Commentary: From Xiaomi’s advanced lens tech to Samsung’s fun color filters, there’s lots Apple could bring to its next phone.
There’s no question that the iPhone 17 Pro has an awesome camera system. It’s put up an amazing fight against the Galaxy S25 Ultra and held its own in a video shootout against a professional cinema camera. I love the quality of all three of the phone’s rear lenses, and while I do like recent features, such as the Photographic Styles and Apple’s ProRaw image format, there’s more I’d like to see Apple do to help its phones appeal even more to pro and amateur photographers alike.
I’ve spent over 14 years reviewing iPhones and Android phones from all brands for CNET, and as a professional photographer I’ve always had an eye toward testing the cameras of top models like the Galaxy S25 Ultra and Google’s Pixel 10 Pro. In that time, I’ve found a variety of features that I’d love to see Apple incorporate into next year’s iPhone 18 Pro.
So let’s get started. Samsung’s My Filters color filter clone
My Filters, as Samsung sometimes calls it, is a tool hidden inside recent Galaxy camera phones. It essentially lets you steal the color tones from one image and apply them to another. Say you found a lovely photo online with dreamy pastel tones and warm highlights. You can save that image to your phone (even a screenshot of it will do), load it into the filter creation tool within the camera app and it will then create a new filter that aims to replicate the tones of that image. That filter will then be saved to your phone for you to apply to all your images later on.
While the filters it creates are not always especially accurate to the source image (sometimes the effects can be quite subtle), I do like the results you can get from it. I’ve been able to create some lovely filmic looks that I’ve customized to try and give the impression of old Kodak film stocks.
Apple’s Photographic Styles is the nearest thing the iPhone has, and while some of the looks are nice enough, there’s not a lot of scope for getting truly creative with colors, film grain and other effects. I’d love to see Apple expand on its Photographic Styles tool to give the sort of filmic looks Fujifilm has achieved so well with its customizable «recipes» on its ever-popular cameras like the X100VI. Nothing Phone 3’s Macro Mode
I wasn’t all that impressed with the Nothing Phone 3 in my recent review and a large part of that was down to the overall disappointing camera performance. But it does have one saving grace in its macro mode. As someone who runs a photography YouTube channel specializing in macro photography, I feel I have a high bar for what looks good when it comes to close-up photos of tiny things like insects or flowers.
