Technologies

Got a New iPhone? Here’s How to Take Your Best Photos Ever

Whether you have an iPhone 14 Pro or an earlier phone, these pro tips will help you get your best ever photos.

We gave Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro a CNET Editors’ Choice award for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest was its awesome triple camera system. It can take beautiful photos that comfortably rival shots from the best camera phones out there, including Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra and Google’s recent Pixel 7 Pro. It takes great photos at night, too.

The iPhone’s powerful combination of gorgeous image quality, software processing and advanced features, such as Apple’s own ProRaw image format, means the iPhone’s images can look like they were taken on a professional-level camera.

Then there’s the wide array of amazing photo editing apps available on iOS that can help turn even a regular image into an eye-catching piece of digital art.

But simply having a great camera isn’t the only thing you need to take award-worthy images. Knowing the tricks of the trade will make the difference between coming home with some fun snaps and coming back with beautiful photos you can’t wait to print and frame for your wall.

Here, then, are my top tips for better images, techniques that I use every day as a professional photographer, from working with the light to using more-creative angles to polishing up your shots in editing apps. Many of these tips will apply on any recent phone you may have, including the base iPhone 14 or older models like the iPhone 13 and iPhone SE and even many Android phones. Looking for a new phone for taking photos? Check out our guide to the best camera phones.

Know when to use the different lenses

fishing boats — By switching to the ultrawide lens, I was able to capture this mooring rope as foreground interest, which ties the scene together.

Andrew Lanxon/CNET

It’s easy to stand in front of a picturesque scene and flick between the normal, super wide and zoomed views on the phone, but it’s more difficult to understand exactly why one might be better than the other for a particular composition. To figure it out, you need to take an extra moment to look at what’s important in the scene in front of you.

Is there a particular subject — perhaps a statue or an impressive building — that’s surrounded by lots of other elements like trees, sign posts or street lights? Using the iPhone 14 Pro’s 3x telephoto zoom here is a great way of isolating your subject and eliminating all those distractions. You may need to move back a bit and then zoom in to keep it in frame, but simplifying your scene like this will help your subject stand out.

But perhaps it’s those extra surrounding elements that really add to the scene and provide context for where you are. In that case, using the standard zoom will allow you to keep those items in the shot. Switching to the super wide view will capture even more of the surroundings. So to avoid your subject getting lost in the frame, you might want to move closer and find interesting foreground objects (a patch of flowers, a cool-looking rock) to add to the composition.

Revisit at different times of day

Edinburgh at sunset — Waiting until the evening for this shot really paid off, with an incredible fiery sunset.

Andrew Lanxon/CNET

Edinburgh on a cloudy afternoon — Only 10 minutes earlier, this was the same scene. Fine, but with none of that Edinburgh sunset drama.

Andrew Lanxon/CNET

The awesome low-light skills of the iPhone 14 Pro mean you’re not limited to only taking photos at midday when the sun is at its highest. Sunrises and sunsets will typically be darker, but may reward you with beautiful colors in the sky and great contrast in the light being cast. Landscape photographers know that getting up before dawn can often yield the best results and it’s something that’s always worth keeping in mind, if you can stomach the early rises.

If you’re willing to try a sunrise shoot at least once, visit the spots you’ve already shot and see how they’re transformed by the different light. It’s this that will separate your images from the hundreds of others on Instagram who just took a snap after their morning coffee.

Don’t be afraid of the dark

boats on a quay lit up at night — Night mode allowed me to capture a vibrant and sharp shot here, despite it being the middle of the night.

Andrew Lanxon/CNET

Don’t think that once the light goes altogether you need to stop shooting. The iPhone 14 Pro has one of the best night modes on any phone and can take astonishing night-time photos. City scenes, with car headlights, vibrant shop window displays and even festive holiday decorations can provide superb fodder for night shots. And don’t worry if it rains. Those wet streets will now reflect all of those lights, which can look amazing.

Check out our tutorial If you want to get even better results from your night-time phone photography.

Shoot in ProRaw, edit your shots later

a photo of two people climbing stairs, one version in color, the other in black and white — The original image on the left is a fair snap, but with a moody black and white edit it has a lot more atmosphere and works much better as a shot.

Andrew Lanxon/CNET

A few careful tweaks in editing apps like Adobe Lightroom can make all the difference between an everyday snap and a beautiful piece of art. Thankfully, Apple has made this even better with the introduction of ProRaw.

ProRaw is much the same as shooting in raw on regular DSLRs; it doesn’t save all the image data, allowing you to change white balance and alter colors much more accurately after you’ve taken your shot.

It also captures more detail in the shadows and highlights of your images, giving more scope for rescuing those bright skies with the highlights slider or bringing back a bit more visible detail in the darker shadows. You’ll see the raw button in the top corner of your screen when you’re in the camera, so make sure it doesn’t have a line through it if you’re taking an image that you know you’ll want to polish up later to look its best. You can edit JPEG images too. I’s just that you won’t have quite the same level of flexibility.

I use Adobe Lightroom Mobile for most of my phone editing. It’s a professional tool and has a lot of granular control over color and exposure, while also syncing my images to the cloud so I can pick up my edits later on my iPad or my desktop computer. If you don’t fancy the monthly fees, Google’s Snapseed is free and also has a lot of superb features for getting the best from your shots, including a variety of film effects that give some beautiful color toning to your photos.

If you want to get a bit more wild and creative, you should check out apps like Bazaart and PicsArt, which provide a variety of tools and effects for compositing images to turn them from photos into often bizarre pieces of modern art. Take a look at my roundup of image editing apps for more ideas.

Remember that there is no right or wrong way to edit your images, and applying creative effects doesn’t mean deleting the original file — so you can always go back and try again if you don’t like the result. My advice is to get a cup of tea, sit back in a comfy chair and spend some time playing with your editing app of choice and seeing what you can create. You may be surprised at what you can come up with, even from images you took some time ago.

Technologies

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Technologies

This $20K Humanoid Robot Promises to Tidy Your Home. But There Are Strings Attached

The new Neo robot from 1X is designed to do chores. It’ll need help from you — and from folks behind the curtain.

It stands 5 feet, 6 inches tall, weighs about as much as a golden retriever and costs near the price of a brand-new budget car.

This is Neo, the humanoid robot. It’s billed as a personal assistant you can talk to and eventually rely on to take care of everyday tasks, such as loading the dishwasher and folding laundry.

Neo doesn’t work cheap. It’ll cost you $20,000. And even then, you’ll still have to train this new home bot, and possibly need a remote assist as well.

If that sounds enticing, preorders are now open (for a mere $200 down). You’ll be signing up as an early adopter for what Neo’s maker, a California-based company called 1X, is calling a «consumer-ready humanoid.» That’s opposed to other humanoids under development from the likes of Tesla and Figure, which are, for the moment at least, more focused on factory environments.

Neo is a whole order of magnitude different from robot vacuums like those from Roomba, Eufy and Ecovacs, and embodies a long-running sci-fi fantasy of robot maids and butlers doing chores and picking up after us. If this is the future, read on for more of what’s in store.

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What the Neo robot can do around the house

The pitch from 1X is that Neo can do all manner of household chores: fold laundry, run a vacuum, tidy shelves, bring in the groceries. It can open doors, climb stairs and even act as a home entertainment system.

Neo appears to move smoothly, with a soft, almost human-like gait, thanks to 1X’s tendon-driven motor system that gives it gentle motion and impressive strength. The company says it can lift up to 154 pounds and carry 55 pounds, but it is quieter than a refrigerator. It’s covered in soft materials and neutral colors, making it look less intimidating than metallic prototypes from other companies.

The company says Neo has a 4-hour runtime. Its hands are IP68-rated, meaning they’re submersible in water. It can connect via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 5G. For conversation, it has a built-in LLM, the same sort of AI technology that powers ChatGPT and Gemini.

The primary way to control the Neo robot will be by speaking to it, just as if it were a person in your home.

Still, Neo’s usefulness today depends heavily on how you define useful. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern got an up-close look at Neo at 1X’s headquarters and found that, at least for now, it’s largely teleoperated, meaning a human often operates it remotely using a virtual-reality headset and controllers.

«I didn’t see Neo do anything autonomously, although the company did share a video of Neo opening a door on its own,» Stern wrote last week.

1X CEO Bernt Børnich told her that Neo will do most things autonomously in 2026, though he also acknowledged that the quality «may lag at first.»

The company’s FAQ says that for any chore request Neo doesn’t know how to accomplish, «you can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it» to help the robot «learn while getting the job done.»

What you need to know about Neo and privacy

Part of what early adopters are signing up for is to let Neo learn from their environment so that future versions can operate more independently.

That learning process raises privacy and trust questions. The robot uses a mix of visual, audio and contextual intelligence — meaning it can see, hear and remember interactions with users throughout their homes.

«If you buy this product, it is because you’re OK with that social contract,» Børnich told the Journal. «It’s less about Neo instantly doing your chores and more about you helping Neo learn to do them safely and effectively.»

Neo’s reliance on human operation behind the scenes prompted a response from John Carmack, a computer industry luminary known for his work with VR systems and the lead programmer of classic video games including Doom and Quake.

«Companies selling the dream of autonomous household humanoid robots today would be better off embracing reality and selling ‘remote operated household help’,» he wrote in a post on the X social network (formerly Twitter) on Monday.

1X says it’s taking steps to protect your privacy: Neo listens only when it recognizes it’s being addressed, and its cameras will blur out humans. You can restrict Neo from entering or viewing specific areas of your home, and the robot will never be teleoperated without owner approval, the company says.

But inviting an AI-equipped humanoid to observe your home life isn’t a small step.

The first units will ship to customers in the US in 2026. There is a $499 monthly subscription alternative to the $20,000 full-purchase price, though that will be available at an unspecified later date. A broader international rollout is promised for 2027.

Neo’s got a long road ahead of it to live up to the expectations set by Rosie the Robot in The Jetsons way back when. But this is no Hanna-Barbera cartoon. What we’re seeing now is a much more tangible harbinger of change.

Technologies

I Wish Nintendo’s New Switch 2 Zelda Game Was an Actual Zelda Game

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment has great graphics, a great story and Zelda is actually in it. But the gameplay makes me wish for another true Zelda title instead.

I’ve never been a Hyrule Warriors fan. Keep that in mind when I say that Nintendo’s new Switch 2-exclusive Zelda-universe game has impressed me in several ways, but the gameplay isn’t one of them. Still, this Zelda spinoff has succeeded in showing off the Switch 2’s graphics power. Now can we have a true Switch 2 exclusive Zelda game next?

The upgraded graphics in Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild has made the Switch 2 a great way to play recent Zelda games, which had stretched the Switch’s capabilities to the limit before. And they’re both well worth revisiting, because they’re engrossing, enchanting, weird, epic wonders. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, another in the Koei-Tecmo developed spinoff series of Zelda-themed games, is a prequel to Tears of the Kingdom. It’s the story of Zelda traveling back in time to ancient Hyrule, and the origins of Ganondorf’s evil. I’m here for that, but a lot of hack and slash battles are in my way.

A handful of hours in, I can say that the production values are wonderful. The voices and characters and worlds feel authentically Zelda. I feel like I’m getting a new chapter in the story I’d already been following. The Switch 2’s graphics show off smooth animation, too, even when battles can span hundreds of enemies.

But the game’s central style, which is endless slashing fights through hordes of enemies, gets boring for me. That’s what Hyrule Warriors is about, but the game so far feels more repetitive than strategic. And I just keep button-mashing to get to the next story chapter. For anyone who’s played Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, expect more of the same, for the most part.

I do like that the big map includes parts in the depths and in the sky, mirroring the tri-level appeal of Tears of the Kingdom. But Age of Calamity isn’t a free-wandering game. Missions open up around the map, each one opening a contained map to battle through. Along the way, you unlock an impressive roster of Hyrule characters you can control.

As a Switch 2 exclusive to tempt Nintendo fans to make the console upgrade, it feels like a half success. I admire the production values, and I want to keep playing just to see where the story goes. But as a purchase, it’s a distant third to Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World.

Hyrule Warriors fans, you probably know what you’re probably in for, and will likely get this game regardless. Serious Zelda fans, you may enjoy it just for the story elements alone.

As for me? I think I’ll play some more, but I’m already sort of tuning the game out a bit. I want more exploration, more puzzles, more curiosity. This game’s not about that. But it does show me how good a true next-gen Zelda could be on the Switch 2, whenever Nintendo decides to make that happen.