A lot of comments seem to be picky with the photo of the lady in the parka. As I mentioned in another comment, I read the article itself and that photo in particular was a hand-held 3-second long exposure in near-complete darkness. It was a test of the Night Mode for portraits.
It was literally just to see how the new LIDAR stuff can help with a nearly impossibly dark shot.
Of course a DSLR/mirrorless with proper lighting and a tripod would actually look good.
I don't think that was the point with that test shot, though.
Agreed; the apples-to-(heh)-apples comparison would be that photo against a hand-held DSLR 3-second exposure, or a shorter exposure with the ISO maxed out, and even them I'm fairly certain the DSLR image would be barely usable.
I wish these reviews would post the full res images. I clicked "View Image" on a few of these to see just the photo but they're all cropped and compressed.
Almost any flagship phone can produce similar pics to the ones in this article. The devil is really in the details now.
If that's the output I can expect, I don't know why I'd even bother taking the picture. The image is a mess. On the basis of this article, my conclusion is if you want to share or view the images on anything other than a mobile device, you might be disappointed with the output of this camera. Better to stick with your a7 III or what have you.
I'm glad for you, but it looks very poor to me. I would be unhappy if I got home and this were the only image I had of this scene. For any given image, you'll be able to find someone who likes it or thinks it looks good enough. If that's your standard, then this camera might be great for you. But if you have a higher standard, then you might not be satisfied.
I'd also ask what kind of screen you're looking at the image on. This image looks fine on my phone, but its screen is barely as large as a 3x5, which is essentially the lowest common denominator for printing -- the McDonald's hamburger of photo rendition. The image looks bad on my monitor, and would look awful if printed on 8x10.
It's not the original. It's a 2048×935 @ 72ppi, at a guess about 1/4 the actual size shot and it's been compressed so it can be uploaded onto a website. It's hardly a real representation of the capabilities of the camera.
Yeah, I expected a bit more of a hardcore review. Maybe we'll have to wait until a dedicated photography blog reviews it. For what it's worth, there's this review here that compares its video capabilities to a Sony a7S III, although the reviewer seems unfamiliar with HDR workflows: https://petapixel.com/2020/10/26/sony-a7s-iii-vs-the-iphone-...
I'm looking at it on my Xiaomi Redmi 8 (maybe?) generic mid level Android phone. I recognise that I'm not very discerning in these matters (and no doubt many others) but by way of compensation I suspect this makes it easier to be happy and content.
That photo is insta-delete in my book at any resolution. I think it's just a bad scene all together but also nothing is sharp at any distance from the camera and colors look washed.
I think the whole point of these reviews are...how will the images look on Instagram not necessarily for pixel peepers.
I agree with you completely, that when it comes down to the full image, the results are usually grainy and pixelated. That's why I'm sticking with my Sony camera.
TBH, I think some of these photos look a little muddy and noisy even at 4x6 dimensions. Even some of the ones taken in daylight. Maybe there was an issue with the post-processing, but I wouldn't characterize someone who wants to print a 4x6 as a pixel peeper..
The 12 Pro does Night Mode on all three lenses. The 11 Pro only does it on the "regular" wide.
The 12 Pro's "regular" wide also has a larger aperture to improve low light capture, so Night Mode can stack fewer / shorter exposures for the final image.
In some ways, this feels like the reviews of the last couple of generations of iPhone: it can work really well in very good light and at typical web resolutions. The photo of the woman in the parka is very impressive as a technical demonstration but is also pretty blurry/smeared, to my eye. As an only camera, it's probably the best or near the best of the phones.
I think the photo of the woman is terrible. I don't blame the phone for it, its very hard to achieve with small sensors, and the iphone is probably the best of the bunch. But it doesn't make the picture quality near "good-enough" for that scenario.
With slightly better lighting it can be "good enough" to be hard to distinguish from a bigger sensor camera for "web" where "web" really means ~6inch phone display - and that's great, but let's not fool ourselves ;-)
I'm also curious what the max will look like - though at the size and price it's difficult to say if buying a RX100 and a cheaper phone isn't a better option still, for many.
You don't need a three second exposure with a modern camera and a fast lens. F/1.2 or f/1.4 with low-light stacking at 1/10 to 1/2 will more than do it for moonlight.
Plus, it has artifical light, a phone screen, so even less than that would be useful.
As for AF, the obvious solution is to simply have a light in the camera. Mine does, it works fine even in complete darkness. I've actually gone and took a photo of a subject lit only with a phone screen, in perfect darkness, at around 2 meters.
Very, very far from a challenging situation. Actually, quite easy.
With my F/1.4 lens, a cellphone screen provides enough light to illuminate a wooden plank to a shutter speed of 1/25 at ISO4000. More than serviceable. Especially with stabilization, where I can in reality get away with 1/2.
You know, dedicated cameras also evolved. A lot.
At the issue of this expriment, I can be confident that my camera can take pictures of much higher quality in the same conditions, at a higher resultion with much less noise and more detail, and all that at half of the price. Indeed, an a6000+EF-speedbooster+Tamron28-75 2.8 EF will run you 600$ tax included, for a higher performance, and will last you a decade or more.
EDIT: for some reason, I can't answer since I'm rate limited, but I can actually do a 3 second exposure, hand held, with my camera, and get a sharper result that that. Especially if I'm tipsy. Here's how I do it - I put my camera in image stacking mode, set the shutter speed to 0.8 seconds, and fire the shutter.
My camera will then take 4 pictures with IS on for 0.8 seconds in each of them, recenter IS in the few milliseconds between them, then warp and shift the images together and stack them. Bam, 3(.2) second exposure. It's not always the sharpest on the first try, but it's a hell of a lot sharper than whatever is in the picture there. Also, the iPhone is rejecting quite a few images there, so it won't be 3 seconds and more like 1.2 seconds.
Especially at the wide focal lengths equivalent to an iPhone. It's not very hard. I was at 1/20 before to ensure maximum sharpness, but if I'm willing to either stack in post or take 2-3 shots, more than possible.
Unfortunately it's too late to edit my comment now but yes, I should have been clearer that what I meant was taking a hand-held three second exposure with another camera, not that that specific photo itself would be impossible.
It's a reasonable separate point to make that a "proper" camera wouldn't need such a long exposure for the same amount of light.
Most cameras can't, I agree, but mine does. It has a 4 exposure stacking mode, but only in JPEG mode, and the stabilization is sufficient that I can get quite sharp images at 0.8x4 handled, especially at the 35-28mm equivalent focal lengths of an iPhone.
I can share some pics, if you want. It does require a steady hand.
But then again, the iPhone doesn't really do a 3 second exposure, it rejects a lot of frame so it's more like 1.5-2 seconds, which I can do reliably.
That shot is testing the low-light autofocus with no modelling light, which I think is a test that any f/0.95 lens/body combo on the market right now would fail?
Most modern cameras can autofocus in perfect darkness using a small AF light. Especially at f/0.95!
But really, I recreated the shot, in a perfectly dark room with a phone light as the only light source, and it focused adequately and the image came out more than adequate at 1/20x ISO 2066 @ f/2.8, or 1/30 ISO2400 f/1.4, all with good AF.
This is on a handheld three second exposure in the dark. Not sure you would do much better with an SLR. I have on Olympus OMD EM5 with great OIS and that shot would be pretty challenging
This is partly because the flash has blasted her face with light losing all the shape except for an ugly shadow under her nose. With my Nikon I could try at (very) high ISO for a natural-light shot or use an off-camera flash to shape her face in a more flattering way. But perhaps people used to the very flat / boring light common in mirror selfies won't care about this.
The blur on the edges of the fur look digitally smeared rather than optically blurred.
[edit - okay, I didn't spot that he used off screen light rather than flash. But the effect is similar and hasn't given any pleasing sculpting of the subject. Other processing may have made things worse]
He didn't use a flash for that image, the only light was from another phone screen. And it was a three second hand-held, it's impressively clear for what it is.
> This Portrait mode w/ Night mode 3-second exposure was shot with the iPhone 12 Pro in my right hand. Simultaneously, in my left hand, I held my iPhone 11 Pro and used the light emitting from the screen (not the flash) as an off-camera fill light for Esther’s face.
I don't think there was flash involved in the shot, it says he held another phone on his left hand and used the light from the screen (not flash) as an indirect light source. The washed out look I think is from software averaging to correct motion blur from the 3 second exposure.
The blur is actually insane amounts of noise reduction, it's not an attempt at bokeh, I think! You can tell because all other shadows are just as blurred out.
I think that it doesn't look flat just because of the flash, but really as a mix of incredibly severe noise reduction as well as a ton of dynamic compression necessary to keep the background in roughly the same exposure.
He says it’s “Portrait mode”, so it does have the fake bokeh on the background in addition to any smoothing from night mode denoising. That’s why he also mentions the depth map for the fuzzy hood.
It's unrealistic to get off-camera flash on iPhone unless two could be paired together with a friend holding iPhone acting as a flash. But what could be done easily is a ring flash around the rear camera that would make most portraits bearable instead of horrible basic flash.
There are also Deep Learning models that change angle of light on a final photo, so you would be able to get your Rembrandt lighting that way soon.
What percentage of people would rate portrait photo with bokeh much much better from a DSLR than from an iPhone 12 pro (or any other top Android phone) in a blind test? I would say that more people will prefer the phone photo, unless you edit the dslr photo (which phone is doing automatically unless you shoot RAW on iPhone).
I don't know how you would define "better", but if you mean higher quality, I'm certain that most people would be able to pick out the DSLR version in a "blind" test, even if you used the same approx. lens focal length on the DSLR and the phone (e.g. 52mm when comparing to iPhone). I would guess people would prefer the DSLR one, but it's simply a guess (and I'm biased because I know more or less what to look for).
I'm not sure if I'd say that most people would be able to tell. But I'm sure photography people would be able to tell. Unless you're a wannabe influencer or a working professional, what matters is not whether other people would be able to tell. Nobody cares about your pictures. What matters is if you can tell, and how it makes you feel.
I think if you let them zoom in to the edges they'd pick it easily enough. My iPhone always blurs a few little details, little part of a hat sticking out, thinking it's the background.
the picture we're talking about is taken at night, and looks like a painting, this has nothing to do with bokeh or the need to edit a picture taken with a large sensor mirrorless camera
> What percentage of people would rate portrait photo with bokeh much much better from a DSLR than from an iPhone 12 pro (or any other top Android phone) in a blind test?
As an iPhone 11 Pro + Halide user myself, I daresay a DSLR photo with a decent portrait lens would definitely look better — or at the very least — more natural, than any iPhone photo that relies on "computational photography" fake-bokeh.
Yes, anyone could tell the difference between this taken on a dedicated camera and this taken on iPhone. Really, anyone. No matter the resolution.
It really does just look like a blurry mess. A cheap 150$ DSLR with a bottom-bargain Chinese or very old lens (at say, F1.4 or lower) would provide significantly better results.
GP is the only person I can find in this thread referencing "woman in a park". Everyone else is talking about the "woman in a parka". I think you were correct in your assumption before. People are talking about the image without the dog.
As a photo for a magazine or other professional use sure. As a photo of your daughter the first time you've managed to get together after the lockdown late at night after a long journey, effing incredible.
I got the iPhone 12 Pro after using my iPhone X for the last three years. I was mostly excited about a big camera upgrade, and there are definitely some big improvements from what I have been using. But I'm not 100% sure if I'm going to keep it. I'm not sure I'm blown away enough for just shy of CDN $2,000. Even though it's almost the same size, it feels considerably bigger than my X, and I'm not a fan of the matte back which slides off my hands much easier than the polished glass of the X. I know the regular 12 and mini have a polished back, and the mini looks like a good option for me except for the fact that I'd be losing the 2x lens. If I have two lenses, I'd rather have the wide and 2x of my X than a wide and ultra-wide that the 12 and 11 before it have.
For the same price you can get a nice DSLR and the iPhone SE 2. That's what I did. Heck even my Nikon D70 from 2008(bought it used in 2011) can still run circles around even the most expensive phones for pictures. Best camera is the one you have on you, well when you have kids you haul the DSLR around anyway. Sorry.
> For the same price you can get a nice DSLR and the iPhone SE 2.
DSLR vs. iPhone is apples and oranges. Two devices with completely different use cases.
If your primary goal is to buy a no-compromise device for photography, obviously you should get a full size camera.
But 99% of the time, you're going to have an iPhone in your pocket and no camera on hand. That's why it's great to have an excellent camera in your phone. You can always augment with a DSLR for special occasions, but it's not like a DSLR and iPhone are interchangeable.
Yea D70 is just for pictures. I have Sony a6400 as main camera and to be honest I can turn it on and record a video faster than I can with my iPhone, mainly because the dedicated buttons. I also don't think it's that much of a hassle. It has Wifi to get data off. It's pretty easy actually. It's worth spending and extra 2 minutes to do it so in 30 years I have nice video and pictures of family.
Most new cameras have WiFi capability syncing to your phone. It's an extra step but it's not as bad as it used to be. Finally snapseed and lightroom for Android are good enough for basic editing in the field. At least that's what I do and I'm quite satisfied. With the resolution Facebook and Instagram presents photos the phone apps are more than sufficient at raw processing.
I can only talk to Panasonic (GX8) and Fujifilm (X100F, XE3), but for both of those it's still pretty awful. Transfers are very slow, especially if you want full resolution, and it's always frustrating to just connect my phone to the camera--the apps are slow and clunky, setting up the adhoc network is flaky, and often times even after connecting it'll suddenly just disconnect for no reason. The XE3 supposedly supports a persistent, bluetooth connection that'll auto connect and auto transfer photos, but every time I've tried to set that up, it sends like the first two photos along and then doesn't work anymore.
> Best camera is the one you have on you, well when you have kids you haul the DSLR around anyway.
I don't have kids, but wouldn't Live Photos be a better feature for reliving moments with your kids? A DSLR will never be able to do that, because the mechanical shutter prevents it from doing so.
So I am not the only one keeping my D70 around! Sensor size is still truly impressive if you're coming from the phone world. My photo hardware currently is just the iPhone XS, a Fuji X100S, and an old Nikon D70 with some telelenses.
I disagree. I have an A9 + GM glass. I'm constantly surprised by what a modern smartphone can take compared to what I get out of my camera. Yes, you can get way better photos if you do everything right with a traditional camera (and certainly much more real bokeh) but that usually involves a lot more editing than you have to do with an iPhone 12 Pro or similar.
For the amount of time it takes - the iPhone 12 Pro and similar can really outperform a camera. One you get a snapshot you'd be okay with sharing with others immediately - with the other, you're like, "Yeah, the exposure is a little off but maybe that's just because of the dynamic range limitations? And I need to adjust the contrast, maybe sharpen a little bit, colors aren't really there, and it would've been great if I had done bracketed exposures because the sky is just too blown out to recover properly..." A lot of that stuff is gone with smartphones because they do it all for you.
It's what annoys me about modern cameras - they don't have any of that built in as an option. You have to do all the work by yourself and bracketing is just way too much of a PITA for me to deal with for most photos. Computational photography is a huge breakthrough that many cameras just don't utilize almost at all.
I'd argue it's the photographer beyond all else that makes the picture good. Camera vs lens - who cares. The lenses and sensors are good enough on these smart phones for their use case. They aren't meant to replace pro gear.
That's why I think smartphones are great. They lower the barrier for taking pretty good pictures. You don't have to worry about balancing exposure or figuring out how to merge multiple photos into one - etc. The smartphone does it all for you. It's an automated photo editor with some intelligent tricks that are very hard (or impossible) to do on a traditional camera.
No one is saying a smartphone is going to replace a pro-camera. If you want to do birding with a 1200mm equivalent, you're going to have a hard time doing that with a smartphone. But if you know the limitations (in the same way that all cameras have limitations) then it can do really well in those parameters.. and I find those parameters are more than enough for 90%+ of consumers out there.
Most people are fine with zooming with their feet.
I had good success with EyeFi back in the day and used it across a couple generations and cameras. Unfortunately, WiFi on a camera is a feature, not a product. Between phones eating cameras and WiFi getting built-in, it really wasn’t a company built for longevity.
I'm still rocking an X. I thought whatever the 12 was would end up being my replacement. But I am just not impressed enough and your summary makes me feel good about not jumping on it. The X is still going strong. I get > 1 day battery life (which is all I need) and although I do notice the occasional stutter, it is still very very good.
These comments can be tedious, but same! Been using this X for a few years now and would rather purchase a battery replacement.
The one feature to make me upgrade is a high refresh rate screen. I switched from 60hz to 120hz on my main monitor a few years ago and I can’t go back. I imagine the same would happen with my phone since it’s mainly used to reading articles like this one.
I went from an X to a 12 Pro and love it for the camera upgrade. I’m trying to force myself to take more video/live photos than stills, and the 12 Pro’s HDR video is a major improvement so far.
I’m considering getting rid of my Nikon Z6 since I rarely actually use it due to the size and weight. Its still image quality is still noticeably better than the phone, especially with my Nikon f1.8 50 mm lens, but the iPhone wins for video and Live Photo’s.
The X is my favorite by far. It was a leap in terms of the user experience and design. I think all the versions that followed that doesn't change the user experience by that much. May be we will see one in the 20th anniversary edition!
and here I am looking to go to the Mini because at this point the phone's cameras have been more capable than I have for ages and all I want is a phone but without the size and weight that makes me notice I am carrying it.
Just since it's sponsored, Airstream is one of the shittiest luxury products I can think of and owning one of the bigger mistakes I've ever made. The quality is the same as any other RV, so you are paying a huge premium for the aluminum shell which looks cool but not nearly as trouble free as the marketing leads one to expect. You can basically own 3-4 trailers from any other manufacturer for the same cost, and would be ahead in every way. You can also rent RVs including other people's airstreams these days so unless you plan on spending a significant amount of time using an RV (like full time or as a guest house) it's smarter to let someone else deal with maintenance and depreciation.
I feel like a lot of people that keep bringing up DSLRs kinda miss the point. The best camera is the one you have on you. So even a minor incremental upgrade is worth its weight in gold when you consider you'll be capturing images where you'd never dream of having a DSLR but in considerably better quality.
You don't need a DSLR. A regular point-and-shoot[0] which costs $100, fits in your pocket and has an electronic retractable lens (and many times optical zoom) is going to blow away anything recent phone cameras can do (photography wise), bar handheld night photos where the additional processing does help even out blurriness. If you can remember to bring your phone, you can remember to bring a point-and-shoot, and they both fit in your pocket.
The insane quality upgrade you get from a point-and-shoot is because they have a much bigger sensor and a real lens and focus light brilliantly well, and if you want bokeh you don't need any of that crap fake blur processing to achieve what physics will do for you.
I often feel like people have forgotten or never even knew how good images can be with an actual camera, and it doesn't have to be a DSLR at all.
I'd be very surprised if this were true. My iPhone 11 goes head-to-head with my mid-range mirrorless camera setup in most shooting conditions. Modern phone cameras are surprisingly good, really.
Really? I've done comparisons with my GR3 and my iPhone and even when browsing thumbnails it gets pretty obvious which is which quality wise. When I start looking at the photos on my desktop or iPad it becomes even more evident. It might be the kit lens your using or your taking pictures in bright sunlight only, which at that point the camera doesn't matter that much anymore.
I've always found it odd nobody, specifically Samsung or Sony (since Sony already makes their own high-end CMOS sensors), doesn't ship a phone with a slightly superior sensor?
Yes, I get the unit economics of it (at least I think I do, I've never worked in the phone industry so that could easily be hubris on my part), but if you can spend an extra few dollars or even tens of dollars on your BOM for something that is clearly, objectively a better camera to everything else out there I don't see how Samsung couldn't trivially add a minimum $200 markup just for that.
And you don't even need that. You could add a sensor that's just a few dollars more expensive at scale - it seems the margins are trivially there since that would easily justify a $50 markup. I realize the optics also matter, but at this point it's really the sensors limiting the phones, not the cheap glass.
In an industry where everyone is struggling for an edge, it just seems painfully obvious to do this to me. I look forward to someone more knowledgeable telling me why all my assumptions are wrong though (I mean that literally, no snark intended!).
What do you mean by "slightly superior sensor"? Do you assume that there exist (or someone could produce with today's technology) sensors that are "objectively" better that the current phone sensors?
In my opinion the limiting factor in phone cameras is the size. Of course, for a given size a cheap, crappy sensor will give crappy results. But I wouldn't be surprised that sensors used in flagship phones are actually pretty close to the state of the art.
The issue with the size is that if you increase it for the sensor, you're going to have to increase it for the optics. In an era where manufacturers are convinced we want paper-thin devices, they're going to have to choose the one over the other.
I think it's a great idea to have a camera that is also a phone, rather than the other way around. I wouldn't care if it was an inch thick instead of a quarter inch if it had the actual best camera built in.
I think he's postulating that the sensor+phone manufacturers could give themselves an edge by only selling less-than-top-of-the-line sensors to their competitors.
OK, I didn't read it like that. My reading was more along the lines of "manufacturers are cheap, when they could pay extra for a better sensor and mark up their product accordingly".
Unfortunately I don't remember where this was, but I read that the way Sony is setup they couldn't really do it.
This was related to "actual cameras", not phone cameras, but the article's point was that "Sony sensors" was a separate division, and Sony Cameras would be their client, just as, say, Nikon.
Nikon was supposedly taking part in the design of the sensors Sony would manufacture for them and this design was only to be used for Nikon. So if some engineer came up with some revolutionary idea, at least in theory, Sony cameras wouldn't be able to use it.
Not sure if this is the case with the phones, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least Apple took a similar approach with this.
The biggest issue for low light is sensor size. Smaller sensors means more noise, and that noise is smoothed out with computational photography. That's why most manufacturers are going for more discrete sensors with different lenses, instead. Samsung does have a "periscope" design for the super tele in their latest phone that mounts the sensor vertically. Lenses are more important than sensor for sharpness, and there's obviously not a ton of room in these phones to put big lenses. Camera bumps are already growing quite large.
I don't think attempts at specifically photo-optimized smartphones have done that well when it was tried, and at least Sony is probably happy having their sensors in everyone elses high-end phones (which I think is the case). And in the form-factor of a normal high-end phone it's probably not just "just use a more expensive sensor", the top models likely are already near the top of what's possible sensor-wise.
The Long answer. Adding a decent camera sensor also requires you market the crap out of it. And as shown by Huawei and Samsung, longer Zoom sells better than better sensor or image quality. For 90% of customers Flagship Smartphone Camera quality is good enough or fast approaching good enough. Zoom level makes lots of difference.
And that is assuming Sony's Smartphone overall are anywhere as good as its competitor such as Samsung and Huawei. I have no idea whether that is the case, but Sony's Smartphone sales are dismal in numbers. [1]
And finally, as far as I can tell, both Sony and Samsung are innovating like crazy to produce the best small sensor. There just isn't a super great small sensors sitting there waiting for others to pick up for additional $20 more. And if Sony decade to withhold those tech from Apple, Samsung will capture those market shares.
[1] If you look at overall annual shipment, Huawei, Samsung, Apple, Chinese Brands ( Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, RealMe, Vivo etc.. ) They are 90+% of the market.
It probably depends on what scale these parts can be provided on. It is possible that for a digital camera the supply capability could meet the demands but would struggle with the volume required for a phone.
This iPhone 12 Pro upgrade has made me put my MILC gear all up for sale. "The best camera is the one you have on you" yada yada.. As others here have pointed out, you can still take a better photo with a DSLR/MILC and nice glass and unlimited time to fidget with your gear, but for the size and convenience, this iPhone comes way too close. For me it easily outweighs the burden of a bulky, expensive, fragile DSLR (I am also embarrassed to haul a DSLR to a wedding or party).
There are also a bunch of software features on the iPhone that are actually more ergonomic than on a dedicated camera, and help me catch the shot I want. Live Photos, burst, pinch zoom, tap to focus (on a legit screen, not on those poor excuses for touch UIs on cameras). Instant switching between video/still and lens modes. Basically everything is auto and It's point and shoot in any situation.
If I am to boil the whole thing down I would say the iPhone's camera makes my MILC feel antiquated and 90% of the time I'll be catching better photos on the iPhone 12.
He only compared a few shots to the 11 pro, there are some youtube videos that do comparisons to the pixel 5 and galaxy note s20. The s20 especially has better zoom and night mode compared to the 12 pro.
I think there was a thread here on the disadvantages of all the software processing in phone cameras today. I had a similar experience trying to capture the orange skies when the wildfires were raging here in California. My iPhone corrected every single image to remove the orange and replace it with a dark gray sky. It looked more overcast than apocalyptic. But I'm not fully against the idea of shipping some of those algorithms in a DSLR, especially the Pixel's low light photography.
What you're describing is the problem with auto white balance, which affects phone cameras and webcams equally. Often it works well, but sometimes (like in your case) it fails disastrously.
Unfortunately the iPhone (and Mac's built-in FaceTime) cameras have no option to manually set the white balance. You need to use third-party apps/webcams to handle it.
> Unfortunately the iPhone (and Mac's built-in FaceTime) cameras have no option to manually set the white balance.
I think the new iPhones ship with native ProRAW support, which might mean that the built-in Photos app would be able to access the same amount of imaging data that a specialised RAW editor could in prior versions.
Nope, all you get is exposure controls. Third party apps like Halide fill in the gaps here quite well, but sadly you can't make them your primary camera.
Well, yeah, because the software magic is a pure attempt to make up for the lack of specs. Sensors the size that fit in phones will never be able to create shallow depth of field naturally, so fix it in post. Sensors the size that fit in a phone will never have the same light sensitivity, so fix it in post with AI (even better?!).
Things like low-light photography has always been available on DSLR's, like SLR's long before it, since you've always been able to control shutter speed, aperture, and ISO.
And all the extra software magic can already be done on your laptop on RAW files, where you've got enough space on your screen for all the sliders -- and a large enough screen to see the difference it makes in the details.
These days, pretty much the only people shooting with DSLR's are the people who want/need that fine-grained manual control anyways.
It does seem like it's high time for there to be some kind of RAW-over-time standard, e.g. a single file with 2 hours of exposure that Photoshop would have built-in tools to manage -- and even the ability to handle matrix transformation movement over time, e.g. to photograph stars over 5 minutes.
I wonder how useful it would be to embed gyroscope/accelerometer data with it though? Everything I imagine having to do with long/stacked exposures involves a tripod.
Motion data actually seems like it would be more useful to embed in regular-exposure RAWs, since it could help build a deconvolution kernel to undo motion blur.
The idea would be that all stills, instead of being just a single still, are actually multiple stills that can be stacked on top of one another in order to reduce noise and reduce motion blur, as well as increase dynamic range.
Of course, this would need a camera with much faster sensor readouts, which should be possible with Sony's next generation of stacked sensors.
I would love that. I'm incredibly curious to see where things are headed, because it feels like this has to be the way forwards.
Of course, storing 100 or 10,000 stills would up storage requirements dramatically -- but then lossless compression should bring that back down to entirely reasonable levels.
Because all you really have to do is compute the "average" image across the entire exposure (or at various "keyframes" if there's significant motion) and then encode the differences from those, which is trivial to compress.
I really hope this is something we see in the next 5 years, as opposed to 20 years.
> These days, pretty much the only people shooting with DSLR's are the people who want/need that fine-grained manual control anyways.
Or people who shoot journalism, sports, conferences or other live events.
I don't care how damn good smartphones are (or will become). DSLRs will forever rule the roost in fast paced environments, smartphones are just too fiddly and there's nothing the manufacturers can do, the hinderance is not software, its form-factor.
But what computational photography aspects that only Apple/Google provide are going to be useful for journalists or sports photographers?
That was the original question, and I'm not seeing it.
Obviously they're using DSLR's for the manual controls and lenses. But my point stands: if they need advanced image processing for something they're going to publish... they need to adjust it on a large screen. Not on-camera.
> And all the extra software magic can already be done on your laptop on RAW files, where you've got enough space on your screen for all the sliders -- and a large enough screen to see the difference it makes in the details.
Not entirely true: DSLRs wouldn't be able to capture depth data like the dual/triple-camera phones can, for "computational photography" magic (or simple masking).
The point is, the sensor size, lens variety, and ergonomics of a full size camera with the astonishingly good computational photography software of Apple or Google. You can’t do it with a standard camera because the software needs sensor data (gyro, accelerometer) and fast control (video frames, changing exposure) of the camera unit.
the software magic "just" takes raw images and make something with it.
photographers prefer retaining the raws and do the something themselves on a fast computer.
Now, there's some good use cases for it but I guess the tradeoff hasn't been worth it so far. E.g. having some processing options in camera can speed up your workflow (but then again all the "toys" like this are removed from pro cameras because most people didn't use them). Also, the same magic Apple or Google use doesn't really exist outside of their phones (yet at least, I assume Adobe is working on this).
One constraint around this is the sheer bandwidth required to do any sort of live processing (either for viewfinding purposes or autofocus) — the latency (and even bandwidth) of anything less than a direct raw feed into the processor isn't gonna be good enough.
The "real" camera would need a lot of sensors in it, because I think the software works by combining the image data with the motion data of the camera to stabilize it.
Most of these photos are remarkable but the woman-in-parka shot looks heavily ... airbrushed. Maybe one of the blur filters got turned on or something? Composition-wise it's good and all that, not insulting the subject or the photographer, but the software appears to have applied quite a bit of blur.
It's labelled as "Extreme low-light Portrait with Night mode" with the note "The blurring and noise reduction is a bit less realistic and a bit more… dreamy?"
It's a three-second exposure, hand-held. The software has greatly reduced the blur if anything. Try doing that with a normal camera and the whole thing will be blur.
> Stop and consider that for a moment... because of Night mode and computational algorithms we went from "completely unusable dark frame" to "I want that on my wall."
No mention of whether or not the photo was handheld or how long the exposure time was. If the photo they were referring to was handheld, I guess I agree. However, the subsequent photo which is the same landscape is captioned "on tripod" so it's not clear if the previous one (which isn't captioned) is handheld or not.
If both were shot on a tripod, then I disagree with the original statement. Any sensor will do better in low light with a longer exposure, and if phones simply let you expose for however long you wanted to then many "night" photos would look amazing - on a tripod, of course.
I think the point he's making is that night mode was not available on the wide lens on the 11. So you can't so a long exposure at all, hence the frame of nothingness.
It was literally just to see how the new LIDAR stuff can help with a nearly impossibly dark shot.
Of course a DSLR/mirrorless with proper lighting and a tripod would actually look good.
I don't think that was the point with that test shot, though.