Apple this morning shared two new iPhone ads on its YouTube channel, focused on highlighting the Portrait Mode feature available on the iPhone 7 Plus. Each 15 second ad explains how Portrait Mode works through blurring the background of a photograph to make a subject stand out.
The ads include examples of images taken with Portrait Mode compared to images taken without Portrait Mode to make the differences clear. The first ad features a dog in front of trees and the second features a child in a creek.
Introduced in iOS 10.1, Portrait mode uses a shallow depth of field to make portrait photos "pop," mimicking a high-end DSLR. The feature takes advantage of the 56mm telephoto lens included in the iPhone 7 Plus, using Apple's image signal processor to scan a scene and machine learning techniques to recognize people and other objects meant to be in the foreground.
A depth map of the image from the two cameras in the iPhone is used to keep people in focus while applying an artistic blur to the background, resulting in an image that's normally not possible on a smartphone.
The two new ads follow a revamped "Shot on iPhone" ad campaign that Apple recently launched, which highlights a series of photographs all taken on a single night to promote the camera features in the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus.
