iOS 17 Camera App Can Help Straighten Your Shooting Angle

[MacRumors]

The iOS Camera app offers a few optional settings to help you line up your shots, most notably a Grid that can be overlaid on the screen to help apply the rule of thirds.

And for the last few years, the Grid mode has included a somewhat-hidden leveling feature for top-down photos, popping up a floating crosshair to help make sure you're lined up properly above your subject.

With iOS 17, Apple is enhancing the camera leveling functionality, separating it out from the Grid mode to its own option and expanding it to include a horizontal level for more traditional straight-on photos.

Turning the Level option on will pop up a broken horizontal line on the screen when your iPhone senses you're lining up for a straight-on shot and you tilt your device slightly out of horizontal. The line appears white while your phone is out of level and then turns yellow once you achieve a level orientation to indicate success.

The leveling pop-up only appears for a brief time and only within a narrow range of angles close to horizontal (in either portrait or landscape orientation), so it's not intrusively popping up when you're intentionally trying to take a photo at an angle.

The new option appears to be off by default if you don't have Grid mode turned on before upgrading, but is on by default if you're already a Grid mode user. The option can be toggled in the Camera section of the Settings app.

The new Level feature is just one of a number of enhancements to photos in iOS 17, including one-tap cropping, pet recognition, animated sticker creation, and Visual Look Up for recipes from photos.

(Thanks, Jake!)

Article Link: iOS 17 Camera App Can Help Straighten Your Shooting Angle

 

[psxp]

this will be a handy feature

 

[anthogag]

One cool feature could be to grab the object them move the camera to change the background in real time.

 

[phill85]

All of these ‘small’ enhancements are really adding up!

EDIT: I should add, the other epic features so far are crossfade, and downloaded offline maps. Finally when flying and in airplane mode with no Wi-Fi it’ll still appear as normal!

 

[Cheesehead Dave]

Nice to see. Halide's camera app does this, and there's a very subtle haptic tap when you're leveled out.

 

[PsykX]

Apple is clearly behind in Natural Language AI (compared to ChatGPT), but there is AI in many places in iOS.

But this. This is one of the nice things they're good at with AI. Very handy, I know I will use it a lot !

 

[aroom]

this is a good feature available in VSCO since 10 years

 

[jezbd1997]

we need a camera app redesign. it’s been how long now. app feels like a toy with the slider and how many times has everyone accidentally changed the mode

 

[dampfnudel]

this is a good feature available in VSCO since 10 years

Third-party apps have often “inspired” Apple. I bet there’s a team at Apple whose primary mission is to download third-party apps and see what “new” features they can farm from them for future iOS updates.

 

[erikkfi]

They copy features from Halide instead of letting us change the default camera app and launch Halide from the lock screen. Great.

 

[ProwlingTiger]

They copy features from Halide instead of letting us change the default camera app and launch Halide from the lock screen. Great.

This is far from a Halide-only feature. It's more like Apple is copying from virtually every other camera maker.

 

[seinman]

I love the people like “OMG stolen from [whatever] software!!!!!1111~~” as if leveling indicators haven’t been part of photography and built into cameras for decades. I had a film SLR camera in the late 90s that had a light that came on when I was holding it level.

 

[msackey]

I don't know how this could be done but I would love the camera to assist with taking pictures of drawings and painting hanging in museums and the like. I find that often when I am taking such pictures, not only do I need assistance with the x- and y-axis, but also z-axis (that is how far I am tilting the camera in or out).

Better yet, if there could be a post-processing tool that would deal with levelling out all x-, y-, and z-axis issues so the picture can look as straight as possible, barring issues with lens distortion.

 

[Mousse]

The leveling pop-up only appears for a brief time and only within a narrow range of angles close to horizontal (in either portrait or landscape orientation), so it's not intrusively popping up when you're intentionally trying to take a photo at an angle.

Noice.🥰 It'd be annoying for the line to pop up when you're going for the dramatic Dutch tilt.😎

 

[tehabe]

One feature I really missed when I switched from the Pixel 5 to iPhone.

 

[spencereeves]

Glad to see this new little improvement! It seemed like every other camera app (even Snapchat) had this level feature except the native Camera app until now!

 

[svish]

Will be very useful. These small improvements are really good.

 

[_Spinn_]

Finally! Very glad to see this.