Another great alternative to your stock camera app is Open Camera, which is rated 4.4 on the Google Play Store with at least 50 million downloads. Despite its minimalist interface, it comes packed with a host of features for your photography needs, from taking photos of the moon to snapping portrait shots.
Right from the camera preview, you can switch among four photo modes (STD, DRO, HDR, and PANO), choose from five focus options (auto, infinity, macro, locked, and continuous picture), select from 16 scene modes (e.g., landscape, night, sports), and apply a color effect (e.g., negative, sepia, mono). Open Camera provides even more options to fine-tune your images in the settings. Configurations include HDR tone mapping, exposure bracketing stops, image format, and photo stamps (you can add datestamp, timestamp, and GPS stamp). Open Camera also lets you customize the camera preview UI to add shortcuts like flash, stamp photo, zoom slider, and face detection.
The best thing about Open Camera is that it’s an open-source app, so it’s completely free to use and download with no annoying ad pop-ups. Plus, its small size of only 5 MB means it won’t take up much storage space on your device. However, a downside of Open Camera is that some of its settings can be quite technical, so if you’re an amateur photographer who hasn’t dabbled with pro cameras before, there might be a bit of a learning curve to maximize all of the app’s features.
