Photographer Builds the iPhone Camera App He Always Wanted
Photographer Builds the iPhone Camera App He Always Wanted
https://petapixel.com/2026/06/01/photographer-builds-the-iphone-camera-app-he-always-wanted/
Publish Date: 2026-06-01 18:09:00
Source Domain: petapixel.com
Better Camera is a new iPhone camera app designed, as its name suggests, to be superior to the iPhone’s native camera app. The new app offers manual controls and film-inspired simulations and boasts zero AI tech.
“In the last 20 years, I have had dozens of cameras. Film, professional, premium,” photographer David Gor, the developer of Better Camera, tells PetaPixel. However, Gor says that most dedicated cameras end up being left at home because they’re too big, bulky, and inconvenient to carry around. Even for Gor, who owns a compact Ricoh GR and relatively lightweight Fujifilm X-T5, it is tough to beat the convenience of a phone.
“On the other hand, your phone is always with you, and it shoots just fine, but often too ‘phone-like’: processed, uncontrolled, generic,” Gor continues.
“I didn’t find a good camera app that ticked all the boxes of what a camera shooting experience should have, so I made it.”
Better Camera is a lightweight, fast app that saves RAW data directly from the iPhone’s cameras without any processing or AI. It has ISO priority, shutter speed priority, automatic, and fully manual shooting modes. It offers manual, AF-S, AF-C, and zone focusing modes. It can also preserve camera settings, so there’s no need to reconfigure the app after it has been closed for a while.
Gor hopes his new iPhone camera app offers photographers just the right amount of control. It is much more hands-on than the default camera app, but isn’t as complex as some dedicated, pro-oriented camera apps.
“Simple where it should be, manual where it counts,” Gor says.
The app offers exposure compensation in 1/3-stop steps, flash power compensation across five steps, and white balance presets and full Kelvin control.
“Better Camera is for photographers who want their iPhone to capture light, not interpret it,” Gor explains. His app doesn’t have smart HDR, AI denoising, or any fancy computational features.
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