iPhone 17 Pro/Max - Camera Settings for Quality Photos

Hey guys, let me share my secrets how you can take shots like this on your phone in just three easy steps. So let's start. Not only will I show you my camera settings but also I will teach you how to make your low-light shots look better and how to avoid that phone HDR look without editing in any third-party apps right on the phone. So stay tuned, keep watching and let's start. All right, so step number one is the camera interface setup. So we have to go for that into the basic settings app and we search over here camera and right here we scroll down to the format. And I know a lot of people on YouTube just go and tell you select high efficiency, that's it done. But not a lot of people understand what that setting actually means. So first of all it will be applied both to photos and videos. So let's say you want to edit your photos on a computer or send it to someone and the person happens to have an older computer that was purchased maybe more than five years back. In that case you're better off using most compatible because they will be having problems opening your files. But if you have a computer or laptop that you purchased maybe within the last five years then high efficiency is the way to go. Think of it as a zip file. So high efficiency will be more compressed so older machines will be having more problems opening those files and uncompressing them. And newer machines, newer phones will have no problems whatsoever and in that case we can use high efficiency and save on the storage. So hopefully that clears it up. And guys if you got lost or you don't understand something you can always ask in the comments and I will make sure to reply to you. The next option over here is the photo mode 12 megapixel and 24. Obviously we want to have more resolution in that case we will get more details and we'll be able to crop a little bit if something happens to our composition that always helps. So 24 megapixel it is. ProRes and resolution control we will enable that for sure because in that case within the camera app we'll have the option to switch between different options. Then we go into the ProRAW format and you can select pretty much anything you want here but I will be sticking to JPEG, XL, Lossy. And you know guys I compared pretty much every single possible format and JPEG, XL, Lossy just gives you a smaller file size and you know you don't really sacrifice quality. At least I didn't see any decrease in quality so I will recommend you to do the same and all these photos actually were taken in this format so if you like these results this is for you. Then video capture I will just in case enable Apple ProRes but to be honest with you it's for videos and I don't use it. A little spoiler I still am able to capture amazing looking footage on this iPhone but you don't really need ProRes. Then we go into the preserve settings, camera mode on, macro control keep it on, exposure adjustment keep it on and night mode keep it on because a lot of the times when the sun goes down like right now like look at this weather it's super cold the sun is technically out but it's getting darker so we're approaching low light situation even though the sun is still out. So in that case sometimes it's really beneficial to have night mode on and you can actually manually select the switch. If you have it disabled then you will not have this advantage of the computational photography and the photos will not look as good. Okay then ProRAW and resolution control. Well that actually all depends if you're taking photos in RAW and you close the camera app and then you take the photo again in the next I don't know 5, 10, 15 minutes or even in one hour do you want to still be taking photos in RAW or you wanted to enable it intentionally. I will keep it on because right now I'm just doing street photography for future videos as well so yeah I will be taking lots of RAW shots but usually for day-to-day life you can just disable it and no need to keep it on. And that's about it for the preserve settings section. What's more important though is the composition so we want to enable grid, level all that kind of stuff. Even right now you see guys I'm somewhat positioned myself over here in the rule of thirds kind of within the grid so it just looks really nice and I can place the screen recording over here so you have to think about these things always when you take photos and it's always very helpful to have some sort of a guidance within our composition so I'll keep the level on, grid on, view outside frame I will keep it on because that will help us to frame the subject a little bit better. Indicators have the flash on, live photo and within the video I keep these ones disabled there is no really need for me to use action mode on a phone because the image stabilization is so good on the iPhone. I don't think I ever used it actually outside of these reviews so keep it off. Okay then we're going to the photo capture and I always have enabled additional lenses 28 millimeter and 35 millimeter but these are actually digital crops but when they work with the computational photography I mean it just works and for the default lens guys I've not seen it actually on YouTube but I'm just trying something new over here and I'm using the default lens as a 35 millimeter lens and the reason being is I tested the vivo x200 ultra phone and that phone has a huge main camera sensor and it's actually 35 millimeter lens can you imagine so in that case you don't get really a wider field of view you get more of a portrait kind of focal length and it really helps to get more interesting shots in my opinion especially if you're taking pictures of people, running animals, subjects I don't know maybe you're taking pictures of coffee or breakfast that kind of stuff just day-to-day life guys you know so for that kind of shots I recommend you to actually try 35 millimeter you can always go back you can remove it I'll show it in this step number two but try it I think you'll like it then we'll go prioritize faster shooting on let's correction on macro control basically you see that's about it now step number two the most important one. Yep so we are done with the technical part now it's actually about taking pictures. Okay guys now step number two and it's getting actually really really cold so I will be using my special heated gloves with built-in power bank and they also have uh hold on let me show you they also have opening for fingers so I can actually press stuff on the screen where we're supposed to have really sunny day but it is what it is Prague castle is basically invisible right now. All right so now finally we can actually open our camera app and you see guys right here in the upper left corner we have the selection between different modes so we can choose heave max or raw and guys a lot of people just you know spray raw photos left and right but I do not recommend you to do that use raw only in case you want to edit your photos so if you have very exceptional framing subject or something happening that you know you will be editing afterwards maybe for wallpapers or just you know the shot is so good you want to post it to Instagram then yes in that case you better be using raw format but for everything else for day-to-day shots heave is just really capable format I think personally and you can still tweak a little bit colors and contrast before the file falls apart so you know something like this you want to send it to a friend heave is just good enough just make sure you're using the maximum resolution of 48 megapixels and you're good to go but if you have something more interesting like right now we have you know mist and there is you know really thick fog over there and the shot looks really really magical for that maybe I will use raw oh my god my hands are shaking even though these are heated guys but just overall the whole body is getting frozen yeah guys in such weather not only I'm getting super frozen but also the phone's battery drains much faster and if you watch my videos then you know wireless chargers were always slow until now as someone who's constantly charging phones earbuds even smart watches I needed something that actually keeps up this is the Anker Prime wireless charging station from Anker's flagship fast charging line and it's the world's first 25 watt wireless charger with an active cooling system and built-in display it's equipped with the new G2 25 watt fast charging technology so you can forget those old slow wireless chargers G2 25 watt is fast enough to compete with regular wire charging on the iPhones it gets my iPhone 17 Pro to 50 percent in about 22 minutes which is only around two minutes slower than Apple's 45 watt charger but the important part is that even with this fast charging the phone doesn't overheat when charging the phone stays at around 89 degrees Fahrenheit all thanks to Anker's active shield 5.0 temperature detection technology combined with the aerospace grade TEC active cooling system it pulls the heat from the phone and the fan expels the heat out so the battery is well protected and the nice thing is you can actually see all this working right on the display you can swipe through different screens check the charging power the temperature and see which devices are connected and all of that you can also do through the Anker's app it's basically like a remote control you can switch between boost mode ice mode and most importantly in my opinion sleep mode where the fans and everything like lights turned off completely so nothing disturbs you when you sleep but you still wake up to a full battery and on top of that it's a three-in-one charger built for the Apple setup the build looks very premium and minimalistic so if you want a fast quiet super clean charging setup that replaces all the random cables check out the Anker prime wireless charging station I'll leave the link in the description and there is also a discount coming soon you see guys even though technically right now sun is still out it's very very dark because the fog is so thick the sun rays just don't get through it so if I point the camera towards the surface of the water it's already pretty dark for the photo algorithm and it suggests me to use the low light night mode so that's really important actually so for scenes like this you might want to turn it on and in that case computational photography will help you to clean out the shadows sharpen the photo a little bit and the results will be better especially for handheld shots I will not be using it just yet but keep in mind it's always there to help you get better photos now a lot of people think that phone photos look too phone like because of this HDR processing because all the shadows are lifted everything is just seems a little bit overexposed there is no contrast as you see on this camera we have really deep black shadows on my outfit and there is something in the back so you really can't tell the depth in the shot you see the foreground middle ground background because of that contrast also and on the phone it's really not as noticeable but we can fix that so you see over here we have photographic styles maybe I want the shadows to be a little bit richer so in that case I just drag this slider down here and this is my shot or let's say with the telephoto camera because actually sometimes this computational photography kicks in the shadow recovery with the telephoto lenses so it's even more prominent there and drag it down a little bit like that and don't worry we can also adjust it after our photos were taken so not only you can you know preview the photo with the contrast and everything will be applied but you can also adjust it afterwards after the shot is taken so let me show you how yes guys it's easier than you think there are a few ways to improve your shots with editing and once you master it you can edit your photos in just like 5-10 seconds really all right now let me show you how I took this photo and made it look like this without downloading any third-party apps you can do everything on a phone so we press over here and we get the undertones menu if you drag the slider up the shot looks a little bit overexposed bringing down there's more contrast left and right controls our saturation so if we move it to the right the shot will be more you know with more vivid colors and everything if we move it all the way to the left and increase the contrast a lot then we get really nice looking photo which would be something similar that I get with a camera like this one I think it looks amazing really in black and white because in that case you can really feel the depth in the shot but if you want something more saturated warmth then you can use the saturation slider as well easy and quick fix it's good enough for instagram story but we can make it even better so if we reset this undertone style we have different options gold amber so you can go through all of them or something that you can actually apply if we press over here so you see all these adjustment sliders like exposure brilliance highlights shadows all that is also present on pretty much every single phone out there so just look at the photo and think about what could you improve what you don't like let's say so for me I don't like this elevated shadows so I just move the shadows down like so or instead you can do the similar thing but by just adjusting the contrast like this so you bring the contrast slider move it to the right and we get more contrasty shot also if you want your photo to look a little bit warmer you go into the warmth tab and you adjust it or if you want it to look cooler maybe more mystic then you would bring it to the left and it will look cooler so in that case you can also control the mood of the photo so here's the shot before and this is after and I think it looks incredible and it's fixed within like 5-10 seconds really and we elevated the shot a lot I know many people say oh this phone is better that phone is worse this processing is better I do say that too in my videos but that's actually super easy and quick fix without downloading any third-party apps however if you want to make the shot even better add some sort of a glow filmic characteristic to the photo then in that case yes you would need to use a third-party app and for this I'm going to be using Lightroom and I actually made a separate tutorial for S23 Ultra a few years back so it's still relevant pretty much every single setting that I will be showing to you right now you can watch that video and also learn yourself how to do it on your Android phones or even you know pick something up for your iPhone as well over there so here is our shot in Lightroom and pretty much same way I go into the light and actually sometimes I use do use auto adjustment so the phone sometimes actually hits the spot and makes the contrast feel just right and everything just looks in order so before and after I mean it looks kind of okay I might keep it on that or I can do everything from scratch and adjust the lighting or increase the contrast sometimes you want to decrease your highlights because you want to bring those values down in order to maximize the dynamic range of the photo and make it more appealing but you don't have to do it actually with every single photo some shots are really looking nice with overexposed highlights and rich contrast I don't have anything against that to be honest I think it's all comes down to your creative decisions and you don't have to edit your photos the same way as everybody else editing them so you just develop your kind of style get the feel what you like and not and this is it for the light and exposure adjustments then we go into the colors over here it's very important that you can adjust white balance so if you want your photo to be warmer you bring the slider right if you want cooler just a little bit you bring it down so it all depends also on the feeling you want to go for and not only you can control the temperature but also adjust the tint okay then we go into the effects tab and we can increase actually the clarity because in low light you don't get as much details as during bright day obviously because the shake has affected the photo and just there is not enough light outside so in that case I would increase actually clarity for some night shots and decrease it for daytime shots so you get the point right texture I can increase it just a little bit dehaze I will not touch it maybe for this photo and one setting that I really love and enjoy using is grain and I do love the way it feels it just adds texture and overall feels a little bit more grungy lively so that's why I like adding it now vignette also you can add it if you want to maybe just a little bit you can control midpoint and everything and that's about it you know so this is before and after obviously you can color grade the photo even further if you want to adjust your shadows and make them look a certain color you can do that as well if you want to adjust your highlights you can also do that and in that case you get really grungy feeling looking photo and this is before and this is after so I think it's just incredible what you can get on the phone you can always edit your photos on the go you don't really need a computer no more you can do it everything on these tiny devices sometimes you want your subject to stand out a little bit so in that case you would either select the subject so it will do it automatically or you can just simply select background phone automatically select the background the dog is not selected and it will not be affected by all the adjustments so now I can just increase the contrast I can decrease the shadows maybe a little bit more even like so the more and more I look at modern photos the less I enjoy seeing all the information in the highlights or everything in the shadows I don't think it's how we perceive the world so I want my highlights to be maybe a borderline clipped or even clipped I have no problems with that I'm not sitting in the lab comparing the photos and saying like this is a perfect dynamic range like this is clipped I don't really care about that yeah and this is before and this is after and you see we made the dog stand out even more with the masks okay and I this was pretty easy right so guys if you still have any questions then let me know down in the comments and I'll make sure to reply to you right now YouTube gave me an option to reply to the comments with voice messages so maybe I'll try to do that and make sure to stick around for the next video which will be in next year and guys thank you so much for helping me to reach 200 000 subscribers by the way I completely forgot I wanted to mention it in the beginning of this this tutorial is a way to celebrate in the way I'm trying to give back to the community and show how I go about taking photos editing them so thank you so much for helping me reach that you know milestone of 200 000 and in the next video I actually will be traveling to the CES I will try to cover a lot of the stuff there so hopefully I'll see some cool tech um yeah and I will see you next year now guys you have to live a lot because it's crazy cold my hands are dead and uh yeah your like will warm me up a little bit