iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review

The 12 Pro's "regular" wide also has a larger aperture to improve low light capture, so Night Mode can stack fewer / shorter exposures for the final image.

I'd also ask what kind of screen you're looking at the image on. This image looks fine on my phone, but its screen is barely as large as a 3x5, which is essentially the lowest common denominator for printing -- the McDonald's hamburger of photo rendition. The image looks bad on my monitor, and would look awful if printed on 8x10.

Put them both on a hi-res display, or HD TV or (even better) print them out in large format. Then there's no comparison.

So it really comes down to how is the photo going to be used.

And for 99% of photos taken these days, viewing it on a small screen is the purpose, so the phone camera is perfectly good enough.

As an iPhone 11 Pro + Halide user myself, I daresay a DSLR photo with a decent portrait lens would definitely look better — or at the very least — more natural, than any iPhone photo that relies on "computational photography" fake-bokeh.

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.

> This Portrait mode w/ Night mode 3-second exposure was shot with the iPhone 12 Pro in my right hand. Simultaneously, in my left hand, I held my iPhone 11 Pro and used the light emitting from the screen (not the flash) as an off-camera fill light for Esther’s face.

There are also Deep Learning models that change angle of light on a final photo, so you would be able to get your Rembrandt lighting that way soon.

Plus, it has artifical light, a phone screen, so even less than that would be useful.

As for AF, the obvious solution is to simply have a light in the camera. Mine does, it works fine even in complete darkness. I've actually gone and took a photo of a subject lit only with a phone screen, in perfect darkness, at around 2 meters.

Result? F2.8, 1/10x3 (stacking), ISO6400 actual, ISO2066 effective.

Very, very far from a challenging situation. Actually, quite easy.

With my F/1.4 lens, a cellphone screen provides enough light to illuminate a wooden plank to a shutter speed of 1/25 at ISO4000. More than serviceable. Especially with stabilization, where I can in reality get away with 1/2.

You know, dedicated cameras also evolved. A lot.

At the issue of this expriment, I can be confident that my camera can take pictures of much higher quality in the same conditions, at a higher resultion with much less noise and more detail, and all that at half of the price. Indeed, an a6000+EF-speedbooster+Tamron28-75 2.8 EF will run you 600$ tax included, for a higher performance, and will last you a decade or more.

EDIT: for some reason, I can't answer since I'm rate limited, but I can actually do a 3 second exposure, hand held, with my camera, and get a sharper result that that. Especially if I'm tipsy. Here's how I do it - I put my camera in image stacking mode, set the shutter speed to 0.8 seconds, and fire the shutter.

My camera will then take 4 pictures with IS on for 0.8 seconds in each of them, recenter IS in the few milliseconds between them, then warp and shift the images together and stack them. Bam, 3(.2) second exposure. It's not always the sharpest on the first try, but it's a hell of a lot sharper than whatever is in the picture there. Also, the iPhone is rejecting quite a few images there, so it won't be 3 seconds and more like 1.2 seconds.

Especially at the wide focal lengths equivalent to an iPhone. It's not very hard. I was at 1/20 before to ensure maximum sharpness, but if I'm willing to either stack in post or take 2-3 shots, more than possible.

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.

Unfortunately I don't remember where this was, but I read that the way Sony is setup they couldn't really do it.

This was related to "actual cameras", not phone cameras, but the article's point was that "Sony sensors" was a separate division, and Sony Cameras would be their client, just as, say, Nikon.

Nikon was supposedly taking part in the design of the sensors Sony would manufacture for them and this design was only to be used for Nikon. So if some engineer came up with some revolutionary idea, at least in theory, Sony cameras wouldn't be able to use it.

Not sure if this is the case with the phones, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least Apple took a similar approach with this.

I think the new iPhones ship with native ProRAW support, which might mean that the built-in Photos app would be able to access the same amount of imaging data that a specialised RAW editor could in prior versions.

It does seem like it's high time for there to be some kind of RAW-over-time standard, e.g. a single file with 2 hours of exposure that Photoshop would have built-in tools to manage -- and even the ability to handle matrix transformation movement over time, e.g. to photograph stars over 5 minutes.

I wonder how useful it would be to embed gyroscope/accelerometer data with it though? Everything I imagine having to do with long/stacked exposures involves a tripod.

Motion data actually seems like it would be more useful to embed in regular-exposure RAWs, since it could help build a deconvolution kernel to undo motion blur.

That was the original question, and I'm not seeing it.

Obviously they're using DSLR's for the manual controls and lenses. But my point stands: if they need advanced image processing for something they're going to publish... they need to adjust it on a large screen. Not on-camera.