I didn't realize that the word "bokeh" is fairly new to English-language discussion of photography -- only since about 1998 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh ).

I had this series of thoughts about smartphone camera "portrait mode" which were like this:

(1) Ha, pretty funny that we're spending all this human effort and R&D time to try to realistically simulate what is essentially a defect in camera lenses that makes them unable to have a wide enough focal plane to accurately represent what is in front of them.

(2) But wait, isn't that snobbish and a little shortsighted? (ha ha). What is a camera for anyway, is it making art or faithfully what it sees or something else? There's whole academic disciplines about this hmm okay.

(3) Well, no, I mean, a photo which has been selectively blurred like this has _less information_ than we started with, so it's objectively telling us less, and that's why it's funny, that we are spending so much time removing information.

(4) But maybe that's just the same as editing. Surely a good editor of texts takes a lot of information and removes information to make a better story; in the same way surely a "portrait mode" is really about figuring out what the most important parts are of a picture and selectively obscuring the rest, so that the 'good stuff' can shine through. That's important and hard; with an 85mm lens at f1.8 you'd do it by controlling focus carefully, but doing it after the fact is definitely interesting.

So okay, the reason this feature is interesting (and hard) is that software is trying to guess what parts of a picture are noise that should be gently deemphasized.

Now, it seems like the best way that software companies can think of to deemphasize unimportant parts of a picture is to mimic what a physical camera does with a portrait lens -- choose parts not on the same focal plane, pretend those parts were out of focus, then soften the image in the areas that "should have been" out of focus and blur them.

Now that they have shipped products that do that I'd be interested to see what the folks at Apple & Android do next. Do their teams still exist? Have they thought about how they would emphasize the important parts of a portrait if they weren't required to simulate the mechanical effect of a camera lens? What else could they do, maybe a little more creatively, to make portraits shine?

(And have they reinvented anything that Photoshop plugin makers have been doing for a decade?)