Apple tunes the iPhone camera for the person who will never open Settings, and for them the defaults are sensible. But a few of those defaults quietly trade image quality for convenience — softer files when you shoot quickly, crooked horizons you fix by cropping, exposure choices that evaporate every time the app closes. These five changes take about two minutes, cost nothing, and improve nearly every photo you take from here on.
1. Turn on the Grid — and the Level
The rule-of-thirds grid is the cheapest composition upgrade in photography, and it ships switched off. With it on, horizons land on a line instead of drifting through the middle of the frame, and subjects settle onto an intersection instead of wherever your thumb happened to point. The horizontal level is now its own toggle: a broken white line appears when you tilt a degree or two off-axis and snaps solid yellow the moment you are straight. That is the difference between an architectural shot that looks intentional and one you rotate later, cropping away pixels you paid for.
- Open Settings → Camera.
- Under Composition, switch on Grid.
- Switch on Level as well — the indicator only appears when you are within a few degrees of straight, so it never clutters the viewfinder.
2. Turn off Prioritize Faster Shooting
This setting lets the camera cut processing quality when you tap the shutter rapidly, so it can keep pace with your finger. The cost is real: the multi-frame work that makes iPhone photos look the way they do — Deep Fusion detail, Smart HDR tone mapping — gets abbreviated on exactly the frames that needed it most. Fast taps usually mean motion: kids, pets, a street scene unfolding. Find it at Settings → Camera → Prioritize Faster Shooting and switch it off. On any recent iPhone you will not miss the speed, and you will keep the fine texture and cleaner shadows.
3. Confirm you are shooting at 24 megapixels
On iPhone 15 and later, the main camera can save 24 MP photos instead of 12 — double the detail at a file size of roughly 3 MB versus about 2 MB, a bargain by any measure. It is the default on new phones, but settings carried over from an older device or a well-meaning storage purge can leave it at 12. Check under Settings → Camera → Formats → Photo Mode and set it to 24 MP. Worth knowing: the camera still drops to 12 MP automatically for Night Mode, flash, macro, and burst shots, so you get smaller files exactly where the extra resolution could not have helped anyway.
4. Leave Lens Correction alone
Lens Correction is on by default, and it should stay that way — this one earns its place on the list because so many viral settings videos tell you to disable it. The toggle corrects the natural distortion of the front and Ultra Wide cameras; without it, faces at the edges of a group selfie stretch sideways and straight lines bow near the borders of the frame. If you have ever followed a tip thread and cannot remember what you changed, take ten seconds to confirm it at Settings → Camera → Lens Correction.
5. Make your choices stick with Preserve Settings
By default the Camera app forgets almost everything when it closes. Dial in a deliberate exposure adjustment, pick a Photographic Style, switch off Live Photo — reopen the app a minute later and you are back to factory behavior. Preserve Settings is the fix, and it is the most underrated screen in the entire Camera menu.
- Open Settings → Camera → Preserve Settings.
- Switch on Creative Controls to keep your aspect ratio, filter, and depth choices between sessions.
- Switch on Exposure Adjustment so a deliberate exposure bias survives until you change it.
- Switch on Night Mode so the camera respects your choice to leave it off.
- Leave Camera Mode off unless you want the app to reopen in Video or Portrait instead of Photo.