‘iPhone 7 Plus Depth Effect is Legit’

Two nights ago I received my iPhone 7 Plus in the mail (matte black, naturally), and I’ve spent the hours between then and now obsessing about how great the new Portrait Mode is. The feature — which uses the two camera lenses to sense depth, focus in on the subject, and blur the foreground and background — is truly great. It’s imperfect, but in my opinion, that doesn’t matter one bit.

The internet disagrees.

Having received my iPhone a bit later than many others, I was actually shocked with how much I instantly fell in love with Portrait Mode as the reaction from my Twitter timeline could be called middling at best. Photographers obsessed with The Perfect Capture came in hot, pointing out the obvious errors, the lack of real bokeh, and other differences between Apple’s ‘Depth Effect’ and a real low aperture camera.

However, I’m of the belief that these criticisms are—to use a technical term—dumb as heck. This thing is amazing, and I say that as someone very aware of the difference between what my iPhone can capture and what I can get out of my Leica Q. That’s because there are situations in life where this difference doesn’t matter, and I foresee myself snapping away with the Portrait Mode in tons of situations going forward.

So I found myself vigorously nodding my head in agreement while reading Stu Maschwitz’s Prolost article about his own experiences. Showing real world examples of Portrait Mode in action, he admits that it’s an imperfect technology, but points out that this is the wrong mentality in the first place, saying this:

So don’t ask if Depth Effect is perfect. A better question is if its failures are distracting. And I have certainly taken some test photos where they are. But the funny thing about test photos is that there’s often nothing worth photographing in them, so you just stare at the problems. In my own testing, whenever I’ve pointed Portrait Mode at something I actually care about, the results have been solid.

So back to the question of whether we should care about a fake blur applied in post to a telephone photo. When I tweeted the above shot, someone replied with a reasonable question: wouldn’t I love the photo just as much without the effect? I replied no, and added:

Composition matters, and focus is composition in depth.

This is exactly right. What Portrait Mode offers isn’t a perfect emulation of an expensive professional camera, but instead it’s the ability to make a photograph — and the photograph’s subject — more clear.

Using a picture of his son in a crowded restaurant as an example, Maschwitz continues:

In the non-depth-effect version, the background is so distracting that I probably wouldn’t have shared this photo, but the shallow-depth-of-field version not only looks better, it succeeds in communicating my feelings at the moment of capture.

See, our eyes actually have very deep focus, but our brains and our hearts fire at ƒ/0.95.

I also took a picture in Portrait Mode (a larger version of this article’s header image), and the errors are in a sense ‘obvious’. I gave the iPhone a tough job, shooting objects on a table with complicated and sharp edges. From a technical perspective, it failed. From an aesthetic perspective, it was an absolute success. I don’t care that the background comes through in a few spaces, the photo is simply stunning, and I immediately shared it with friends.

Again, I can reference Maschwitz’s excellent article, who had a similar experience with a photo of his:

So I posted this oyster shot on Instagram, and someone pointed out how the white blob on the left is eating into my son’s elbow a little. This is true, and it’s definitely a technical failing of the depth effect. It also reminded me of something that VFX master Dennis Muren once said in dailies when I was a young artist at ILM. Someone pointed out a very real flaw with a shot. But instead of demanding that it be fixed, Dennis brushed the concern aside and declared the shot final. The flaw was not near the subject of the shot, so it didn’t concern him. “If they’re looking there,” he said, “we’ve lost them.”

Apple isn’t interested in technical perfection. They’re interested in magic.

…and ‘magic’ is exactly what Portrait Mode is.