What are the best smartphone camera apps for underwater photography? We believe that smartphones will be the future of underwater photography. Along with a great camera in your phone, you need an app that provides the controls you need for getting great pictures underwater.
If you have experience with using your smartphone camera in a waterproof housing for getting great pictures while snorkeling, share with us what app you use and what features you like about it.
I have been using the Divevolk Seatouch 4 Max housing with my iPhone 13 Pro Max for two years now, and I agree that phone cameras are the future of underwater photography. One of several advantages of the Divevolk housing is that it allows use of the touchscreen underwater, which in turn means that you can use any camera app you want. For iPhone users, I will offer the following suggestions, based on my own experience. There are also informative reviews and comparisons on the web which you can search for.
The native Apple camera app is quite good, but has some shortcomings for underwater use. First is the lack of manual controls. In particular, you cannot adjust white balance to achieve the most realistic colors. The auto white balance works well at depths under ten feet (that’s the depth of the object you are shooting, not yourself), but deeper than that the red colors are increasingly lost, and everything will have a blue cast. If you are shooting in Pro Raw mode (for photos) or ProRes (for videos) this is not critical, because you can adjust the white balance afterwards. But this requires post-processing in editing software.
The second shortcoming in the Apple camera app is that you must change a handful of settings to be able to unlock and access the phone’s functions underwater, since you cannot operate the phone’s external buttons. It’s not difficult, but it’s annoying.
I shoot mostly video, and can recommend two camera apps for that: Black Magic and UWACAM. Black Magic is developed by the maker of the very successful (and very expensive) Black Magic video cameras, is quite mature, and is free. UWACAM was developed specifically for use with the Divevolk housing, is only a few months from initial release, and has a subscription fee. Both apps have Auto modes and Pro modes, which offer manual control of virtually every setting, including white balance. Both have the ability to set and lock white balance using a grey card (or a white object). For those willing to edit their clips, both can use the H.265 codec combined with Log color space, which results in excellent quality which rivals ProRes, without the huge file sizes.
Three features differentiate the UWACAM app. First, it uses only buttons on the touchscreen, whereas many of the pro controls on the Black Magic app use sliders, which are more difficult to operate through the housing membrane. Second, UWACAM has a dedicated button that turns the screen on and off, without locking the phone. This means you can eliminate most of the pre-dive setting changes described above. Hurrah! And third, it has an optional AI feature which can automatically adjust colors based on conditions, either at the time of capture, or afterwards. Because I edit all my videos and photos, I have not experimented with this feature yet.
For still photos, I can recommend several alternatives to the native Apple camera app. The UWACAM app can be used for photos as well as videos, with the same controls and advantages listed above and is now what I intend to use. Prior to that, I used the Lightroom camera app, which is built into Lightroom Mobile, and is free. It can shoot JPEG and Raw (in Adobe’s DNG wrapper). It offers manual control over most settings, and you can do minor editing on your phone in the same app. The Halide app has a large following among serious land photographers, but I have never used it.
And finally, if you are at all curious about the exciting future of computational photography, I encourage you to try the experimental Project Indigo app from Adobe, which is currently free. In a nutshell, it merges multiple frames (up to 30) to optimize dynamic range, focus, exposure, etc. I have only limited experience with this app, all on land, but I am impressed so far.
If you have any questions, let me know. This is an exciting time for phone camera photography, where the competition is fierce. On the hardware front, sensors are getting larger, lenses are becoming more versatile, etc. But I think the real magic is happening on the software front.