Owners of Apple’s latest iPhones can expect a big camera upgrade later this year, thanks to two significant improvements promised in the forthcoming iOS 16 release.
According to Apple’s official iOS 16 website, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max smartphones will all receive an upgrade to the camera’s Portrait mode that improves the bokeh effect by adding artificial blur to the foreground as well as the background.
This should make the Portrait mode effect even more realistic by more-accurately simulating the look of professional cameras with wide-aperture lenses. Blurring the background of a portrait shot will make your subject pop, but a real wide-aperture lens would also blur the extreme foreground.
Deliberately blurring objects in the foreground can also serve as a great way to frame the subject in your photo so, as well as enhanced realism, this new feature will bring new creative possibilities to iPhone photography.
Apple’s second upgrade promises similar improvements for video, where Cinematic mode is set to gain more accurate depth-of-field effects for profile shots as well as around the edges of hair and glasses.
It’s great to see Apple delivering unexpected quality improvements to the iPhone 13 so close to the launch of the iPhone 14. According to Dxomark, the iPhone 13 Pro suffers a little from depth estimation errors in Portrait mode, notably pointing out areas around hair as an example of the issue.
Maybe the iPhone 14’s new camera will bring a truly special, must-have, upgrade later this year but, iOS 16 will at the very least allow iPhone 13 owners to mentally add a couple of points to their camera’s current Dxomark score.
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