iPhone 18 Pro Camera Upgrades: Variable Aperture and Pro Controls

Apple has big camera improvements coming to its newly announced iPhone 18 Pro. Speaking during the annual September iPhone event on Wednesday morning, Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide iPhone Product Marketing Kaiann Drance revealed that the new iPhone 18 Pro will feature a 48-megapixel main camera with variable aperture, so that you can control light intake and depth of field yourself.

“One of the fundamental pillars of photography is aperture,” Drance said. “To create variable aperture, we developed a system of six laser-cut blades, each thinner than a human hair.”

The six blades are made from a polymer composite, and have a rotor mechanism that controls movements and a customized lens “to ensure image quality at multiple apertures.”

The aperture automatically adjusts based on your lighting — if you’re in a dark area, it’ll open to let in 50% more light, for example.

There’s also new camera software.

“You can now get stunning cinematic mode effects from regular video after you capture, and it now supports 60 frames per second for this half-speed effect. Time-lapse now offers 4K resolution in Dolby Vision HDR for breathtaking videos, and Audio Mix has updated algorithms for higher-quality voice recordings, and now supports music,” Apple said.

Apple also introduced Pro Controls for the iPhone 18 Pro. It lets you customize your camera and photo-taking experience and gives you more manual control options, like changing white balance, using a histogram to check exposure levels, manually adjusting the aperture between four options, changing the shutter speed and adjusting skin texture.

A new AI-powered addition is smart focus tracking.

“We’re also making it easier to maintain focus on moving subjects,” Apple said. “Smart focus tracking uses on-device AI models to lock onto a subject and maintain detail, even if they change depth or exit and re-enter the frame.”

Also in relation to AI, a new Apple Reference Image will help you prove the authenticity of photos taken using the iPhone 18 Pro — like a “digital negative,” Apple said — and show they were not generated by AI.

“Apple Reference Image starts in the most secure way possible with the sensor, the new main camera securely signs photo data at a pixel level right at the time of capture,” Apple said. “Private cloud compute develops the sign data into an unalterable image that you can view in the Photos app.”

You can preorder the iPhone 18 Pro on Sept. 12, and it will be available on Sept. 18.