Hands on with Apple's awesome new Portrait camera mode
The iPhone 7 Plus holds a place of distinction in Apple’s growing line of mobile handsets. It’s the first to feature two cameras, one for regular shooting and the other for optically zooming in. Apple might have gotten more criticism for adding a camera just to introduce optical zoom to the iPhone, if that was its only play.
Apple, however, made it clear at the launch event earlier this month that these two lenses would soon work together in a rather visually stunning feature called Portrait.
Portrait shot mode on the iPhone 7 Plus adds a bokeh effect to portrait shots: blurring the background while keeping the face in the foreground perfectly focused. In photography, the adjustment refers to changing the depth of field or focus length/depth. Long focus, where you can see everything in sharp detail in the foreground and background, can look busy. Short focus photos with the bokeh effect can help make the subject in the foreground pop. Apple showed a number of beautiful so-called “Depth Effect” photos at the iPhone 7 launch event, but units in the demo room didn’t have the capability. Nor did the iPhone 7 Plus I reviewed a week later.
You May Also Like
Now, however, the very first Portrait-mode-featuring beta has arrived. It is, essentially a beta feature within an iOS beta.
Taking pro-level photos
Beta or not, as soon as I downloaded it (you have to be in Apple’s beta preview program), I started taking portraits. The actual mode sits between “Photo” and “Square” in the camera app. As soon as you open it, the words “DEPTH EFFECT” appear as an overlay on the photo.
If you’re too close to your subject, a message appears above the “Depth” one, urging you to move father away from you subject. Get too far away and you get a message asking you to place your subject within 8 feet.
As you line up your subjects, the camera app will identify the faces and nearby objects in the frame. There really isn’t anything else you need to do besides take your photo. At this point there’s no way that I could see to switch between the Depth Effect preview and a standard image before taking your Portrait photo. In case you’re wondering, there is, in this beta, no way to apply the Portrait effect to videos and I’m pretty sure Apple has no plans to add that capability.
Deep tech
Behind the scenes, the iPhone 7 Plus and the camera app are preparing to use both the 12 MP f1.8 wide angle camera and the 2x, f2.8 optical zoom lens at the same time. The telephoto is focusing on the face, while the wide angle is gathering all the visual background information. There are actually nine layers of information and the iPhone 7 Plus’s image signal processor (ISP) incrementally blurs each layer more and more so the ones furthest away from the subject get the greatest degree of defocus.
To take my first few photos, I made sure my subjects were directly in front of me and about four feet away. I positioned them so the open-floor plan office was directly behind them and took my photos. Even in this beta, it takes no time for the Depth Effect images to appear. The results were very good. The faces looked sharp and untouched, but the whole area behind them was a beautiful blur, giving each image a professional look.
Every photo also comes with its less-attractive, bokeh-less twin, which you can see in your camera roll. I wonder what this double-12MP photo operation does to your storage.
After a few successful portraits. I tried a few more challenging compositions. A cup with a handle and a lot of reflection proved a little problematic (the feature blurred out some of the cup), but then who wants portraits of cups? Plus, this is a beta.
Fun with focus
Portrait can handle up to three people in a photo, though it does work best if they’re all on the same plane. I was curious what would happen if I took two people and had one closer to me than the other. Portrait found both of them and managed to blur the background around each subject. This created a bizarre forced perspective effect where the person further away was also perfectly in focus, which made her look like a smaller person next to the larger person in the foreground. Still, I applaud Apple’s still-in-beta algorithm for some pretty good work.
I tried Portrait mode in low light where, to my surprise, it still succeeded, though the background was a little less blurred than it was in the well-lit photos.
Portrait mode can even create striking selfies. I held the camera at arm’s length and got some decent shots in pretty challenging conditions. My only complaint is that, because I’m bald and the sun glints off my head, the ISP actually blurred away part of my skull. Again, this is just the kind of thing that can be resolved in the beta process (or by me wearing a wig).
The addition of Portrait to the iPhone 7 Plus further propels the 5.5-inch hand-set into the upper-tiers of smartphone shooters. It’s nice to have one great camera, great to have two, but it may be inspiring to have two that actually work together.
Lance Ulanoff was Chief Correspondent and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. Lance acted as a senior member of the editing team, with a focus on defining internal and curated opinion content. He also helped develop staff-wide alternative story-telling skills and implementation of social media tools during live events. Prior to joining Mashable in September 2011 Lance Ulanoff served as Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for the Ziff Davis, Inc. While there, he guided the brand to a 100% digital existence and oversaw content strategy for all of Ziff Davis’ Web sites. His long-running column on PCMag.com earned him a Bronze award from the ASBPE. Winmag.com, HomePC.com and PCMag.com were all been honored under Lance’s guidance.He makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Fox News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, Kelly and Michael, CNBC, CNN and the BBC.He has also offered commentary on National Public Radio and been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations around the country. Lance has been an invited guest speaker at numerous technology conferences including SXSW, Think Mobile, CEA Line Shows, Digital Life, RoboBusiness, RoboNexus, Business Foresight and Digital Media Wire’s Games and Mobile Forum.
