Nilay Patel’s annual iPhone review for The Verge is a great read, as always. This year I really enjoyed his take on the camera system and the new “Photographic Styles” features:

The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro allow you to exclude yourself from this narrative entirely with a huge upgrade to the Photographic Styles feature that allows you to adjust how the camera processes colors, skin tones, and shadows, even after you’ve shot a photo.

It’s a subtle feature, but allowing these styles to be changed after capture is very nice.

You can pick between five “undertone” settings that are meant to adjust skin tones and nine “mood” settings that feel a lot like high-quality Instagram filters. You can shoot with a live preview of any of the styles, and then you can tweak the settings or even switch styles entirely later on.

And all of these styles offer three new fine controls: there’s “color,” which is basically saturation, and “palette,” which is the range of colors being applied. Most importantly, there’s a new control called “tone,” which lets you add shadows back to your photos. It turns out Apple is using “tone” in this context to mean “tone mapping,” and in my tests, the tone control allowed me to reliably bring the iPhone’s image processing back to reality by turning it down.

The tone control is semantically aware — it will adjust things like faces and the sky differently, so it’s still doing some intense computational photography, but the goal is for you to be able to take photos that look a lot more like what a traditional camera would produce if you bring the slider all the way down.

See also, Halide’s new “Process Zero” features.

So many great tools for photographers using phones. More of this, please.