If you’ve recently upgraded your iPhone, or are getting more into photography, you may be wondering how to make the most of the increasingly sophisticated camera hardware and relatively complex software.

It can be a surprisingly in-depth topic, especially given the range of hardware available throughout different iPhone lines and generations, but we’ll try to make it as simple as we can, and call out when tips are exclusive to certain models.

Is more resolution always better?

Depending on which model iPhone you have, your phone may give you the option to shoot photos in higher resolution, though the toggle for it may be a bit buried. To access them, you’ll first have to go to Settings > Camera > Formats, then enable either “Resolution Control” if you have a non-Pro phone, or “ProRAW & Resolution Control” on Pro phones. You’ll then be able to access a “Formats” button within the camera app that lets you switch resolutions.

In our tests, we found that, in good light, the differences between the iPhone’s 48MP photos and default 24MP HEIC images were quite subtle, despite the files being roughly double the size (or larger). For that reason, it’s hard to recommend leaving it on all the time. For highly detailed, well-lit scenes, though, it can be worth turning on to make sure you capture as much as possible.

iPhone 17 Pro Max | Raws processed with Adobe Camera Raw at default settings | All exported as JPEG w/ matching settings

For best results, we don’t recommend using the higher-resolution mode in low-light scenarios. Because of how the quad-bayer sensors used in iPhones work, capturing the full resolution means giving up some noise performance. While the iPhone has noise-reduction, we found that the additional work it had to do made the difference between the higher-resolution and standard modes even less distinct.

What about Raw?

iPhone 17 Pro Max | Main Camera | ProRaw processed with ACR at default settings

If you have a Pro-series phone, you have the option of not just changing your photos’ resolution, but to shoot in Raw as well, using a proprietary Apple format called ProRaw. While we didn’t notice an appreciable amount of detail in our ProRaw shots – the main benefit comes from a bit more control over the processing – we did find that our selected resolution made much more of a difference than it did with non-Raw images.

This is in part due to the fact that, in Raw, your choice is between 12 and 48MP, rather than 24 and 48. Our 48MP Raw images had considerably more detail than the 12MP ones.

On the iPhone 18 Pro: consider your aperture and settings

The just-released iPhone 18 Pro introduces two new considerations that we haven’t seen before: a variable aperture and manual controls. The latter ends up being a greater consideration than you might think. According to The Verge, manually adjusting your shutter speed and aperture causes the phone to take a single exposure, as opposed to the multiple shots it usually takes.

In our tests, the images in the single shot mode were often still quite good. In bright daylight, you’d likely struggle to tell the difference between the single exposures and the ones multi-shot computational photos produced with computational methods that have long allowed phones to produce better images than would otherwise be possible because of their relatively small sensors. Even if you’re pixel-peeping, the difference is subtle.

iPhone 18 Pro | Main camera, 48MP | F1.48 | 1/30 sec
Photo: Dale Baskin

In low-light settings, you might be tempted to use the manual controls to ensure the phone uses the sensor wide-open to let in the most light. However, this is where the effects of using a single exposure rather than a multi-shot one will become much more noticeable in the form of more noise and less detail. We also found that the phone’s auto mode typically use the F1.48 setting anyways in these situations, so unless you’re going for a specific look or effect, it’s probably best to avoid manual mode in low light.

Our advice for achieving best results with the variable aperture won’t surprise anyone familiar with traditional photography: for sharpest results stop down. The lens’ F1.8 setting is noticeably better than its F1.48 one, and while theoretically the effects of diffraction will start to creep in around F2.8 and F4, we didn’t find that there was too much of an issue with sharpness at those settings in our tests.

Other considerations

While Apple markets its phones’ crop modes (the 2x and, on the Pros, 8x settings) as “optical quality,” they are created only using a quarter of their respective sensor’s area, and so come with a definite loss of quality. Of course, if the choice is between using them and not getting the shot at all, they’re handy to have, but it’s worth getting a little closer and using one of the actual optical settings if possible.

Speaking of the other cameras, it’s also worth noting that the main camera is by far the iPhone’s largest, with the ultrawide and telephoto ones using much smaller sensors. Again, there are some situations where they’re the best tool for the job, but if image quality is your main concern, it’s worth using the main camera, especially in lower-light situations.