- Smart Portrait mode almost always captures depth data, so you can even adjust focus after taking the shot.
- Portrait mode now works with Night mode thanks to the LiDAR sensor.
- This is one step closer to replacing a "proper" camera.
The iPhone's portrait mode is no longer a cool but awkward gimmick. Now it has become an essential, automatic and extremely flexible tool.
You know, with the iPhone 14's Portrait Mode, you have to choose to use it, and then you have to position your subject at the correct distance from the phone's camera, and then you have to try to get the phone to lock on to that subject? Well, it's all over. Portrait mode is now mature and so easy to use that you'll probably never need to turn it on. You just shoot and choose what to shoot later.
"I'm an amateur photographer, but I've won some competitions, and I'm also a professor of media anthropology. When I do serious photography, I use DSLRs and mirrorless full-frame cameras, but I also Use my phone a lot because I have it with me all the time,” Gareth Barkin, chair of the Department of Operations and Technology at the University of Puget Sound and an enthusiastic amateur photographer, told Lifewire via email. "You can select your subject after picking up the phone, you can adjust the depth of field in two different ways, [and] you can also save the original content unchanged, so/[...] there's no real reason not to use it all the time" .
Portrait mode is a mode that fakes the blurred background in photos taken with a regular camera. These cameras have very large sensors, much larger than the image sensors in mobile phones, which means that when the lens is set up correctly, the subject will be sharp and the background will be blurry.
This physical quirk has become a desirable aspect of portrait photos, allowing your subject to stand out even against a cluttered background. As mentioned earlier, phone cameras can't manage this on their own, so they use powerful computer brains to fake it.
iPhone's new Smart Portrait Mode uses the camera's various sensors, including the LiDAR sensor, to create a 3D "depth map" of the scene ahead. It knows that the wall and that trash can are far away, that the human is close, and that the branch that crawled into the frame is nearby. With this knowledge, it applies a blur effect to parts of the image that are not part of your subject.
Before the iPhone 15, Portrait mode existed as a separate mode that you had to select before taking a photo. But now, with the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro, it's automatic. That is, if it detects a human, dog, or cat face, it will capture depth information. If you tap a subject on the screen to focus, depth data is captured. With lidar, this can even work in the dark.
This is already a great upgrade, but there's more. This change means you can now choose the subject of your photo after taking it . You can enable and disable the portrait effect on any photo with depth data, and tap on a person to focus on it while blurring the rest.
"Having it automatically detect portraits is a great option. Instantly capturing depth data that the photographer may or may not use later is a zero-cost affordance that's been a long time coming. It's always just a technology Journalist Matthew Panzarino wrote during his annual iPhone review trip to Disneyland: "When taking a photo, you have to choose to switch to portrait mode via a dedicated interface, a 'should I or shouldn't I' moment. "
For most people, mobile phones have been their only camera for years, with dedicated DSLRs and mirrorless cameras becoming the professional or hobbyist photographer's choice. Every year, phone cameras close the gap with regular dedicated cameras, and this year is no different.
There are several reasons for still using larger cameras. First, the photos will still be more detailed, and there is no need to pretend that the portrait is blurry. Additionally, they feature dedicated knobs and dials for greater control over the image and how it is captured.
On the other hand, a camera phone is also a ridiculously powerful computer, which means it can capture (and computationally combine) perfect exposures that a regular camera would struggle to do. To be sure, for most people, phone cameras are good enough in most situations.
