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iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

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Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#101

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

sudosysgen wrote: post #48
ssijak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this was the image referenced with the "woman in a park" in the initial post https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/50730c37e4b03a...

Oh, I read "woman in a parka " instead, and in combination with "blurry, smeared" I concluded that it was the image at night.

GP is the only person I can find in this thread referencing "woman in a park". Everyone else is talking about the "woman in a parka". I think you were correct in your assumption before. People are talking about the image without the dog.

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#103

Post by frostburg »

Nition wrote: post #94
zobzu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the photo of the woman is terrible. I don't blame the phone for it, its very hard to achieve with small sensors, and the iphone is probably the best of the bunch. But it doesn't make the picture quality near "good-enough" for that scenario. With slightly better lighting it can be "good enough" to be hard to distinguish from a bigger sensor camera for "web" where "web" really means ~6inch phone display - and t…

> I think the photo of the woman is terrible. On any normal camera that photo would be a complete blur. Impossible. It's a hand-held three second exposure.

IBIS and a f/0.95 lens would get you there (or a flash, which phones mostly can't synch to).

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#104

Post by dingaling »

bradlys wrote: post #83
dham wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same price you can get a nice DSLR and the iPhone SE 2. That's what I did. Heck even my Nikon D70 from 2008(bought it used in 2011) can still run circles around even the most expensive phones for pictures. Best camera is the one you have on you, well when you have kids you haul the DSLR around anyway. Sorry.

I disagree. I have an A9 + GM glass. I'm constantly surprised by what a modern smartphone can take compared to what I get out of my camera. Yes, you can get way better photos if you do everything right with a traditional camera (and certainly much more real bokeh) but that usually involves a lot more editing than you have to do with an iPhone 12 Pro or similar. For the amount of time it takes - the iPhone 12 Pro and…

> For the amount of time it takes - iPhone 12 Pro and similar can really outperform a camera

It's not the camera that makes the difference but the lens. And a smartphone just can't make up that difference with software tricks.

A smartphone will be fantastically practical and convenient as a camera in a specific set of use-cases. Outside those it's pretty useless.

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#105

Post by jdxcode »

bradlys wrote: post #83
dham wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same price you can get a nice DSLR and the iPhone SE 2. That's what I did. Heck even my Nikon D70 from 2008(bought it used in 2011) can still run circles around even the most expensive phones for pictures. Best camera is the one you have on you, well when you have kids you haul the DSLR around anyway. Sorry.

I disagree. I have an A9 + GM glass. I'm constantly surprised by what a modern smartphone can take compared to what I get out of my camera. Yes, you can get way better photos if you do everything right with a traditional camera (and certainly much more real bokeh) but that usually involves a lot more editing than you have to do with an iPhone 12 Pro or similar. For the amount of time it takes - the iPhone 12 Pro and…

I would guess that camera manufacturers can't afford computational photography—certainly not in the same way Apple, Samsung, and Google can.

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#106

Post by wlesieutre »

Nition wrote: post #94
zobzu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the photo of the woman is terrible. I don't blame the phone for it, its very hard to achieve with small sensors, and the iphone is probably the best of the bunch. But it doesn't make the picture quality near "good-enough" for that scenario. With slightly better lighting it can be "good enough" to be hard to distinguish from a bigger sensor camera for "web" where "web" really means ~6inch phone display - and t…

> I think the photo of the woman is terrible. On any normal camera that photo would be a complete blur. Impossible. It's a hand-held three second exposure.

And good luck with auto-focus

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#107

Post by renewiltord »

gokhan wrote: post #71
renewiltord wrote: post #70

Most of these photos are remarkable but the woman-in-parka shot looks heavily ... airbrushed. Maybe one of the blur filters got turned on or something? Composition-wise it's good and all that, not insulting the subject or the photographer, but the software appears to have applied quite a bit of blur.

It's labelled as "Extreme low-light Portrait with Night mode" with the note "The blurring and noise reduction is a bit less realistic and a bit more… dreamy?"

Huh, my bad, I missed that it was night mode.

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#108

Post by pat2man »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #53
aloknnikhil wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there was a thread here on the disadvantages of all the software processing in phone cameras today. I had a similar experience trying to capture the orange skies when the wildfires were raging here in California. My iPhone corrected every single image to remove the orange and replace it with a dark gray sky. It looked more overcast than apocalyptic. But I'm not fully against the idea of shipping some of those…

Does iPhone not have a pro mode? On my Samsung phone I put it into pro, adjusted the white-balance inside and then pointed my camera outside.

Nope, all you get is exposure controls. Third party apps like Halide fill in the gaps here quite well, but sadly you can't make them your primary camera.

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#109

Post by wlesieutre »

sudosysgen wrote: post #45
KineticLensman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the photo of the woman is terrible This is partly because the flash has blasted her face with light losing all the shape except for an ugly shadow under her nose. With my Nikon I could try at (very) high ISO for a natural-light shot or use an off-camera flash to shape her face in a more flattering way. But perhaps people used to the very flat / boring light common in mirror selfies won't care about this. Th…

The blur is actually insane amounts of noise reduction, it's not an attempt at bokeh, I think! You can tell because all other shadows are just as blurred out. I think that it doesn't look flat just because of the flash, but really as a mix of incredibly severe noise reduction as well as a ton of dynamic compression necessary to keep the background in roughly the same exposure.

He says it’s “Portrait mode”, so it does have the fake bokeh on the background in addition to any smoothing from night mode denoising. That’s why he also mentions the depth map for the fuzzy hood.

Re: iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

#110

Post by Nition »

frostburg wrote: post #103
Nition wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the photo of the woman is terrible. On any normal camera that photo would be a complete blur. Impossible. It's a hand-held three second exposure.

IBIS and a f/0.95 lens would get you there (or a flash, which phones mostly can't synch to).

Ah well, F/0.95 is cheating a bit though, I meant assuming you were doing a hand-held three second exposure with another camera.

Of course it's a reasonable point you make that a "proper" camera wouldn't need such a long exposure for the same amount of light.

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