Adjust Video Depth Of Field After Video Recording
Cinematic mode also allows you to change depth of field and focus AFTER you’ve recorded a video. This is something of a gamechanger for post-production on the iPhone itself. To change the depth on a Cinematic video after you’ve shot it, select the video in the Photos app, select Edit and tap ‘f‘ (note that the changes will apply to the whole video.
You can also edit focus points after recording. As you scrub through a video, the focus point is indicated with a yellow square while other recognised potential subjects will have a white square around them you can tap those white squares to change the focus point to that subject. You can also try tapping other objects in the frame. Like when recording, you can double-tap to set automatic focus tracking or touch and hold to lock the focus at a specific distance. Tap the focus button to swap back and forth between automatic focus tracking and your own selected focus points.
Buying Advice For Photographers
If you shoot macro photography, then this year’s upgrade is a no-brainer. Think of macro as a fourth lens that offers an entirely new camera capability, not just an iterative increase.
If youre a non-Max user, remember this year is a more substantial upgrade to the 13 Pro as you make a leap to a bigger sensor and the 33% increase in the Telephoto lens. The iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max camera systems are identical, so you dont need to debate between them based on camera capabilities.
If you are serious about filmmaking with the iPhone, the 13 Pro offers a substantial step up with the ProRes format , the naturally cinematic 3x Telephoto lens, and of course Cinematic mode.
If youre an everyday user without an interest in macro photography or filmmaking, you may find this years upgrade more nuanced. Features like Photographic Styles and improved Smart HDR 4 will impact every single photo you take, but not at the same transformative level.
Finally A Smaller Notch
As we mentioned earlier the iPhone 13 Pro looks just like its predecessor, but the first thing you’ll notice when you have it in your hand is that the notch is now smaller. Apple managed to reduce the overall size of the notch by 20% by moving the speaker grill to the edge of the top bezel and cramming the rest of the Face ID hardware closer together.
Since the introduction of the iPhone X back in 2017, the size of the notch has remained unchanged until now. While this isn’t nearly as great as the hole-punch design that many Android flagships have, we certainly appreciate some improvement rather than none. You’ll certainly notice the increased display area when you upgrade from an older iPhone model with a notch.
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Adjust Portrait Lighting Effects In Portrait Mode
Portrait mode on the iPhone 13 creates a depth-of-field effect that blurs the background of your photo while keeping the subject in sharp focus. You can use lighting effects to further enhance your Portrait mode iPhone 13 photos. These effects use software algorithms to create different lighting options on your subjects face, based on popular lighting setups in photography studios.
Simply choose the Portrait mode in the Camera app. After that, drag the Portrait Lighting control to choose between the following lighting effects:
- Natural Light: No additional lighting effects are added.
- Studio Light: Facial features brighten to mimic photo studio lights.
- Contour Light: Sharper lighting creates dramatic highlights and lowlights.
- Stage Light: Imitate a spotlight and plunge the background into darkness.
- Stage Light Mono: The same as Stage Light, but in black and white.
- High-Key Light Mono: Create a white background with a black and white subject.
Next, tap on the Portrait Control button that appears at the top of the screen. The Portrait Lighting slider shows below the frame.Now, drag the slider to the right or left to fine-tune the effect.Once you have fine-tuned the portrait lighting effect, hit the Shutter button to take the shot. Now, check out the image to ensure its in line with your taste. If you arent pleased with the portrait image, get into the edit mode and then use the Portrait Lighting slider to further adjust the lighting effect.
Putting The Smart Into Smartphone Photography
Around the time of iOS 4 , Apple introduced an HDR option to their camera app to address the most common technical challenges in photography: capturing really bright and really dark stuff at the same time.
When taking a photo, clouds in the sky get so bright that the camera only sees a white shape. If you turn down that brightness, youll the shadows turn black, losing details. While the human eye can see both the clouds and shadows at the same time, an iPhone 4s sensor has less dynamic range.
In fact, this high dynamic range problem has existed since the early days of photography. Experienced photographers dealt with it by taking multiple photos of different exposures and patching them together. iOS 4 solved it with an HDR mode you could toggle on and off. This toggle was important because
Automatic edits on photos can go wrong. When there are object in motion, the merging of photos creates artifacts, or ghosting. This all worked out with smarter algorithms, more powerful chips, faster memory, and an iPhone that could simply take photos so fast that there were fewer gaps in photos.
Fast forward to today, and your iPhone goes way above and beyond HDR. It has not been a setting you can toggle for a while. When you take a photo now, the camera on the iPhone will merge many shots to get your final result. Today, your camera essentially always edits your photos for you. And exactly how it edits them is a bit of a mystery.
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An Image That Says It All
This photo is among my favorites from this project for a few reasons. For starters, this male adult leopard was laying in the baobob tree for two hours before he started moving around and by the time he finally stood up the light was waning and had shifted making the scene much more challenging to shoot.
An adult male leopard prepares to hunt after spotting prey from a baobob tree.Shot on iPhone 13 Pro w/ Telephoto lens. ProRAW file edited on iPhone in Lightroom CC.
Despite all this, shooting in ProRAW meant I could easily recover the highlight details in the sky and boost the shadows in the foreground, bringing out the detail in the backlit leopard and baobob tree precisely to my preference.
I was using the 3x Telephoto lens on this shot, which punched in just enough on the leopard without losing the strong sense of place in the composition.
To me, this image beautifully illustrates the hundreds if not thousands of micro improvements in the iPhone camera system over the years. Some obvious ones like the extended 77 mm focal length, HDR light balancing, and the larger sensor, but also more subtle advancements like semantic rendering, Deep Fusion, and Focus Pixels.
It all compounds in an image like thisa frame I never would have believed was shot on iPhone just a few short years ago.
The iPhone 13 Camera Is Probably Good Enough For Most People
Well start with the base-level iPhone 13 camera. This gets you two 12-megapixel rear cameras, one with a wide field of view and a very bright f/1.6 aperture, the other with an ultrawide 120-degree field of view and a darker f/2.4 aperture. The camera lenses are coated in sapphire crystal to resist scratches, and have been turned 45 degrees in their housing in order to fit the upgraded optics into the iPhone 13. Theres sensor-shift optical image stabilization for the wide camera, and both cameras boast greater lowlight capability. Extra camera features include a portrait mode with bokeh and depth control, adjustable portrait lighting effects, True Tone flash with Slow Sync, and the ability to capture panoramas up to 63MP. Burst mode is also present, as are photo geotagging and Night mode.
Smart HDR 4 is now capable of recognizing as many as four different people in a scene in order to optimize contrast, lighting, and skin tones for each person. Deep Fusion activates automatically in challenging lighting situations to analyze multiple exposures and increase photo quality in low light. Photographic styles are essentially smart filters that selectively apply adjustments to your photos. For example, choosing the vibrant style boosts colors and contrast, but the phone will maintain natural skin tones in human subjects.
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iPhone 14 Pro Vs 13 Pro: 4 Significant Ways The Cameras Are Different
Here’s how the newer hardware and software affect real-world use.
Lexy Savvides
Principal Video Producer
Lexy is an on-air presenter and award-winning producer who covers consumer tech, including the latest smartphones, wearables and emerging trends like assistive robotics. She’s won two Gold Telly Awards for her video series Beta Test. Prior to her career at CNET, she was a magazine editor, radio announcer and DJ. Lexy is based in San Francisco.
Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro has several camera system improvements that have led to stellar reviews, including a 48-megapixel sensor and the company’s new image-processing technique called the Photonic Engine. This immediately puts the iPhone 14 Pro at an advantage over last year’s iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, at least on paper.
But how big of a difference do these new hardware and software features actually make in the real world?
I compared the cameras on both phones in a range of challenging situations around San Francisco to find out. All these photos were taken in the default camera app on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro, both running the latest version of iOS 16.
The Importance Of Processing
When you take a photo on a modern iPhone or any smartphone for that matter you might like to think that what you saw was what you captured, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The zeros and ones that your sensor sees would mean nothing to the human eye. They require interpretation. For example, some of the colors your camera sees cant be represented on your screen, so it needs to find something close. Some bits of processing are creative, like adding contrast to make things pop, while other decisions are to compensate for the weaknesses of the hardware, like noise.
Consider this underprocessed iPhone photo:
This noisy shot didnt come from an iPhone 5 this is from an iPhone 13 Pro. This image, which is a raw capture, is much noisier than what youd get from a dedicated, full-size camera. Why? Physics.
Consider this series showing the evolution of Canons cameras over more than half a century:
Youll notice that while technologies come and go, and even the medium changes , the camera stayed a similar shape, and most importantly, size.
Technology always strives for miniaturization. Your iPhone is enabled by smaller and denser chips with more power than the large desktop computers of decades ago your iPhone screen is a higher resolution than most TVs, packed into a tiny 5 inch size, and your camera, too, is only a fraction of the size of a digital camera from years past.
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Action Mode 4k Cinematic Mode At 24 Fps Satellite And Esim
The action mode is another great feature of the iphone 14 pro cameras. The action mode works the best in outdoor and daylight scenarios, especially when held with the hand rather than when attached to a moving vehicle. The action mode crops in slightly to your image and drops the resolution from 4k to 2.8k. The results are impressively better especially in comparison to the iphone 13 pro cameras. It is also worth knowing to realize the field of view crop is substantial because the software using the outer edges of the frame for stabilization shooting with the 5x ultra wide lens is closer to the FOV you are used to with the 1x main lens. Both the iphone 14 pro and iphone 13 pro shoot in 4k at up to 60fps. The image looks similar when filming on the main rear camera. But the iphone 14 pro unlocks additional video tools like action mode.
Now with the ability to shoot at 24 fps and in 4k, footage shot in cinematic mode is a bit closer to being a tool for filmmakers to use in their workflow. The cinematic mode like portrait mode for motion video looks interesting, but it lacks a couple of key features that have prevented the common use. Because the film industry, standard for frame rate for making movies is 24fps, but the cinematic mode has been locked at 30fps, that is why with the new improvement is the ability to shoot standard frame rat at 24 fps.
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The iPhone 13 Pro Camera Review
Getting an iPhone 13 Pro was a bit of a headache this year. Supply chain issues have taken their toll on would-be iPhone 13 Pro Max owners or anyone wanting an iPhone with more than 128GB of onboard storage. The cellphone store next to our office still hasnt received a single iPhone 13 Pro Max to sell.
I was in that iPhone 13 Pro Max queue and eventually gave up. Seeing all the wonderful photographic creativity hitting my Instagram and Glass feed pushed me to the brink. I scaled back expectations and opted for the iPhone 13 Pro with 128GB storage instead.
Hindsight is 20/20 coming from the iPhone 12 mini means the 13 Pros size is more manageable than the jump from mini-to-Max, doubly so when shooting photos. The extra wait time also allowed me to temper review expectations, allow the iPhone to settle more into regular routine, and showcase its benefits in more lasting ways.
The last Pro-iPhone I used was the iPhone 11 Pro. That camera system was great and the iPhone superb, but I remember my time with that iPhone as a phone first, camera second.
The iPhone 12 mini was neither phone nor camera for me battery life was so abysmal and the camera so sub-optimal that I generally chose to neither use it as a phone or a camera. It was largely relegated to the role of the best camera is the one you have with you, with a giant shrug.
The iPhone 13 Pro has taken a very different role than the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 12 mini of years past.
All from the iPhone.
All The New Software Features Introduced In iPhone 13
The tech giant introduced several new software-based camera features that use the A15 Bionic chips advanced image signal processor to offer the best results.
- Cinematic Mode Cinematic Mode allows video with beautiful bokeh and automatic focus changes to be captured from the smartphone using rack focus. Focus can be changed during capture or as part of post-editing in Photos and iMovie apps. iPhone 13 can also smartly detect when users are coming into the frame to put them into focus, or move focus away from them when the subject changes. Cinematic mode captures video in Dolby Vision HDR.
- Smart HDR 4 Smart HDR 4 provides improved colors, contrast, and lighting for up to 4 people in a group photo while preserving skin tones.
- Photographic Styles allow users to personalize their own look for all the photos they take. Unlike filters, Photographic Styles are smartly applied as effects on different parts of an image. Photographic Styles include Vibrant, Rich Contrast, Warm or Cool. Tone and Warmth are customizable for each style.
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What Is The iPhone 13 Camera Like
When it comes to camera hardware, we can split the differences into two categories: The iPhone 13 and the iPhone 13 Pro. The iPhone 13 category would include the iPhone mini, and the iPhone 13 Pro would include the iPhone 13 Pro Max.
The iPhone 13 mini and iPhone 13 models sport two camera lenses: a 12MP wide lens and a 12MP ultrawide lens. The cameras are placed diagonally, while the iPhone 12 had both cameras in a vertical line. The wide lens has an aperture of f/1.6, while the ultrawide features an aperture of f/2.4.
The iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max have three lenses instead: the original two, with the addition of an f/2.8 telephoto lens. The telephoto lens features 3x optical zoom, not available in the iPhone 13 mini and iPhone 13. The apertures for the wide and ultrawide lenses are different as well, with an f/1.5 wide lens and an f/1.8 ultrawide lens.
With that in mind, there are a few notable differences in the camera software for all the models in the iPhone 13 series, with some features only found in the Pro versions. Below is a list of new features not found in iPhones before the 13 series and a brief description of each.