup, this is a very useful technique.
Have you tried shooting in RAW? That should give you more latitude when editing. But I suspect thereās only so much we can do with these tiny sensors at the moment.
In my experience the macro mode on the iPhone 15 Pro is pretty good. The physics of macro are just very difficult to overcome, especially with such a small lens.
Manual macro mode!! Currently, my iPhone switches to Macro automatically when it detects something close to the lens, but it doesnāt always detect the close object (for example, a small bug on a window, where most of the frame is ādistantā). I would LOVE to be able to choose the Macro setting manually instead of having to trick it into switching by putting my hand behind the subjectāwhich often scares it away.
I agree on more control on focusing - i lose so many good photos of flying things!! Also, Iāve noticed the lenses on the 16 Pro skew colors oddly. I donāt use styles. I just want the colors to show up correctly and Iāve had to do a lot of extra fiddling to de-warm some images, or get the brilliant reds and magentas marginally accurate when the photo is in full sun.
also, this is more on the photo app side, but a point blur tool (rather than image-wide blur) - to help blur out things for privacy
ProShot (available for Apple and Android) gives you great manual control, including focus. Itās pretty inexpensive too. Worth checking out if you want more control.
Thatās one that should be easier to implement using existing camera abilities. There are some decent stacking phone apps already out there too.
A while back, I purchased a clip-on āmicroscopeā for my Android phone (an old Samsung Note 8) and shot some short 4k vid clips moving slightly in and out. Went to a frame extractor app and selected about 20 of the best frames (at different focus levels) and ran them through stacking software with some decent results. Hereās the best one from that experiment (dead fly from window sill).
The thing with macro though, is not just thin focal planes, but lens-to-subject distance. Itās not any use to get higher magnification if you have to get so close to the subject that it gets spooked and escapes. And even if you somehow could, thereās a real advantage of having something much heavier, like a real camera, behind a macro lens because steadiness is also a big part of the equation for real-life macro shooting.
I canāt see how you can increase that distance without longer, larger lens assemblies that would not fit inside the thin casing of a phone.
Alternative camera apps have been mentioned. For some, that may be the way to go. However, after switching to a non-Apple camera app, I found out the hard way that not all camera apps are created equal. Let the user beware!
A larger sensor would be the maor one, as thatās a huge factor in limiting image quality. A phoneās form factor places hard limits on sensor size though.
can you please write a tutorial on what you did or share any other similar link to what you did end-to-end for first timers?
the mobile industry has always been toying with external lens for phones but i guess its still long way until it will become marketable product. and its still atypical for iphones market i guess but we never know how behaviours change eventually.
here are two concepts from 2025 - Xiaomi modular lens and Realme mount lens
Sony did this a long time ago with their Q-series and while it was a cool idea it never took off. Just too awkward.
You can still buy them if you looks around.
My #1 problem with taking pictures of bugs on an iPhone is that the phone always wants to focus on the background, no matter how much I click on the bug or try to make the bug take up the entire center of the frame. Manual focus is not the solution. Manual focus is virtually impossible with tiny bugs. What I want is an option for center-weighted focus, just like my camera gives me. In fact most cameras give you 3 or more options for how tight you want the focus-weighting radius to be. iPhones donāt give you any option. They just assume you want a pretty landscape photo and ignore whatever is in the foreground unless itās a person.
