KitCam for iPhone review: Control the camera's exposure, white balance, focus, and more

By Leanna Lofte
last updated

KitCam is a full-featured camera app for the iPhone that gives you full control over settings like exposure, focus, and white balance. It also comes equipped with many different lenses and filters and includes different shooting modes like multi-shot, time-lapse, multiple exposure, and more.

I'm just going to come right out and say it -- KitCam is awesome and it would take me thousands of words to really dive into everything it can do. Instead, I'll just touch on the highlights.

My absolute favorite feature of KitCam is that you can manually adjust the exposure and white balance before you even take the photo. These two sliders alone can drastically improve your photos, as is demonstrated in the screenshots above.

KitCam also comes with a slew of lenses that apply various effects to your image and provides a live preview of the final results. These lenses include vignette, tilt shift, pinhole, olga, and more. You can also choose form different film types that act as filters. These are also shown in the live preview. KitCam comes loaded with quite a few lenses and film and also offers more as in-app purchases.

In addition to normal, single-shot mode, KitCam offers many other shooting options. These include HD video recording, timer, stabilizer, night stamp, multi-exposure, multi-shot, and time-lapse.

When taking a photo, you can separate focus from exposure by tapping the screen with two fingers. You'll get a circle for exposure and a square for focus and tapping them will lock them down.

If after taking a photo you realize you would've preferred to use a different lens or roll of film, you can easily switch them out with the editor. The editor also allows you to adjust straightening, attachments, exposure, white balance, brightness, contrast, saturation, color mixer, levels, and sharpening.

The good

  • Live Preview FX
  • Exposure and white balance compensation controls
  • Live exposure info on histogram
  • 4x3, 1x1, 3x2, and 16x9 crop ratios
  • Auto and manual focus modes
  • Low light boost
  • Face detection
  • Built-in composition aides
  • Stabilizer
  • Multiple exposures
  • Multi-shot
  • Time-lapse
  • Shot editor including straightening, attachments, exposure, white balance, brightness, contrast, saturation, color mixer, levels, and sharpening
  • Non-destructive editing
  • Auto archiving
  • Change lenses and film even after taking the photo
  • Share to Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, Instagram, and Tumbler

The bad

  • Most interface elements do not rotate when shooting in landscape orientation

The bottom line

Even with the availability of some great camera apps, I've always defaulted back to the built-in Camera app. Not any more! KitCam is just too good not to use. Having full control over exposure and white-balance is the must-have feature for me -- everything else is just bonus.

KitCam is currently 50% off, so grab it now!

Leanna Lofte
Leanna Lofte

Former app and photography editor at iMore, Leanna has since moved on to other endeavors. Mother, wife, mathamagician, even though she no longer writes for iMore you can still follow her on Twitter @llofte.

13 Comments
  • Martin Reisch has been extolling it's virtues for a while and it had me at download. Fantastic app, and a really great one-stop-shop for photo capture and processing on the iPhone. It was my pick of the week both on iMore and MacBreak Weekly last week. I can't say enough good things about it. And at $0.99 on sale, it's a steal. (Seriously, we should get fined for paying that little! Buy some IAP and give those people a tip!)
  • The article title lead me to believe you can control shutter speed and aperture with this app. It didn't say that out right but as a professional photographer "exposure and focus" made me think in that direction. I would LOVE to be able to have full manual control over my phone's camera settings. Some one please make this a reality.
  • Not sure this quite answers, but if you tap with two fingers you can separate the focus and exposure. Additionally under "Night Snap" you can adjust the shutter speed.
  • I tried dozens of camera apps over the years, including the popular Camera+ (which I personally found over rated), and finally settled on KitCam last year. I went for the in-app purchase, but even without it you get a lot of high quality filters and lenses and more features than many other apps, including the option to shoot 1:1, so you can compose in square format and don't have to crop the photo later.
  • I can't find the tilt-shift lens. I found two "tilt focus" lenses, that allow you create a band of in-focus that blurs anything outside of that band, but not one that allows you to correct for perspective. I have it set to save as TIFF, and it doesn't, it saves as JPEG. I have it set to "No sound FX" and it still makes an annoying old-school shutter/film wind noise when I take a picture. @Ninotschka, how do you get the 1:1 shooting?
  • Pinch to change the perspective for tilt focus.
  • That's not a tilt-shift. Tilt-shift corrects for perspective distortion. An example would be to take a flat picture of a whiteboard when you are off to one side.
  • I've been using KitCam since CES and Ashley Esqueda told me she refused to even open the default camera app and used KitCam. I love it.
  • Fantastic! Thanks for the writeup.
    I got Camera+ long ago, and used it about 3 times.
    Never did figure out what the fuss was all about.
  • couldn't agree more. I use Camera+ it because it's the first app i bought. I felt obligated. It's ok but there's little that's special about it in my opinion. I still force my self to use it but now i've also got 3 other free or free when i downloaded them camera apps that do just as good a job.
  • Besides it being a great app, the gorgeous icon is reason enough to buy it!!! Been using it for a few months now, def 1 of the best (and I agree with others that Camera+ is a bit overrated...not bad, just don't see what the fuss is about)
  • Thanks just started using kitcam amazing saw it and thought that looks cool you've helped me so much thanks
  • Looks like they were acquired by Yahoo and the app is no longer available. Boo.