CameraTweak 4 launches in Cydia, turns iPhone into a professional camera

CameraTweak 4 iOS 9 photography

By far one of the most comprehensive jailbreak tweaks for the iOS Camera app known as CameraTweak 4 has been updated with full support for iOS 9 this week.

The tweak brings a wide range of features to the stock Camera app that empower you to turn yourself into a professional mobile photographer. We’ll talk a little about it in this review.

The king of photography tweaks?

I’ve been in the jailbreak tweak review business for several years, and CameraTweak is probably the one photography tweak that I get excited about each and every year. Although I’m on the fence about jailbreaking my daily driver, CameraTweak 4 certainly makes things more tempting, even on iOS 9.3.3.

The tweak basically takes a lot of the features you can have from several third-party App Store apps and bakes them right into the stock Camera app so you don’t have to download other apps from the App Store. But, because it’s a jailbreak tweak, you can bet it has more to offer than the App Store does, simply because the App Store is limited by Apple’s restrictions and Cydia is not.

With CameraTweak 4, not only can your iPhone photography improve, but so can your videography. The tweak adds features to the photo-snapping and video-capture features in the app, as we’ll discuss below.

Features for photographers

If you’re an amateur photographer and you like how automatic Apple’s iPhone cameras are in terms of point-and-shoot capability, then you’ll probably love to see what the iPhone camera is capable of when you take full manual control over its features. Yes, full manual control.

CameraTweak 4 iOS 9 photography

CameraTweak 4 provides an all-in-one interface that is built directly into the stock Camera app on your iPhone. You can hide and show the additional features by tapping on the Camera-shaped button just by the Camera Roll button.

Among the features that the tweak provides for iPhone photographers are:

  • Manual ISO
  • Separated focus and white balance
  • White balance lock
  • Aperture settings
  • Various photography guides
  • Lapse timer
  • Un-mirrored selfies
  • And more…

Everything is built right into the “Photo” section of the Camera app, and you can swipe left and right between them to get into the settings you really want to use. The tweak works great on all iOS devices, whether you’re using a small iPhone SE or a larger iPhone 6s Plus.

With these features, you can better control your focus and your exposure, giving you better shots that Apple’s automatic software just aren’t good at catching.

Features for videographers

In addition to improving the photography aspect of the default Camera app, CameraTweak 4 also builds off of the core functionality of recording videos.

CameraTweak 4 iOS 9 video recording

If you’re looking to capture better-quality video than you could with Apple’s own automatic software, then CameraTweak 4 has you covered with several add-ons, including:

  • Manual quality selection
  • Manual FPS adjustments
  • Changing the video stabilization
  • Pause and resume for video capture
  • White balance adjustments
  • And more…

With the beautiful 4K video recording capability that is built into Apple’s latest handsets, having this additional software to give you more manual overrides over the hardware is going to present you with opportunities to record video like you never have before on your iPhone.

To access the new settings in video-capture mode, you just need to enter the “Video” section of the Camera app and you will see a new quality and FPS selection button to the right of the recording button. Simply tap, and then make adjustments where necessary.

Configuring the tweak

The tweak honestly doesn’t have anything to configure. A preferences pane is added to the Settings app where you can enable or disable the tweak on demand.

CameraTweak 4 preferences pane

The developer notes right under the user manual that there are going to be updates in the future that add more configuration, so it seems this is an early release of a growing project for iOS 9 devices. So we recommend you stay patient, because this is, and always has been, one heck of a tweak for jailbroken iOS devices.

Wrapping up

We’ll skip the “My opinion on…” part of the post where I usually include in my personal opinion because, to me, it seems pointless to add in this review. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about CameraTweak 4 and it’s always been one of my favorite jailbreak tweaks to have just because of the photography features you get from it that you don’t normally have in a stock installation of iOS.

If you want to take better photos and videos, get this. It’s a wonderful add-on for iOS 9.0-9.3.3 that can be had for just $1.49 in Cydia’s BigBoss repository. Moreover, if you already own a previous version of CameraTweak, then CameraTweak 4 is a free upgrade!

What are your thoughts on having this additional functionality built right into the stock Camera app in iOS? Share below!