This has been one of the complaints against camera manufactures recently, that the firmware on the cameras is wildly archaic.
Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ looks okay at a glance, but thinks like hair, wires, and twigs are TERRIBLE on closer inspection.
Not to say the software couldn't be improved. For example, after taking a 20 second exposure, I have to wait another ~15 seconds before I can take another photo. I'd love for that processing time to be cut down.
You can turn this off in the settings, but I imagine it's way easier for the camera to correct for this specific kind of noise than for Lightroom to do so.
I believe it kicks in once the exposure length is >2" on my Sony A7ii.
Take lots of short exposures and fuse them. If the device is handheld you get variability in positioning for free, if it's on a tripod, it will automatically wiggle the OIS slightly to achieve the same effect.
Portrait mode on any phone looks crap. I have not yet seen a picture where fake shallow DOF does not fail and look crap.
But it's not a substitute for a really nice lens and sensor combo. Maybe someday.
I just wish the DSLR/mirrorless manufactuers would invest more in making their RAW files more intelligent. I don't want 'portrait mode' but I do want to be able to focus stack in one image (with originals preserved), do true adjustable HDR (combining exposures), etc.
Sony and Nikon have a couple hint at these capabilities, but the software is not easy to use, and don't get me started on moving pictures between camera bodies and wherever they need to be to do things with them (laptop, iPad, phone).
[1] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3Sm2XHss0lA/XffZ95s_KjI/AAAAAAAAF...
As well, who’s to say what Apple could do when given an image from a high end camera sensor instead of the tiny one in an iPhone?
And lastly, why not just enable power users to turn it off? Sure you can say manpower would be better directed at other problems, but who cares if post processing capabilities are on the camera if you can turn it off? Those who want it use it. Those who don’t don’t.
Ruin it. But they wouldn't, because there'd be no need.
The thing about a big high-end camera sensor is that having one means you don't need to fake bokeh. You can put a good fast prime lens in front of it and get the real thing. Phone cameras have to post-process their way to it because the physics of their small sensors mean they simply aren't capable of capturing enough off-axis light to produce true bokeh.
When I scroll the photo modes there is no such thing as "portrait".
Or maybe it is only for the Plus models with two cameras?
yeah its called an iPhone 11 PRO
https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_11-9848.php
You need to crop, color correct, distortion correct, noise correct, exposure correct. Only after that would you ever really want to apply some kind of bokeh filter.
The entire reason to use a high end camera is to do it right. Camera software is never going to do it right until they start putting photoshop on cameras.
Modern phones already do all that - and seemingly in that order.
As a photographer, what I find lacking are the lenses. You can only squeeze so much light from the relatively tiny lenses. Perfect recent example was kids Christmas play. Sitting back 25+ meters, with somewhat dim lighting and fast moving kids, I could see the other parents with their smartphones and tablets getting very poor photo's and vids - whereas my Nikon had zoom galore and excellent clear focus.
Physics matters.
You can already shoot RAW on a phone, but putting Photoshop on the phone won't solve the lack of depth of field inherent to the lens and sensor setup.
Ray tracing will suffice!
Plus it can't possibly work correctly with transparent and semi-transparent objects like glass.
Most people apparently don't look at their pictures.
The "enhanced" photos I've gotten from the Iphone for the last few models have just been getting worse. They look OK if you don't look too closely, but then they're just wrong. Blurry details on the same focal plane as crisp ones, crappy details with translucency, hair or anything else that confuses the "foreground/background" detector, they're just bad.
My DLSR will be in service for quite a while longer.
I have no intention of giving up my Olympus mirrorless system. I'll probably add at least one more lens to my collection next year - I've been relying on my 12-40 f2.8 for portraits, but I'm liking what I've read about the Sigma 56 f1.4.
FWIW, I have an iPhone X. The watercolour trend started around the iPhone 5s, IIRC.
This is very much a subjective interpretation and I don't mean to be picking at nits, however most smartphones have tremendous lens systems. They just happen to have a short focal length (e.g. 1.54mm, 4.25mm and 6mm on the iPhone 11). Depth of field is primarily a function of focal length, and the smaller the focal length the larger the depth of field. Which is why portrait photographers often use zoom lenses.
In the real world though 99% of the time what people are aiming for is simply sharp photos where the subject is in focus. That small focal length makes that much, much more likely, yielding a dramatically higher percentage of "keeper" photos. Shallow depth of field photos are a gimmick in most cases.
There are plenty of things that could be improved about DSLR and mirrorless cameras, in the firmware and out of it. The number of those things which are in any way related to, or could be in any way improved by, the idea of jamming a smartphone into an interchangeable-lens camera, is zero.
(In case anyone's inclined to question my own chops: that's fair, considering my line of argument. I don't post much of my work lately, but here's my best shot of 2019, taken from a distance of six inches with a Nikon D500 and a 105mm macro lens: https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg - so you can look at that and judge for yourself whether I'm qualified to speak to the question of how familiarity with interchangeable-lens cameras influences the perceived value of junking up their UI with a lot of smartphone garbage.)