These camera apps give you more control over the iPhone 18 Pro’s aperture

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.

One of the questionable limitations of the iPhone 18 Pro’s new main camera with a variable aperture is that you’re limited to just four settings in the native iOS’ camera app in manual mode: f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4. Those same limitations are also in place when the app is adjusting the iris itself in Auto aperture mode, but it turns out that’s not a strict limitation of the iPhone’s camera hardware. Apple’s SDK allows third party camera apps to implement more granular control of the aperture.

BlackMagic Design’s well-featured and still completely free BlackMagic Camera app for iOS was one of the first third-party options to introduce support for the iPhone 18 Pro’s adjustable aperture. But instead of just four stop settings, the app offers 10 presets with additional options in-between the settings available in iOS’ camera. The iPhoneographers YouTube channel tested the new functionality in version 3.5 of the app last week and while they describe it as “pretty buggy” the app has since been updated to version 3.5.1 with “general performance and stability improvements.”

Yesterday, Moment followed suit with an announcement on X that its $12.99 Moment Pro Camera II app has also been updated to support the iPhone 18 Pro’s variable aperture. You can adjust the aperture from f/1.48 to f/4.0 in 1/3 stop increments giving you 10 presets like Blackmagic’s app, which is the same approach as most digital cameras take. Given the small sensor size of the iPhone 18 Pro you may be hard pressed to see a difference in background blur and focus depth when comparing photos with f-stops different by just 1/3 of a stop, but more control is never a bad thing.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.