Featured
iPhone X Studio Lighting Portrait Mode Feature Tested
Paul Briden
15/11/2017 – 12:30pm
Apple’s iPhone X Portrait Mode has been compared against actual studio lighting by a pro photographer
There are a lot of major talking points regarding the iPhone X’s feature set, but amongst them one that has received a lot of attention is Apple’s new Portrait Mode for the camera, specifically the Studio Lighting aspect which uses software algorithms in a bid to emulate the kind of high-quality photography you’d usually have to pay a professional to snap of you inside a fully-kitted studio.
Interestingly, professional photographer Daniel DeArco has taken the time to investigate and compare side-by-side this new feature with actual studio-lit photography and has created a video on the subject, posted to Youtube.
The full video is quite thorough, and well worth a watch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the conclusion (which you can probably make for yourself just by glancing at the side-by-side photos) is that Apple’s Portrait Mode isn’t a match to real-deal studio photography with a professional lighting setup.
An immediate observation is just the contrast and shadow depth, as well as the clarity and overall “smoothness” – you can see that there’s a lot more definition on the studio photos.
But with that said, it does improve mobile-snapped portraits for the average phone user quite signficantly over what we’ve seen before, and this is great for those who use things like Instagram and Facebook, as well as for something like Tinder or LinkedIn, who want better quality photos but don’t need them to be as good as expensive or time consuming studio-captured imagery.