The iPhone XS Camera is... great?

3 weeks with the iPhone XS Max

Mobile photography has come a really long way. Just take a look at this photo I snapped last week with my new phone.

24th and 6th, shot on the iPhone XS Max

I pulled out my phone, quickly composed and snapped this photo in under 2 seconds

I was crossing the street, and caught a rare moment in NYC where I had an unobstructed view down the street - I pulled out my phone, quickly composed and snapped this photo in under 2 seconds, then proceeded to cross the street before I got hit by a taxi. I was pretty shocked at what a good job the phone did, given the circumstances of the sky being brightly lit, and the buildings being mostly in shadow. Unless I had been walking around in the city with my DSLR in hand, ready to take photos, I would have never caught this.

Don't get me wrong - if you're pixel peeping on a large monitor, this picture is not going to confuse photo enthusiasts for having been taken with a professional camera. For most people, however, you can see why the low to mid-range camera market is not doing so hot right now. These phones are almost as good, if not better in some cases, for less money.

An excellent article on the iPhone XS Camera, via Halide blog

The article linked here on Halide's excellent Design and Development blog dives into much of the technical details on how the iPhone XS camera uses computational photography methods, stacking multiple exposures to produce photos with much higher dynamic range than what would be possible with a single snap on a phone's small sensor. The end result is typically impressive, albeit, a bit soft in some scenarios. For something that you're going to share on social media, the vast majority of the time you'll never notice.

Portrait Mode

So, if you're not a fan of wonderfully beautiful and amazing babies, then apologies for this next section, you're going to see a lot of pictures of my daughter. After all, she's usually what I'm pulling my phone out to take photos of!

The space between the table legs is blurred convincingly - that's pretty damn good! However, there are some hiccups by the top of the large pumpkin.

Portrait mode on the iPhone XS is vastly improved.

The photo above was taken using portrait mode, and edited using the standard iPhone photo app. I applied the "studio lighting" effect, adjusted the exposure, and what you see is the result directly out of the phone. My wife has an iPhone 7 Plus, and I can assure you that portrait mode is vastly improved.

Beautiful photo, though the fence by my daughter's left arm gives the portrait mode some issues

The iPhone uses the telephoto lens to take portrait photos, using the difference in distance to the subject between the wide angle lens and telephoto lens to generate a depth map, and then appropriately simulates a lens bokeh using this data. Note that the telephoto lens uses a sensor that is not as sensitive to light compared to the wide angle lens, and also has an f/2.4 lens compared to f/1.8 with the wide angle lens. This all means that the telephoto lens will not be very useful in low light scenarios - but given proper lighting, you can get some great results.

Portrait Mode is FAST

Another important thing to note is that Portrait Mode is FAST. I mean, really - I never owned an iPhone 8 Plus or X, but compared to the first iteration of Portrait Mode from two years ago on the 7 Plus, this is very impressive. Older phones would have a hard time focusing in Portrait Mode, and really cause you to miss a lot of moments - that's no longer the case. Today, however, the portrait camera focuses almost as fast as in regular camera mode, and really allows you to capture images of things like pets and babies with relative ease.

Having said that, as you can see in the two examples above, detailed or semi-transparent foreground objects can still give the bokeh effect some issues. You don't always catch the problems at first glance - or at all - but during critical review of some photos, and looking closely at the edges of all surfaces, you may see some missed / incorrect effect application.

Here are some more Portrait Mode examples

Come on, this is pretty neat.

The above was taken at the Bronx Zoo this past weekend. Given the consistent pattern on the rocks between the foreground and background, I'm actually pretty amazed that the phone was able to make the distinction between the two, and that the bokeh effect comes off as well as it does. I'm guessing that the depth map between the two cameras really does work - which leads me to wonder how Portrait Mode on the iPhone XR will perform when it comes out later this month. If you follow mobile phone news, you may know that the less expensive XR model will only have one rear camera, meaning that portrait mode will be performed without the depth map information that the XS models have access to.

Smart HDR

Smart HDR in Full Effect

The iPhone takes many exposures for a given scene and stitches them together in realtime.

Here we see Smart HDR and Portrait Mode in full effect - most cameras would have a bit of trouble with the lighting of this scene above. Normally, you'd need to underexpose your picture for the highlights in the sky, bring it into some editing suite like Adobe Lightroom, and then boost the shadows to make the foreground pop. Or, use some more traditional techniques like a reflector card or a flash to expose for the sky and still properly expose the subject. The iPhone solves for this by snapping a lot of photos at different exposures in realtime, and then stitching them together seamlessly, unbeknownst to most users who will be using the phone.

The selfie camera in portrait mode is pretty good as well! #beautygate

Here's hoping some software updates can fix the minor bokeh issues.

You get portrait mode on the front-facing selfie camera as well. Something, something, something - #beautygate. Long story short - it looks great. If I can hold my squirming daughter, while waiving my phone in front of my face, directly in the sun, not being able to see the screen, and still come out with something that looks halfway decent - (let alone actually pretty good) - well then I'd say that's awesome. Yah, there are some minor missed bokeh applications in the spaces between our faces, but you really need to be looking close to notice that. Here's hoping some software updates can fix these minor issues.