The iPhone 16 Pro already has a great camera system capable of taking photos so good you'd think they were taken on pro-level mirrorless cameras. I love the quality of all three rear lenses, and while I like recent features, such as the Photographic Styles and Apple's ProRaw image format, I think there's more the company can do to help photographers take their best ever photos.
I've spent 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 Pixel 9 Pro. In that time, I've found a variety of features that I'd love to see Apple incorporate into its upcoming iPhone 17.
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.
The original image (left) and the edited version using my custom filter (right). I love the warmer tones, the teal sky and the film grain. It's given it a very vintage look and I really like it. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
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.
The Nothing Phone 3 has a great macro mode. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
Nothing Phone 3's Macro Mode
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