What’s New With Moment Pro Camera For iOS 18, and Why Should I Care?

iOS 18 brought a lot of behind-the-scenes upgrades to the camera system – some large, some small – but together they constitute a notable improvement. Here’s an overview of the new features we brought into Pro Camera, and how they can make photography on iPhones even more convenient.

1. Lock Screen Capture

iOS 18 finally lets you access other camera apps without unlocking your phone! To set this up, hold down

1. Hold down on an empty part of the lock screen
2. Tap “Customize” at the bottom of the screen
3. Tap the Lock Screen on the left
4. Remove one of the controls at the bottom left or right of the screen
5. Tap the plus button in the now-empty slot and select “Moment” from the options in the “Capture” section
6. Tap “Done” at the top right of the screen

With this set up, you can now hold down the Moment icon to launch the app, even if your phone is locked!

2. Camera Control

On iPhone 16, Pro Camera supports the new Camera Control, which comes with a few interactions:

• Light press to start editing a control value. Swipe the control button side to side (or drag the on-screen slider) to change the value.
• Double light press to choose between the available controls. Pro Camera lets you choose between shutter speed, ISO, EV, focus, zoom, and white balance. You can also access the list of controls by swiping down on the on-screen slider.
• Full press to take a photo or start/stop video recording

You can even set the Camera Control to launch Pro Camera whenever it’s pressed. Just open the Settings app and select “Moment” under Camera → Camera Control. This works even if your phone is locked!

3. iPhone 16

In addition to the Camera Control, iPhone 16 also comes with some new capture formats. You can now shoot 4k video up to 120 fps (as opposed to the previous max frame rate of 60 fps). In addition, 48 MP images can be captured on both the ultra-wide (0.5x) and wide (1x) cameras.

4. Other Improvements

Gallery HDR display

Our gallery now lets you view images in full HDR, like in the stock Photos app. This lets you truly appreciate the full dynamic range that iPhone cameras can capture. Of course, we also allow you to turn this off: just toggle “Display HDR Images” in settings.

Bug fixes

Some users may have noticed a long-standing bug with manual exposure: when adjusting the ISO, the shutter speed could sometimes fluctuate from the value you initially set. You may have even noticed this in some other third-party iOS camera apps. We’re happy to announce that this issue no longer affects the Moment Pro Camera! We have also significantly reduced the app size.

Lock Screen Widgets

During the previous upgrade from iOS 17, we saw the introduction of new widgets for faster ways to access your favorite third-party apps. The Moment Pro Camera App now offers multiple ways to access the app straight from the lock screen:

• Quick launch: a shortcut to open the app in its current state
• Preset widget: launch the app and load a specific preset of your choosing
• Capture mode widgets: quickly access the photo, video, slow shutter, or timelapse modes
• Camera widgets: open the app with a specific camera pre-selected (0.5x, 1x, 3x, or selfie)

Responsive Capture

Again, with the previous iteration of iOS 17, Apple offers a few new technologies that allow photos to be taken much faster — improving shot-to-shot time while maintaining the highest possible quality. All of these have been implemented in our Pro Camera app – download or update here!

Why does this matter?

These features are best suited for action shots and spur-of-the-moment captures. They improve results in two somewhat subtly-different ways:

1. Zero shutter lag: At the time you press the shutter button, what you see in the viewfinder is now what you’ll see in the captured image. The result is now limited only by your reflexes rather than being subject to processing latency as well.
2. Capture pipeline improvements: After an image is taken, the camera system is much faster to “recover” and be ready to take another. This reduced delay means you can take more images of a moving subject faster, hopefully acquiring a frame that contains the action or composition you want to capture.

We’ve made these two features available automatically, but there’s also a third optional feature: fast capture prioritization. If you want to ensure you don’t miss a shot, you can opt-in to this behavior (called ”Prioritize Faster Shooting” in our app settings). This will temporarily increase shutter responsiveness at the expense of slightly reduced image quality.

How does it work?

Responsive capture pipeline

Before iOS 17, an image had to be fully processed before the next image could be taken. Now, two new features work together to mitigate this latency. Responsive capture allows multiple photo captures to operate simultaneously, rather than waiting for one to complete entirely before taking the next photo. Further, with deferred photo processing, some of this processing can occur in the background, freeing up resources for use in grabbing new images.

Zero shutter lag

As of iOS 17, your phone maintains a circular buffer of incoming sensor data while the camera is active. When you press the shutter button, the camera system can grab frames from the past (just before you pressed the button) to merge together into a single high-quality image, rather than only capturing frames after you press the shutter button. This means you capture the subject as it was when you decided to take a photo rather than in the state it was after pressing the shutter. For any audio geeks out there, this feature is conceptually similar to retrospective recording.

Fast capture prioritization

When the camera detects faster-than-average shutter presses, it can choose to temporarily reduce photo quality (i.e., turn off Deep Fusion and other processing) so that images take even less time to be saved. The system is ready to take another photo that much quicker.

For more technical details, see the WWDC session here.

Real-world results

Overall, the difference is striking; you can see the results below. We compared two phones: a brand-new iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 16 and an older iPhone 11 Pro running our iOS 17 update. Both had the image quality set to the highest possible setting, and both had “Prioritize Faster Shooting” turned off, so they took maximum-quality images the whole time. Despite its weaker processor, the iPhone 11 could take many more photos in a shorter period. Meanwhile, the iOS 16 device was left playing catch-up: it kept trying to take images slowly, even after we stopped pressing the shutter button.