Final Cut Camera 2.4 adds variable aperture control on iPhone 18 Pro

The iPhone 18 Pro's Fusion Main camera brings aperture control to iPhone for the first time, and Apple calls it the most advanced camera it has ever made. How much of that control you actually get depends on which app you open.

Final Cut Camera, Apple's professional filming app for iPhone, is where the company put its own answer. Version 2.4 arrives as a free software update beginning September 29 with a new design, support for variable aperture on iPhone 18 Pro, and more pro options tied to the release of iOS 27. Creators can dial in aperture settings precisely, or hand part of the decision to the camera by choosing between shutter priority and aperture priority modes.

The interface work matters as much as the new dials. Settings like ISO and white balance are easier to reach, and a two-finger tap clears the screen so you see nothing but the viewfinder. Because Final Cut Camera lets you drive an iPhone remotely from Final Cut Pro, all the same settings, aperture adjustments included, can be set from a nearby iPad or Mac.

The update also unlocks Cinematic mode effects for regular video, including footage shot in ProRes and Apple Log, which means focus points and depth of field become editable after the fact in Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro and Motion both support editing the depth of field and focus points of video shot on iPhone 18 Pro.

With iOS 27, Final Cut Camera adds professional video scopes, clean SDI out and genlock offset. Clean SDI out lets creators send a clean video signal through an HDMI-to-SDI converter for broadcast-quality streaming. Genlock offset is the fix for two specific headaches: image artifacts when you are filming a display, and latency differences between the iPhone and other genlocked cameras on the same shoot.

The new camera settings require an iPhone 18 Pro.

Third-party apps got to the aperture first in some cases. Lux Optics has updated Halide for iPhone and iPad with two new photography looks and support for the variable aperture on the iPhone 18 Pro's main camera, and it is not the first alternative to the native camera app to do so, but it gives you more granular control than the others. The iOS camera app limits aperture adjustments to four presets, both Blackmagic Camera and Moment Pro Camera II expand that to 10 presets in 1/3 stop increments, while Halide Mark III skips presets altogether and lets you select any f-stop from f/1.48 down to f/4.0. The Halide developers are considering adding f-stop presets in future updates based on user feedback.

Apple's other app work this round reaches outside video. The subscription-only iPad version of Pixelmator Pro gains the Select and Mask tools from the Mac version, though its new templates need a $13-per-month Creator Studio subscription. Keynote is picking up the ability to automatically generate images that match the content of a slide.