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 processes data directly from the iPhone’s processed video pipeline, a deliberate choice to render film simulations and grain in real time. The app 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.

Better Camera features nine film simulations, each inspired by real film stocks. The app also includes a separate grain layer with four intensity levels that can be applied to any film simulation or to unfiltered photos. The noise is rendered per-pixel using a Metal compute shader. The grain is monochromatic and rendered as a single noise value per pixel equally across all color channels.

Better Camera captures HEIF, JPEG, and lossless TIFF files with full EXIF metadata.

Better Camera is available now as a free download, although the full experience requires an in-app purchase. Better Camera is $7.99 per month, $19.99 annually, or $39.99 for a lifetime license.

Image credits: Better Camera