Apple Shares New Ad Highlighting iPhone 7 Plus Portrait Mode

My dad bought an iPhone 7 and asked how to do Portrait mode...I go over and see he doesn't have the "Plus" - he got kinda peeved. He's not techy and didn't know there were different features (which I'm guessing that non-techy people are Apple's main crowd).

All I'm saying is that all iPhone 7's should be built & act the same (obviously a high res screen and bigger battery would be acceptable. But not giant features).

Finally a decent add. Portrait mode is pretty incredible.

Finally a decent add. Portrait mode is pretty incredible.

Portrait mode has alot of potential. But I would like to see it more refined with how particular it is with the distance being at 8 feet and how the photo needs to be just right to take the photo with specific lighting.

What a great ad! Still, I feel like it's missing something…

I don't get it. Somehow I missed the memo. Can someone explain to me what "Portrait Mode" is/does?

The iPhone 7 Plus has two camera lenses on the back. One is your typical lens, and the other is a "tele-photo" lens that gives you 2x optical 'zoom'. It's not an actual zoom, but the other lens has a longer focal length.

With Portrait mode, the iPhone switches to this telephoto lens and uses the other standard lens in conjunction with it to scan the scene and basically come up with a 'depth map' of the scene so that the iPhone can tell how far the objects in front of it are in relation to one another. With this information, the iPhone can add a blur effect to objects in the background of your subject with the blur increasing in intensity as objects are further and further away from the subject. This is essentially mimicking a "bokeh" effect that is common with lenses on larger DSLR cameras that keep your subject in focus while having a soft focus on everything else. The iPhone obviously cannot fit a large enough lens to produce this effect physically, so Apple incorporated a software work-around that actually works rather well.

Unfortunately since the telephoto lens on the iPhone has a small aperture compared to the standard lens, this means that that lens does not gather as much light as the standard lens, so to use this Portrait mode feature, you need to be in a place with a lot of available light. It is also software scanning the background and creating a depth map, so it does take a bit of time to get right, and it does not alway work correctly. But it works rather well with faces, since the iPhone is able to do facial recognition to more quickly and accurately apply this effect.

That was really terrific. The quality of photos we can get on our phones these days is remarkable. If we don't have our dedicated camera with us, we no longer have to settle for garbage shots from our mobile device like the smartphone cameras of yore. And this is coming from a DSLR owner. Great ad.