Portrait mode sucks

[Barks]

So this post is a bit of a rant but I am hoping someone who knows more than me about optical engineering can offer some insight.

The Portrait mode feature on iPhones and other smart phones to me looks completely unnatural. As this has just been a ‘gimmick’ on smartphones over the last few years it was fine but now I noticed during the Rugby World cup they were clearly using footage with the background artificially blurred. It looked awful. You could literally see parts of the player‘s top becoming blurred.

When you take a photo with a camera and focus on the subject, the background will be blurred at different degrees depending on the depth. A pin sharp 1.8f portrait will have the face razor sharp in focus, the horizon completely blurred and other closer elements slightly blurred. When you use AI to just blur the background it loses that sense of depth. It’s a binary IN or OUT of focus.

I honestly think it looks horrific and I accept it’s a fun gimmick on smartphones but I’m annoyed to see it is now manifesting itself in commercial applications.

The thing is even the standard lens in my 12 Pro Max takes great photos with bokeh WITHOUT the artificial manipulation.

Take delivery of the 15 Pro Max tomorrow so maybe they’ve improved it but AI cannot possibly manually adjust different elements of focus based on depth from a 2D image so it’s never going to look good… this is where I was wondering if anyone could offer insight?

 

[Barks]

The depth maps and software algorithms are improving.
For social media, viewed on a phone/iPad display, at arms length the current Portrait mode outputs are fine.

I’m not sure they are though, they still stand out like a sore thumb to me. Just because the images on Insta, for example, are heavily compressed it doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate which ones were taken on a proper camera.

 

[Barks]

It is getting better but the biggest problems with it are

1 - Isolation / Selection - correctly selecting what is in focus and what is not. The edges and do it accurately
2 - Fall off / Transition - AI does it too abruptly, real lenses and real optics don't do that. Out of focus areas gradually gets more blur as it is further away.
3 - The illusion of the bokeh - different optics produces different kind of bokeh. Rather than Gaussian blur the whole thing.

I just don't use it, tried it before and it's just not needed. The average person who uses it think it looks great because it is all seen in movies, shot with a $30,000 cine lenses and they just want the effect.

iPhone 14 Pro.

Now do the same photo on the Olympus of your iphone and the what looks like a prolytic digestive enzyme shake!

 

[Barks]

I reckon B is iPhone but you’re not making it easy with those compositions. Intrigued to hear the result!

 

[Barks]

Image you hire someone to shoot your wedding. Instead of using the best gear he can, comes with a cheap phone or cheap gear. The photos are probably decent (if he's VERY good), but not as good as they could be otherwise and some images were not even taken, because it was impossible with the equipment he had. Would you be happy with that? I won't...

Gear doesn't matter is a very simplistic and wrong way to see things. Cinema cameras wouldn't exist, phones would be used everywhere. Clearly that's not the case, even when the guy behind is exceptionally good at his job.

If I hired a videographer who shot my wedding on cinematic mode or snapped photos with artificial backgrounds I wouldn’t just be unhappy I would probably throttle them

They’re using cinematic mode footage during the Rugby World Cup to capture people in the crowd and it looks truly and utterly awful.

 

[Barks]

Everything is a trade off. Phones are very close to "good enough" that the benfit of not having to lug around a camera outweighs the improve picture quality for the majority of people/uses.

"Good enough" still looks awful and completely artificial. Most of the times I've seen people use portrait mode on the iPhone, the natural bokeh from the primary lens would have looked much better anyway, but the portrait mode version just butchers what would have been a nice photo. Even my 12 Pro Max got decent portrait shots with subtle and natural bokeh (not on portrait mode).

I can't stand it. It's one of those things we'll look back on and laugh at ourselves. I doubt Steve Jobs would even have signed it off, it's just not good enough for an Apple product, not in the first iteration, not in this one either. If I could remove it entirely from my 15 Pro Max so it doesn't even appear as an option then I would. Naff, tacky, awful (in my humble opinion, I respect yours to disagree!)

 

[Barks]

I find reducing the blur to look more subtle gives the best results. I hate the cut out look some of the default portrait modes use.

Yes I agree with this completely. They do look better when you crank the background blur down. The default option looks really artificial.

 

[Barks]

Yeah I saw this in Lightroom last week and had a play. I still don’t think it looks good, even if you use it with skill and good judgement the images look artificial.

To my eyes an image with a subject in focus and a background artificially blurred just doesn’t look natural, period. The same shot taken through a proper lens will have all sorts of depth going on at different areas with the out of focus background, it isn’t just all blurred to the same degree.

Even in your image above you can see the tanker is less blurred than the tyres that are further away.

The only time these artificial options work is telephoto portrait shots where it’s just pin sharp subject and background blurred to oblivion.

 

[Barks]

I will add even though I still dislike Portrait mode, the main wide angle lens in the new 15 Pro Max is extremely impressive. Plenty of natural bokeh going on without all the portrait mode nonsense.