Category: iPhone
Inside the iPhone 11 Camera, Part 1: A Completely New Camera
Last month, we took a look at what is new in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro’s camera hardware. You might’ve noticed two things from Apple’s iPhone announcement event and our blog post: the hardware changes seem fairly modest, with more attention directed at this generation’s software based processing. It’s true: The great advances in camera quality for these new iPhones are mostly to blame on advanced (and improved) software processing. I’ve taken some time to analyze the iPhone 11’s new image capture pipeline, and it looks like one of the greatest changes in iPhone cameras yet. What is a photo? That sounds like we’re off to a rather philosophical start, or delivering the punchline of an iPad photography commercial, but to highlight what makes the iPhone 11 camera unique we have to understand our expectations of photography. For a while now, you haven’t been the one taking your photos. That’s not a slight at you, dear reader: When your finger touches the shutter button, to reduce perceived latency, the iPhone grabs a photo it has already taken before you even touched the screen. This is done by starting a sort of rolling buffer of shots as soon as you open the Camera app...
iPhone 11 Pro Preview: The Camera Hardware Changes
Last year, before the iPhone XS hit the store shelves, we took a look at the changes in camera hardware on the iPhone XS compared to the iPhone X. We can do this thanks to Halide’s Technical Readout feature. Much like last year, some kind individuals have shared a few technical readouts with us from iPhone 11 Pro (and iPhone 11) units in the wild. A few words before we dig in: Why just the iPhone 11 Pro? The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro use the same kind of camera system apart from a key difference: the Pro gains a telephoto camera. All camera, sensor and performance specifications appear identical across the board, so there’s no need for us to compare the iPhone 11 to the iPhone XS. Performance-wise, though, the iPhone 11 looks to be a much better camera than the iPhone XS. These are just the hardware specs Every year, cameras including those in your iPhone become far more powerful thanks to both hardware changes and accompanying software processing. Incremental hardware improvements enable cool new features, but the real magic is increasingly in the software. We’ll follow up with a look at the work that is being done to..
iPhone XR: A Deep Dive Into Depth
With the introduction of iPhone XR, every phone in Apple’s lineup now supports depth capture. But the XR is unique: it’s the first iPhone to do it with a single lens. As we were starting to test and optimize Halide for it, we found both advantages and disadvantages. In this post we’ll take a look at three different ways iPhones generate depth data, what makes the iPhone XR so special, and show off Halide’s new 1.11 update, which enables you to do things with the iPhone XR that the regular camera app won’t. Depth Capture Method 1: Dual Camera Disparity Humans perceive depth with the help of two eyes. Our eyes may only a few inches apart, but our brains detect subtle differences between image. The greater difference, or disparity, the closer an object. The iPhone 7 Plus introduced a dual-camera system, which enables a similar way to construct depth. By taking two photos at the same time, each from a slightly different position, we can construct a disparity map. There’s a lot of guesswork involved when matches images. Add video noise and things get even rougher. A great deal of effort goes into filtering the data, additional post processing that guesses how to..
iPhone XS: Why It’s A Whole New Camera
Last week we detailed the camera hardware changes of the iPhone XS vs. the iPhone X, and I wondered why Apple’s keynote focused on changes in camera software rather than the new hardware. After testing the iPhone XS cameras for the last week, I get it. The iPhone XS doesn’t just have a bigger sensor: It has a whole new camera — and the biggest change is its reliance on computational photography. It’s A Smart Thing Apple is smart. They see diminishing returns cramming more and more electronics in a fingernail-sized sensor. Photographic technology is the science of capturing light, which is limited by optics and physics. The only way to circumvent the laws of physics is with something known as ‘computational photography’. With the powerful chips in modern iPhones, Apple can take a whole bunch of photos—some of them before you even pressed the shutter—and merge them into one perfect shot. An iPhone XS will over- and underexpose the shot, get fast shots to freeze motion and retain sharpness across the frame and grab every best part of all these frames to create one image. That’s what you get out of the iPhone XS camera, and that’s what makes it..
iPhone XS vs. iPhone X — The Camera Hardware Changes
We released Halide 1.9 on Monday, with a powerful new feature called Technical Readout. Reviewers with advance access to the iPhone XS have been kind enough to share these readouts with us, detailing several camera hardware specs. After some analysis, we can now give you an overview of what’s new in the iPhone XS camera hardware and its technical capabilities beyond what Apple stated at their keynote. Note that these are the hardware specs — Apple focused strongly on software enhancements like Smart HDR and the new Portrait mode, which are not covered by the technical specifications. Skip to the end for the comparison table. What’s new? Redesigned wide-angle lens The lens on iPhone XS and XS Max that is used for most shots* has had an overhaul with a new 26mm equivalent focal length. This is a change of 2mm—shaved off the previous iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X which have 28mm wide-angle lenses. Rafael Zeier, a journalist and Halide and iPhone XS user was kind enough to share a comparison: A new sensor While we can’t check the size of the sensor with our Technical Readout, all data points to a new sensor in the iPhone XS. John Gruber confirmed that the new..
The Power of RAW on iPhone, Part 1: Shooting RAW
I take a lot of photos. Usually I pack either a Sony A7R2 or a Leica M—two cameras with massive sensors and brilliant lenses. But lately, I’ve been shooting exclusively with the iPhone X, and have found it absolutely excellent. I am the design half of the team that makes the iPhone app Halide, which is a camera app with manual controls and, most importantly, RAW capture. RAW is a file format that holds an incredible amount of information. We’ll get into the details later, but first let’s show what you can do with it. RAW affords you editing freedom. Absolute freedom to change the colors and white balance of a photo, or recover too-bright highlights and too-dark shadows. However, as awesome as RAW is, it’s important to know RAW isn’t a magic “enhance” button. Some of our users sometimes reach out with confusion about their RAW images looking worse than a regular capture from the stock camera app. It’s helpful to understand how a RAW file is fundamentally different than JPEG, to fully understand the tradeoffs. So What’s a RAW file? Think of the process of taking a photo as three steps: 1. A sensor captures light 2. Software translates..
