If you own an iPhone 13 or newer, you have access to Apple’s Photographic Styles. Essentially, these are built-in looks—like the Instagram filters of old but more subtle—that adjust picture parameters such as color tone, saturation, and contrast. You can apply them to your photos on an ad hoc basis, or you can even set one that you especially love as your default style.

On older (pre–iPhone 16) models, these looks are relatively limited, giving you only four options to choose from in addition to the Standard look: Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. You can tweak each of them to your liking by adjusting tone and warmth.

Accessing the styles is easy: You can choose your default style through the Camera app’s settings, and you can also cycle through styles while shooting by tapping the ^ icon at the top of the screen inside the Camera app and then hitting the three-square icon that appears above the shutter button.

The iPhone 16 series expands the Photographic Styles palette with 14 choices of styles in addition to the default Standard style, and it lets you fine-tune each of them with a dual-axis tone-and-color graph, plus a secondary slider that ramps up or limits the intensity of the effect.

Rules are made to be broken in photography, just as in anything else. But one photographic rule that will help you make better photos—especially as a beginner—is the rule of thirds.

In short, the rule of thirds suggests that an image should be divided into nine equally sized parts with a grid consisting of two vertical and two horizontal lines, and that you should compose your images so that the objects of interest are positioned where those lines intersect.

You can try imagining the lines, or if you want to make things easier on yourself, you can go to your iPhone’s settings, choose the Camera app in the list of apps, and turn on the Grid and Level settings. The former superimposes the lines right on the screen, while the latter will let you know when you’re holding your camera just right, so you don’t have to rotate the image later to get a level horizon.

The iPhone has a reliable metering system, and thanks to its automatic use of HDR techniques, the images it produces tend to be evenly exposed. But if you’re shooting creatively, rather than journalistically, you don’t always want a perfect exposure.

You can intentionally underexpose a scene to heighten drama, for instance, or overexpose to capture a subject in shadow. And your iPhone’s Camera app has two separate built-in tools to do that.

First, you can change the camera’s exposure compensation by tapping to focus and then sliding your finger up and down next to the focusing box that appears where you tapped. Alternatively, you can swipe up from the bottom of the viewfinder window to expose the Camera app’s extra controls and tap the ± symbol to bring up a more traditional exposure-compensation slider. Sliding left, toward a negative value, darkens the image; moving right and positive lightens it.

A less commonly used but equally clutch feature is the iPhone’s auto-exposure and autofocus (AE/AF) lock. This setting lets you tap and hold on a subject to ensure that the exposure and focus information don’t change when you reposition the camera and the subject moves in the frame.

To engage this feature, simply press and hold on the subject you want to lock until the AE/AF Lock indicator appears. You can tap again anywhere in the frame to reset it.

If you get close enough to your subject, the iPhone’s wide and telephoto lenses can create a decent amount of background blur in the normal camera mode. But for really creamy-smooth blur (aka bokeh), it’s best to enable Portrait mode.

This mode uses the phone’s lidar sensor to determine how far your subject is from the camera and then gradually blurs out everything behind and in front of your subject to make their face stand out in the image. The results aren’t perfect—you can still sometimes see rough edges around hair, for instance—but they look remarkably similar to a shot from a DSLR or mirrorless camera.

On newer iPhones, you can enable a Camera app setting called “Portraits in Photo Mode.” This mode makes the camera automatically capture depth information if it detects a person or pet in frame, even when you’re not using Portrait mode. That way, you can blast away in the regular Photo mode and then choose to use Portrait mode after the fact if it makes sense.

You can tap anywhere in the frame on a Portrait-mode photo to set the point of focus, and you can adjust the amount of blur applied to the background. Simply edit a Portrait-mode photo, tap the Portrait icon at the bottom of the editing screen, and then choose your f-stop on the slider above. A lower number, such as f/2.8, makes the background blurrier; a higher number, such as f/8, limits the amount of blur.

Since the introduction of the iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone owners have been able to take great-looking macro shots using the ultra-wide camera. The only downside: By default, the camera switches to macro mode whenever you get within a certain distance of your subject.

That automatic switching can be annoying if you want to keep using the primary camera to get beautifully blurred backgrounds at close distance. But thankfully, there’s a solution: Simply go into the Camera app’s settings and turn on the Macro Control setting.

Now, instead of automatically switching, the Camera app will give you a toggle to change between macro and regular shooting.

Most people know the disappointment of scrambling to hit the shutter button only to miss a crucial moment—your kid blowing out the candles on their cake, for instance, or your dog making a silly face, or a Formula 1 car blasting by you at the track. But did you know that your iPhone camera has a secret burst mode that can capture a constant stream of photos at 10 frames per second?

It’s easy to use, too: Instead of tapping the shutter button, simply swipe it to the left and hold for as long as you want to keep shooting. When you’re done, the burst will show up as a single entry in your photo roll; tap the Burst icon in the upper left to filter through your shots and choose your favorites, and the app will offer to automatically delete the rest.

If you’d prefer a physical button for burst mode, go into the Camera settings and enable “Use Volume Up for Burst.” Then, when you have the Camera app open, you can press and hold the iPhone’s volume-up button to capture a burst of photos.

The iPhone turns out good-looking photos in many circumstances, but tweaking exposure, contrast, and color can elevate your shots from good to great.

You can use Apple’s own editing software, which is built into the Camera app, or you can use a third-party editing app, but either way, taking a few minutes to edit your photos will almost always make them look better—and truer to your vision.

To edit photos in the iPhone Camera app, pull up the photo you want to edit and then tap the three-slider icon at the bottom of the screen. From there, tap the Adjust icon to change things such as brightness, sharpness, contrast, and saturation. Tapping the photo in this mode shows the original version to help you quickly see how your edits have changed the image.

On the iPhone 16 series, you can also toggle between different Photographic Styles even after shooting, as well as crop and rotate your image or correct for vertical and horizontal image distortion.

This article was edited by Phil Ryan and Erica Ogg.