Many of them offer a Wide camera lens, HDR setting, and exposure control. Expect even the most robust photography apps to run smoothly and quickly, making photo work more efficient. The large Liquid Retina display with LED backlighting further enhances the user experience. The iPad Pro 11” offers the same powerful processor, crystal-clear resolution, as well as rear and front cameras.
Large photo storage allows photographers to keep original high-resolution images on the iPad. This means instant access to the collection anytime the photos are needed to view, share, or edit. It also makes it easier to create print projects with native Apple apps, like Motif. Adobe Lightroom – The embedded camera in this app lets photographers take RAW pictures on the iPad.
Shooting RAW produces the highest quality image files and makes editing a breeze. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is also one of the best photo editing apps for iOS.
Camera+ 2 – Using this app’s long shutter speed (up to 30 seconds) helps capture action shots and waterfalls with more clarity. It also has a macro mode for shooting closeups and a built-in portrait editor.
This feature allows control of the level of background blur in portraits. It’s also uniquely designed to quickly transition from autofocus to manual mode by simply swiping left or right. It has everyone’s favorite functions: the ability to control shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and exposure.
Like Camera+2 and VSCO, ProCamera lets you shoot in RAW format and supports JPEG, TIFF, and HEIF.
A Color Story – This free-to-download app has over 100 different filters that instantly change the tone of photos. Temperature, saturation, brightness, contrast, and other features can all be quickly adjusted.
After perfecting the basic settings, add a lens flare or colored mist to the photo. Users can tap into its collection of professional-grade photo effects and presets. As for actual editing tools, Photoshop Fix offers everything most photographers require. The Adjustments module can be used for making global changes to exposure, contrast, and saturation. Its filter selection assists in enhancing photos with specific art styles. The photo editing app even permits users to upload their creative ideas.
Snapseed – This app was specifically designed to edit RAW photos. Snapseed is stocked with photo effects, like a vintage overlay or grainy film. Apple’s latest iPads have dual, high-resolution cameras and 4K video capture.
A telephoto lens attachment is best when it’s necessary to keep a distance – as required in nature photography.
An LED flash attachment, for instance, adds brilliant soft white light – perfect for professional photography and videos. If wildlife photography ideas are in mind, make sure to have a sturdy iPad stand on hand. While the iPad is easier to shoot with than a compact iPhone camera, it still needs stabilizing. Many of them are sold as kits, with a few lenses, a light source, a protective case, and a tripod stand. Even though the iPad Pro promises up to 10 hours of battery life, don’t leave home without a backup plan.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, professional photographers use external cameras with their laptops and tablets all the time.
In some cases, photographers can even make adjustments to exposure and lighting straight from the tablet. This is a common practice with DSLR users, who use an iPad to edit, share, or create photo projects.
Both models feature a USB-C connector, which opens up the connectivity options. By using a USB cable to tether a camera to an iPad, you create a hard-wired connection. Most new mirrorless cameras also use USB-C. That means they can directly connect to the DSLR using the USB-C-to-USB-C cable that came with the iPad. The adapter plugs into the iPad’s Lightning port and allows connection to the tablet via standard USB cables.
The larger screen paired with the best iPad editing apps results in more precise revisions that are harder to achieve on an iPhone. When ready to make the transfer, select the photos, and hit the Share icon. When moving over photos, create a separate folder on iPad and give it a descriptive title. If there are thousands of photos, consider saving them to an external hard drive.
It also allows users to pull photos to the iPad in smaller groups, as needed. If the iPad has anything less than 256 GB, consider saving photos to an external hard drive. You’ll know exactly which album to call on when pulling photos into a favorite program. It is necessary to either switch to Live Photos mode or invest in an iPad photography stand to keep the device stable.
Simply swipe right and left on the iPad camera screen to switch modes. High Dynamic Range (HDR) is a feature that helps get quality shots in high-contrast situations.
Scroll to the Camera section, and toggle the Auto/Smart HDR slider to the Off position (gray).
Practice using the features, download a few editing apps, and hone your skills. Don’t lose those photos in the vast chasm of your iPad’s memory or on iCloud storage.
How to Improve Your iPhone or iPad Camera
While the device’s huge screen can make it easier to snap a fantastic photo, the camera lags behind the one found in the iPhone. This setting tells the iPhone or iPad to snap multiple photos and merge them to create a high dynamic range (HDR) photograph. The Magic Wand analyzes a photo and adjusts lighting and color contrast. The Crop tool removes unwanted portions of a photo and can be used to rotate the image.
Live Photos are small video clips the phone captures when you take a photograph on a newer iPhone or iPad. Along with creating moving pictures, you can choose a main photograph from the video to fix defects like an awkward facial expression, a blink of the eyes, or a just-missed shot.
The Live Photos function is available on iPhones 6S and later and 9.7-inch iPad Pros and later, running iOS 9 or newer. When editing a Live Photo, the bottom of the screen shows every frame the camera captured. A lens also boosts functionality on an older device by improving the camera without the extra cost of a new smartphone or tablet. Another good source for iPad camera lens and accessories is B&H Foto & Electronics, and an Amazon search yields several compatible lenses as well.
Where, How, Tips, and More
Most people, even if they have an iPad, don’t use the camera app to its full potential. It is small, unlike a regular camera, and that’s what makes iPads so thin and portable.
If you’re trying to use Zoom, Google Meet, or other remote-work applications and wondering why your iPad doesn’t show your face, here is the solution:
When your Zoom call is active, touch the screen to make the controls appear.
The maximum resolution that the iPad’s rear camera offers is 12 MP. It’s a great little feature to catch up with friends and family while also moving around the house.
It is also the only iPad to have a flash and a LiDAR scanner, which helps in keeping accurate focus and also unlocks some amazing AR experiences. All iPad cameras will work with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and other video conferencing apps.
If you are having problems using your iPad’s camera with Zoom, then I would recommend reading the entire article. With iOS 14 and iPad OS 14, Apple announced a feature called App Library. Reaching for the shutter button with your thumb or any other fingers doesn’t feel like finger-gymnastics. You might have experienced this yourself if you’ve tried taking a picture with your iPad — the shutter button is hard to reach.
Don’t you hate when you’re taking pictures of your family, and every time someone ends up with their eyes closed? Next time you’re clicking pictures on your iPad, as soon as you hit the shutter button, don’t let go. Hold your finger on the shutter, and your iPad will keep taking pictures in quick succession.
After a couple of seconds, you can let go, and then you can head over to your gallery and find the pictures where everyone is smiling and has their eyes open at the same time.
Instead of keeping all the images, it will ask you to select the best picture out of the lot and remove the rest from the gallery. iPads (and iPhones) have plenty of other features in the camera app that can be used creatively.
While this video is created on an iPhone, your iPad will have similar features in the camera app, namely, timelapse mode, panorama, timer, and slow motion. It lets users simulate a depth of field and also offers some interesting lighting options post taking a picture. Most people never look into the video settings of their iPads, and let me tell you, they are missing out. By default, most newer iPads are set to record video at 30 Frames Per Second. By changing the framerate of your iPad’s video, you’ll be able to achieve some interesting effects. We’ve done a dedicated article on the subject, so make sure to check it out here Best iPhone Photo Apps
Also, if you have a friend or colleague who struggles with their iPad camera, make sure to share this article with them as well.
Using an iPad for Photography Workflows: A Complete Guide – The Sweet Setup
For years, it seemed Apple wasn’t sure what they wanted it to be: a serious computer for “real work”, a basic consumption device, an artist-focused creative tool, or even something in between. Their answer, which we’re finally seeing take shape, is that the iPad is meant to be the center of a modular computer system that adapts to the needs of its users. Happily, many of the updates feel custom-tailored to the needs of photographers using an iPad, and as someone who’s inhabited that role for years now — I haven’t owned a laptop in nearly a decade — I’m thrilled. To be practical, an iPad photography workflow has to encompass everything from shooting, importing, culling, editing, and the final export.
Our team here at The Sweet Setup put together a short list of our must-have, most-used apps for taking and editing photos on iPhone and iPad. We’ve gained the ability to directly import photos into Lightroom, we have cursor support built in, we have a desktop-class web browsing experience, we can connect to external displays, access and use external storage, and the hardware line-up is more diversified and generous with functionality across the price spectrum. It was a cumbersome workflow at a crucial juncture in the process, and I know many photographers wrote off the iPad as a result, asserting (very reasonably) that it was too much of a hassle to be worth it. It’s also worth noting that macOS features like Sidecar have opened up new ways of using an iPad as part of your desktop workflow too — without having to involve any third-party apps.
You can use it instead of a Wacom or similar drawing tablet for pen-based retouching, which remains a staple of professional portraiture workflows. Adobe, besides bolstering Lightroom’s import and file management capabilities, also launched Photoshop for iPadOS just in time for its 30th birthday. They’ve already made strides toward bringing it up to feature parity with the desktop version, and it won’t be long now before the full spectrum of tools and capabilities is fully cross-platform, including Lightroom / Photoshop round-tripping. With so many critical limitations being lifted at the operating system level, third-party developers are finally able to unleash their ambitions and build powerful, professional-grade apps for iPadOS.
Keeping a Shot List: A checklist in my notes or task management app helps me stay on top of what I need to capture. I tend to assemble mood boards with new clients, often using a mutually-familiar tool like Pinterest so that everyone can contribute and refer back to the collection. The iPad has copies of any documentation I need clients to sign (like model releases) and an Apple Pencil makes it a breeze to get that done without worrying about printouts.
This popular app is designed to help photographers plan the perfect shot, most famously by letting you plot the trajectories of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky and giving you the tools to find out when and where you need to be to get everything lined up exactly the way you imagined.
A robust AR view keeps the process feeling intuitive and futuristic, and the app includes a number of calculators to help you nail the right settings for stars, find your hyper-focal distance, choose the right time lapse interval, and more. Once you’ve connected to your camera using its onboard Wi-Fi, Cascable takes over and gives you a remote live view, with control over exposure settings, shutter release, etc. Cascable and PhotoPills are perfect examples of how an iPad can be a useful companion in the pre-production and execution phases of a shoot, but the real question — and the area where iOS devices have traditionally struggled to keep up with a professional workflow — is what happens next. Most egregiously, some don’t allow the import of raw files from your camera, which is a complete non-starter for the way many photographers work.
As of this moment, only Olympus and Canon offer the ability to wirelessly import raw files through their respective apps. Many have begun to make use of Bluetooth connections as well to simplify pairing, or to send GPS location data from your phone to your camera while using less power. The lack of raw support and slow speeds (Sony is a notable exception to this rule — their app transfers JPGs over very quickly) preclude me from using this option if I can avoid it. The other side of Cascable’s value proposition is that it can use its connection to import photos from your camera to the iPad in whatever format you want: raw, JPG, or both.
As of its major version 5 update, Cascable also supports direct USB connections for faster transfers, and an overhauled automatic import feature. These new “Storage Links” are like recipes for what kinds of image files to pull off of your connected camera (raw only, JPG only, or both). There have been a few portable drives with built-in SD card slots, but the one I own and have personal experience with is the Western Digital MyPassport Wireless Pro. Other manufacturers have also developed similar devices, including Lacie’s DJI Copilot, and the expensive but powerful Gnarbox.
No matter what option you choose, the workflow is simple: you plug your SD card in and it automatically backs it up to the drive (no need to have your iPad around). In other words, I’m relying on the drive primarily as a backup, storing it separately from my used SD cards when I pack my gear.
It’s easy to get swept up in the geekery of using powerful third-party apps to edit and manage photos, so I just wanted to take a moment to dispel the notion that this is somehow necessary. I can’t count the number of times I’ve imported new photos, only to have them immediately offloaded to iCloud, requiring me to re-download them minutes later just to move them to another service or to show somebody. This general lack of transparency and control over the files means that you may be forced to eschew the “Optimize Storage” option and keep all your photos saved locally. You can flag and rate photos, create folders and albums, use the AI-powered Sensei capabilities for search and face recognition, and decide per-album whether you want to keep a local copy of the full-resolution files or just lower resolution Smart Previews. All of this syncs seamlessly to the desktop versions of Lightroom (CC or Classic), beaming your original raw files to the cloud for safekeeping and easy access from any of your devices. Google has put the full brunt of its vast computational intelligence behind their Photos product, allowing it to provide natural language searching, automatic edits, sharing recommendations, and more.
Like all other third-party apps, it has limited background uploading capabilities, so it can be a bit of a hassle to get an initial sync completed. It provides intelligent automation to help you sort through your shots, plus the world’s most capable search to make sure you can always find the image you’re looking for.
It also has a special trick up its sleeve: Google has introduced the ability to share your library with a spouse or family member.
What we’re left with is an import and file management experience that’s either similar to what you would get on a Mac, or effectively identical if you’re a Lightroom user.
Filters are effectively development presets, many of which seek to emulate the look of a classic analog film stock, or a popular movie color grade. When I’m not interested in detailed manual editing, or I just want to quickly experiment with different looks, there are two main apps I turn to: VSCO and Pixelmator Photo. VSCO is a well-known camera and filter app, and the iPad version provides an expansive canvas for working on photos. VSCO’s main downside remains its interface (it’s icon-heavy to the point of obscurity) and its workflow, which requires importing shots into the app’s storage container before editing, and then exporting them back out once you’re done. This can either be accomplished from a series of ML-enhanced filters, or you can selectively toggle an ML-calculated starting point for each adjustment module in the app for a more granular approach. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the app applied its smarts in a heavy-handed way for effect, but it’s often quite subtle and I haven’t yet run into a situation where I thought the results were garish. When the time comes to do some serious editing work, I turn to Darkroom, Lightroom Mobile, Affinity Photo, and — most recently — Photoshop. Alongside its own set of filters, it has a full suite of core editing tools, including curves, HSL, exposure and contrast adjustments, grain, sharpening, and a sophisticated way to handle photos shot using portrait mode that have depth information embedded.
Furthermore, its export options include features for copying hashtag sets for Instagram, putting your photos into adjustable frames, and even watermarking them. Recently, Darkroom launched an update that unlocks the use of all its tools for video files as well, instantly transforming it into a powerful color grading app with real-time processing and previewing.
This means that, eventually, even the most sophisticated retouching workflows will be possible on the iPad, and may even be superior to their desktop equivalents thanks to the immediacy of the Apple Pencil. All of the editing apps above make it simple to export your finished work back to wherever it came from, either as a copy or as a new version of the original file. Print is probably my favorite outcome for the photos I take these days, so the inability to get from panel to paper in a serious way is unfortunate. Print is probably my favorite outcome for the photos I take these days, so the inability to get from panel to paper in a serious way is unfortunate.
You can directly manipulate items on screen, make precise adjustments with the Apple Pencil, and do it all from the comfort of your couch, the seat of an airplane on the way to your next shoot, or wherever life takes you. With the advent of cursor support and external display connectivity, you can also choose to use it as the center of a desktop-like setup that happens to run iOS instead of macOS. The advantage will be felt most keenly by photographers who need to stay mobile, for whom a compact and long-lasting device like the iPad can serve as a nimble but capable companion for work and play. But the iPad benefits from its limitations — iOS and its apps were designed from the ground up to fit a modern, mobile lifestyle. The pace of improvement, especially in the past year, leaves me feeling very confident about the future of the iPad in a professional photography context.
How An iPad Can Improve Your Photography
You can check out his personal website to learn more about Jeff’s work, and the newest tool in your camera bag — the iPad. It’s lighter than a laptop (especially the iPad mini), offers a great screen for previewing images and presenting a portfolio, and, thanks to a growing assortment of photo apps, lets you edit images, rate and tag photos, share shots quickly, and even control cameras remotely. An iPad can’t completely replace a personal computer, as I’ll discuss shortly, but it serves as an essential tool in your camera bag. If you’ve ever hauled a book of prints to client meetings, you’ll appreciate the ability to flip through photos on the iPad’s vibrant 9.7-inch screen. We’ve come a long way since it was necessary to wait several days for film to be developed, but often there’s still a delay between when you capture the shot and view it on a computer screen. ShutterSnitch helps me avoid dumb mistakes, too, such as displaying a message (that I configure) when I’ve forgotten to dial back the ISO after an earlier shoot.
The devices’ apps also include features such as exposure bracketing and focus stacking, an intervalometer, live view shooting, and review modes so someone can see what’s coming out of the camera without crowding the shot. You’ll find hundreds of apps in the iTunes Store that edit photos in one way or another, but most of the time I come back to a handful of editors. Apple’s iPhoto for iOS ($4.99) corrects exposure, color, white balance, and cropping, and can do a fairly good job fixing blemishes or wayward dust spots. Google’s Snapseed (free) is my favorite app for quick tonal corrections, while Photogene ($2.99) delivers Photoshop-style controls (sliders galore!).
A few apps, such as piRAWnha ($9.99), can edit raw files, but performance is slow and, in my experience, spotty, mostly due to the hardware limitations of the iPads, which include surprisingly little working memory.) The iPad is also handy for storing your camera and equipment manals and favorite photo books as PDFs or ebooks for easy reference without packing any paper.
I also like using TPE (The Photographer’s Ephemeris)($8.99), which shows you which direction the sun is shining at any given time during the day, no matter what location you choose.
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