After using the iPhone 16 for two weeks, here are my favorite features:

Don’t call it a filter. That’s what I kept telling myself as I played around with the new Photographic Styles version on the iPhone 16, and surprisingly, it’s become my favorite new feature on Apple’s latest phone.

Photo styles are essentially visual effects that change the color and tone of an image, and they’ve been around since the iPhone 13 generation. But Apple has improved this version in the iPhone 16 to better understand color, highlights, skin undertones, and shadows. And the difference is noticeable, and in fact, it feels basic compared to previous versions.

At a time when the tech industry is buzzing about generative AI—AI that can generate content in response to prompts—it’s refreshing to see an upgrade that improves one of the most basic yet essential uses of a phone: taking photos. A CNET survey conducted in partnership with YouGov found that camera features were the third-biggest motivator for upgrading a smartphone, further underscoring the importance of camera improvements.

While phone makers tend to improve their camera hardware and image processing software each year—for example, better low-light performance on the iPhone 16’s wide-angle camera—the new Photo Style feature has a bigger impact in some ways. While camera improvements each year can feel incremental and only become apparent in very specific shooting situations, Photo Style lets you change your images in an instantly obvious and satisfying way.

Read more: Inside the new sleep apnea detection feature in Apple Watch Series 10

Using Photo Styles on iPhone 16

Photo styles may sound a lot like filters, but the updated version of Apple’s tool does more than just apply a blanket effect to an image. Instead, it applies an aesthetic to a scene based on specific colors in the photo, and in my experience, it’s made it much easier to give a snapshot a dramatic look without having to edit anything.

Available exclusively on the iPhone 16 lineup, including the Pro and Pro Max, Photo Styles are built into the Camera app and can be applied before or after you take a photo. Just tap the icon that looks like a square filled with dots in the Photo options in the camera viewfinder. Or, if you’re using the camera control button, swipe over the miniature menu in the overlay until you see the Styles options.

Apple offers a variety of options to either emphasize specific skin undertones or provide aesthetics based on the mood, depending on the look you’re going for. Examples of skin undertones include Cool Rose, Neutral, Rose Gold, and Amber, while Vibrant, Luminous, Quiet, and Dramatic are examples of mood-based options. If you set a style as the default, your iPhone camera will always apply that effect, even if you don’t turn it on manually.

Some of Apple’s photo styles are more subtle than others, particularly those that focus on skin undertones, like Cool Rose and Amber, which primarily influence the subject of the photo.

However, I tend to prefer more atmospheric photo styles like Vibrant, Dramatic, and Stark Black & White that enhance the colors and contrast. Other styles like Ethereal and Quiet play with the lighting of the image, giving the photo an almost washed-out feel, almost like an overexposed Polaroid, giving it a slightly vintage look.

What’s even more interesting is that you can customize the style by adjusting the tone and color of each individual style. It feels much more personalized than ever, as you’re essentially creating a custom color and tone profile for your camera. It feels like you have more creative control over your images, even if you have no background in photography or photo editing.

I hope Apple offers more skin undertone options in the future. Many of the current choices look very similar. It’s not immediately obvious that you can change the tone and color by tapping on the style you’ve chosen.
Here are some of my favorite photography styles.

vibrant

Stark Black & White

quiet

snug

gold

Photo styles are another sign that mobile phone photography is becoming more and more customizable.

If there’s one thing that’s become clear over the past two years, it’s that the smartphone giants want to give us more control over the photos we take on our phones—for better or worse.

We now live in an age where we can erase objects from images, add objects that never existed, pick a favorite expression and add it to another image, and resize or change elements of a photo. I’m mainly referring to the AI-based photo editing tools that have appeared on Google’s Pixel phones over the past two years, which seem designed to help you capture the perfect moment, even if it didn’t happen. (Apple is also releasing a tool called Clean Up that removes parts of an image as part of Apple Intelligence.)

Perhaps that is why Photographic Styles resonates with me so much. It also wants to help you create the perfect image, but in a much different way, more creatively and without distorting reality. You could argue that changing the tone and color profile is also unauthentic and contributes to the pursuit of the perfect photo regardless of what the actual scene looks like.

But I think the idea of ​​taking an existing photo and applying more color or contrast to it is much more appealing than changing the scene itself, so I think Apple is onto something with the photo style.

Is Photographic Styles worth buying a new iPhone for? No. It’s an underrated feature, but when combined with other upgrades, the iPhone 16’s camera will feel like a leap forward for those coming from previous iPhones.