Olloclip 4-In-1 Lens Review: How To Take Better iPhone 6 Photos

Olloclip’s popular snap-on lenses can transform your smartphone photography, delivering results which are simply impossible with the phone camera alone.

Here, I’m taking a look at the latest 4-in-1 lens set, redesigned specially for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The kit includes a wide angle and fisheye adapter lenses, which can be unscrewed to reveal 10x macro and 15x macro lenses beneath. These attach to a reversible plastic clip, containing the macro lenses, which slides onto the top of the iPhone, gripping it firmly and automatically aligning with the phone’s built in lens.

You would probably most often use these lenses fitted to the 8 megapixel rear camera, but all of them also work on the iPhone’s front-facing camera, enabling you to cram more people into a group selfies or more easily capture the environment around you with a fisheye selfie.

READ MORE - Olloclip Macro 3-In-1 Lens Review: Extreme iPhone 6 Close-Ups

What’s in the box?

The packaging and accessories are of a pleasingly high quality, with extras such as carry pouches, lens caps and even a trio of coloured clips allowing you to wear the lenses around your neck on a supplied lanyard. The fisheye and wide angle adapter lenses are metal barrelled and the whole package has a premium feel which won’t disappoint exacting iPhone users.

How it works

The Olloclip is simple to attach as it’s designed to line up with the iPhone’s lens automatically when you slide it on. After a couple of attempts, attaching it became second nature. It’s configured for the iPhone 6 straight out of the box, but comes with a small plastic insert which must be installed for use with the iPhone 6 Plus, which is the phone I used for testing.

This plastic insert fits very tightly and is quite difficult to install, but you’ll probably only need to do this once and it’s reassuring to know that it’s unlikely to fall out and become lost.

The Lenses

The Olloclip 4-in-1 offers variations of two main functions: with the fisheye and wide angle lenses attached, you can fit much more into your picture, but with them removed you can magnify small objects to reveal far more detail than with the standard iPhone lens.

Fisheye

The fisheye adapter is an ultra-wide angle lens which presents a near circular field of view. You can use this for fun effects or to take photos in really tight spaces where no other lens will do.

The fisheye shoots so wide, that it becomes tricky to hold the phone without your fingers showing in the picture. If you look closely, you may find my finger creeping into the left hand side of my test shot.

If you trust the tight grip of the Olloclip, you can hold the other lens, which faces towards you, as a kind of handle, but don’t blame me if your iPhone unexpectedly falls to its death using this method. The iPhone 6 Plus is notoriously slippery and difficult to grip, so great care is needed when using the fisheye lens as you’ll probably end up holding the phone with the tips of your fingers. Because of the way the Olloclip works, you will have to remove any case you may be using to protect your phone before you can attach it.

Wide angle

The iPhone lens is already pretty wide, but if you want to get even more in shot, and you can’t simply move back to take in more of the view, a wide angle lens will let you get the shot you want. The Olloclip wide angle lens gives you approximately double the field of view of the standard iPhone.

Of course you could, in many situations, simply shoot a panorama to get a wide image, but if either you or your subject is moving you’re going to have to capture the picture in a single shot - and this is where a wide angle lens is indispensable.

Macro 10x and 15x

A Macro lens lets you get in really close to your subject, capturing small objects in near microscopic detail. The standard iPhone lens simply can’t compete, as you will see from my test images below.

With either of these lenses, your iPhone is going to be very close to the subject indeed and the slightest movement of either could easily spoil the image. You’re not going to be able to hand-hold the phone to take clear shots with these lenses, even with the iPhone 6 Plus’s famed optical image stabilisation in effect. I used a Shoulderpod S1 grip to mount the iPhone 6 Plus to  a tripod for all of my macro shots.

Of course, if you’re just shooting low-resolution photos to put on Instagram, you can crop in on your original image quite a bit and still retain good enough quality. But this won’t give you anything like the sort of images you can get with a macro lens.

The resolution will obviously be higher with the macro lens as you’re using the whole image rather than just a small section of it, but moving the phone much, much closer to your subject has other effects too. Most obvious among these is the shallow depth of field effect, which sees one part of your image in sharp focus, while others blur away into the background.

Test shots

Wide angle and fisheye

For these three shots of a local church I stood in the same spot and took the photo first with the standard iPhone 6 Plus, then with the Olloclip wide angle adapter and finally with the Olloclip fisheye lens.

You can see clearly the huge difference the lenses make, allowing me to capture the whole church with the wide angle lens and a lot more of the environment when switching to the fisheye.

There is some noticeable quality degradation with the Olloclip lenses, both of them distort the image, turning straight lines into curves and they also become noticeably less sharp at the extreme edges of the frame. Towards the center, however, they are very sharp. The fisheye lens also introduced some blue colour fringes on the left hand side of the image and on the right edge of the church spire.

Both lenses also seemed to result in a slightly warmer image than the original iPhone shot, although this is easily corrected in software.

Distortion

All four of the Olliclip lenses in this set exhibit some level of distortion, be it the barrel distortion of the wide angle and fisheye attachments or the pincushion effect revealed in the two macro lenses. I’ve taken some test shots of a piece of 1mm graph paper so you can see for yourself how the various lenses distort the images.

With a fisheye lens this is an unavoidable and often desirable effect, but the distortion created by the other lenses may be something you wish to correct.

The macro lenses show marked pincushion distortion and loss of sharpness at the edges of the image. The effect is noticeable with the 10x macro and quite severe with the 15x macro. If you want to take a close up picture with plenty of detail all the way out to the edges, you may be better off using the 10x macro and cropping in, rather than using the 15x macro.

However if, as is often the case, you may want to highlight the detail in the centre of your image. Here, you can use the distortion of the 15x macro to your advantage as it naturally blurs the edges of the picture while keeping the centre tack sharp.

All of these distortion effects were quite easily corrected with a simple tweak in Lightroom, so if you want straight lines, it’s not too difficult to fix the distortion later.

Macro performance

To test the 10x and 15x macro performance, I focused as closely as possible on some blueberries. Again I started with the standard iPhone 6 Plus lens, then attaching the 10x macro lens and finally the 15x macro lens. The images were shot in square format on the iPhone, mainly to obscure the unsightly skewer I was using to hold the blueberries in place and also because, well, Instagram is like that and I’m pretending this is my dinner.

You can see immediately how much closer both macro lenses can go compared to the naked iPhone 6 Plus. Again, the Olloclip photos are slightly warmer, but I prefer the look in this case.

Both macro lenses capture a tremendous amount of detail in the centre of the blueberry, with the 15x macro blurring the edges of the picture more, making the middle stand out. Here, the added distortion of the 15x macro really doesn’t seem to matter to the finished result.

In this next test shot, I cropped into the blueberry, resizing the standard and 10x images to be the same size as the 15x macro shot. This shows the huge amount of extra detail you can capture with either of these macro lenses. The 15x macro captures the most detail, but remember this is in the centre of the image and all bets are off with this lens once you venture near the edges. Overall, I was very impressed with what these macro lenses can do.

Conclusion

While the quality of the Olloclip 4-in-1 lens is somewhat compromised in terms of edge sharpness and distortion, the results unarguably take you way beyond what you can shoot with just your iPhone. All the lenses are sharp in the center and the detail in the macro shots can be very impressive. For most, the creative flexibility gained will far outweigh any faults. The premium feel of the product also makes it an ideal gift idea for anyone who likes taking photos with their iPhone 6.

One disadvantage is that the Olloclip obscures the phone’s flash when in place, making it unavailable for use. I recommend using an external flash, such as the Nova flash, to help in such situations.

If macro photography is your main interest, you may prefer to wait for the forthcoming Olloclip Macro 3-in-1 lens, which offers many features designed to make it easier to take close-up shots as well as even greater magnification up to 21x and lower distortion.

Olloclip is also soon to release a 2-in-1 telephoto and circular polarising lens combo, which I intend to test review as soon as a sample becomes available.

The Olloclip 4-in-1 Lens for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is available now from olloclip.com in a choice of five colours, priced $79.99