iPhone 7 Plus Portrait mode in-depth guide

There is a wider gap between this year's iPhone models than between those of years prior, and this time around the differences go beyond screen size, battery capacity, and amounts of RAM. The iPhone 7 Plus has a big standout feature against its smaller sibling in the form of an excellent dual-shooter setup on its back. Comprised of a wide-angle camera and a telephoto lens with 2x optical zoom, it swiftly turned the iPhone 7 Plus into one of the best smartphones for shutterbugs out there.Apart from producing far better and more detailed zooms than regular cameras, the telephoto lens has another ace up its sleeve – the new bokeh-licious Portrait mode that allows anyone to shoot professional-looking portraits with simulated depth of field. We recently pitted the iPhone 7 Plus against a $1600 professional camera in the ultimate portrait shoot-out, and Apple's latest managed to hold its own quite well. This time around, however, we won't be performing a crazy test. Instead, we thought we'd take an in-depth look at how Portrait Mode performs in different environments and lighting scenarios, where it excels and what makes it stumble, and extract some useful and insightful tips for you to improve your photos with. Let's jump right in!

Setting

Scenery

At its best, Portrait mode pleasantly blurs out visual distractions in the distance, leaving the subject of your photos squarely in focus against a pleasant backdrop of creamy colors and smooth shapes. Ironically, intricate patterns are both what Portrait mode is currently having the most trouble with, and what you'd usually try to tone down in most situations. Although results vary from shot to shot, a general rule of thumb we gleaned from our experience with this mode is: the more intricate the background, and the closer it is to your subject, the bigger the chance for errors. Currently, Portrait mode on the iPhone 7 Plus performs best with simple backgrounds, such as a cloudy sky or a large body of water in the distance, and has a bit of a hard time with pattern-rich scenery containing multiple layers of foliage, for example. This could be chalked up to Portrait mode still being in beta. Still, when it performs well in such scenarios, and it does perform well often enough, the results can be quite impressive. Let's take a look at some samples:

As you can probably tell by now, I chose a rather cloudy day to perform this camera test. This is generally not a great idea when shooting portraits, but it brings me to my next point:

Conclusions:

Complex scenes look great when blurred out in the distance, but Portrait mode currently has some difficulties performing well in such situations
Simpler backgrounds are easy for the software blur and blend with foreground objects
When Portrait mode works well, the results can be quite impressive

Light is your friend

Despite the gloomy skies, thanks to my charming model, I still managed to snap some acceptable samples for us to take a look at. Still, you should keep in mind – the more light there is, the better your photos will turn out. When shooting in Portrait Mode, the iPhone 7 Plus uses its telephoto lens exclusively in order to create a better shallow depth of field effect. However, since the zoom lens has a smaller aperture than the wide-angle camera next to it (f/2.8 against f/1.8), meaning less light can enter through and reach the sensor, the iPhone compensates by increasing ISO sensitivity to properly expose the final image. Unfortunately, higher ISO settings entail noise, loss of detail, and overall deterioration of image quality. In other words, the less light there is, the more noisy and unappealing your photos will be. If the environment is too dark, your 7 Plus will outright refuse to apply any background blur to your photos, so just give up on even trying.

Conclusions:

Light = good, darkness = bad.
Shooting against direct sunlight = mostly bad

Examples, do's & don'ts

Use your imagination!

No, seriously. As cliché as this sounds, your imagination is the only limit when it comes to photography. Despite the technical limitations of the iPhone 7 Plus and current shortcomings of Portrait Mode, you can take some seriously impressive photos with Apple's latest 5.5-incher. What's on offer here is capable enough to fool the laymen that they are looking at photos taken with a dedicated camera. If you spend some time with this mode, we bet you will be able to produce some results to impress even serious enthusiasts with (dare we also say semi-pros?). With that said, let's now go through some miscellaneous examples and useful tips.

Just a good example of Portrait Mode faring well in dealing with a complex backdrop. Unfortunately, the regular, non-blurred version disappeared somehow. Good thing it wasn't this one, or I would have been pissed!

More tips:

Basic photography rules apply here as much as they do when you are shooting with a dedicated camera
Composition is key, use the grid in the camera app to your advantage. The rule of thirds is one of the basic guidelines you can and should follow
Just like Instagram filters, Portrait mode can be a slippery slope. Don't overuse it
Portrait mode doesn't like movement. That means no shaky hands!
Sometimes the initial preview of the effect may seem slightly different from the final result. This is hard to illustrate but comes down to the fact that the bokeh effect itself is not rendered until after you take the picture. This is done to keep the camera app running smoothly, as this effect needs a lot of processing power to render.

Whew, that was a lot of information! Next time you are out taking pictures with your iPhone 7 Plus, try out some of the things we discussed in this article. We are not saying you should retake the same photo 10 times in a row until you get that depth of field effect just right — that's not the main idea here — but keep our advises in mind and your results will improve with each shot.

Use your imagination, rely on the composition grid in your camera app, don't be afraid to experiment! Best of luck!