One of the stylistic tools I love most on traditional cameras like my Fujifilm X-PRO 3 are the choice of reduced field of depth. The possibility to guide the eye of the observer to a certain spot in the image just by reducing the sharpness around is fantastic. As you know, I am performing a three month challenge to use only my new iPhone 16 Pro Max 1TB natural titanium for a photography tasks. Till now I am impressed of the image quality and color rendering. The next episode before I will start to use third party photo apps to get better control of camera parameters in the iPhone, I wanted to experiment with the Portrait function of the standard apple photo app. At the same time I tried also a build in filter „strahlend warm“. The settings are ISO 500, 48mm, f2.8, 1/27s and 12mp.
Please have a very close look to the next pictures. How does the filter influence sharpness, details and resolution? How realistic is the by AI generated reduced field of depth?
Verdict
I am not a fool, of course one can easily see that the reduced field of depth is fake and artificial produced by the AI running on the GPUs of the iPhone 16 Pro Max but for example the unsharp rendering of the lights is fantastic. Nice circular as only very expensive lenses with many blade elects in the diaphragm can produce. Still it’s scattered at the borders of these circles to be not too perfect. This is a masterpiece of software, very well done by Apple.
My big surprise is the changes the filter “strahlend warm” is applying to the image. Not only the color rendering is modified but also the sharpness, shape and intensity of rendering the artificial reduced field of depth is modified. To those Christmas pictures it fits perfectly. One klick and it’s done and saves me hours on my laptop tuning my pictures with e.g. Photoshop.
All in all, I am once again impressed what is possible with this iPhone cameras. The strong feeling missing to use my X-PRO3 starts to fade away. Something I have never expected at the beginning of that journey. Next step will be the use of the third party app “ProCamera”. Stay tuned to see also those results.