iPhone 12: A Photographer's Reaction By Tyler Stalman

Apple has announced the iPhone 12, and we know all there is to know about it, except I feel like they really rushed through the camera section. The differences between the iPhone 12, 12, mini 12 pro and iPhone 12 Pro max are not completely clear. So, let's talk about some differences in those cameras, how things have gotten better and which one you might want to buy. First, the features that came to all the new iPhone 12 models. Obviously 5g was one of the big flagship features, doesn't have a huge effect on photography. Other than being able to you know, upload and download them a little faster and something that really caught my eye, and I think everyone that was watching is MagSafe coming to iPhones, obviously it's different from when it was in mac books they're using the same branding.

But it's going to be a very interesting feature, especially that car charger. In terms of photography, I wonder if there are accessories that could be clamped on like that, like can it pass data back and forth, and you could have like a whole lens on the'm getting ahead of myself, but could be interesting. You can now choose from four different sizes of phone going from mini to max. This is part of why everything is complicated right now and there's a bunch of new colors, including you can match to your Apple Watch. So maybe I need the blue on blue and, of course, a new iPhone means.

A new processor and I've been watching this very closely because, as they move to Apple Silicon, whatever they do in the phones, this is going to translate to the computers too in one way or another. But the way apple described their new a14 bionic is that it now has 40 percent more transistors than the a13 6 core CPU 4, core GPU and the neural engine got much bigger, went from 8 cores all the way up to 16, which they say is making it 70 faster for machine learning and 50 faster than any other smartphone. But why should the a14 matter for photographers, because it affects everything you do on the phone, especially photography. The whole reason that sometimes you'll take a photo on your iPhone, and it looks better than on your full-frame mirrorless. Camera is because of all that processing, that's happening in the background.

The CPU and GPU determine how quick and responsive it is, while you're taking the photo so kind of that immediate interaction, as well as being able to have a live preview of features like portrait mode and then the neural engine and image signal processor take over, and they do all that computation. That makes our photos look incredible and that's something that those bigger cameras just don't come close to right now. So sometimes they get comments and people are like. Why doesn't apple make a big camera if they did the thing that would make it magic is putting this processor inside then? The other feature for all these phones is what apple's calling the ceramic shield- and this is supposed to make your phone four times more resistant to breaking when you drop it. But I'm not going to test that myself, because I think I've broken more than four iPhones, so the odds are against me.

Instead, I'm going to count on the sponsor of this video casting and put a case on my new iPhone 12. And look if you're about to pre-order an iPhone I'd, recommend picking up a case before you do so that you don't have one of those incidents where you open up the box, and it hits the floor before you've even had a chance to use it case. Defies cases are only 13, millimeters, thin, and they're much more protective than the cheaper options that you can find on. Amazon they're engineered with what they call chi tech, where there are two different layers that will protect it from dropping on all four sides from a height of up to 6.6 feet, and it does still support wireless charging with the case on they come in tons of different designs and colors, and you can also customize it with your own monogram. I decided to stick my name on one you can put whatever you want on there and match the colors to the phone that you order, and the case is built using recycled plastics and an antimicrobial coating.

So, to find a case, that's going to match your new phone head to castify. com Tyler, stall man, and you're also going to get free shipping by using that URL thanks again casting. So, let's go through the camera features that all the new iPhone 12 models received, and I'll try to explain what really matters about these specs. First, all these models are getting the new smart, HDR hdr3 in previous iPhones. This has been one of the features that changes the look of the photos, the most as they come out, and it's a lot of what makes images either look more natural, more synthetic, more impressive.

It's the whole set of algorithms that we call computational photography. One of the main things I'm going to be looking out for is sometimes in the previous version. Blue skies would have this weird vignetting anti-vignetting around the corners, where the center of the sky would be darker, blue and the corners would be brighter blue. There's little details like that I hope they're looking out for and make improvements to, but smart HDR is already pretty mature and pretty amazing. So at this point it's kind of just squashing some bugs, rather than I don't want the whole thing to change, just make it a little better, there's also a new wide-angle lens wide meaning the normal one kind of the default, which is still 26 millimeters, equivalent on a full-frame camera, and now it is f 1.6. So it's just a little faster.

That means in low light you're going to see a bit less noise. It's going to be a little brighter, and you're also going to get a little more real both, especially as you come up close to a subject. That's how you get that realistic depth of field without relying on synthetic depth of field that the iPhone's creating when you use portrait mode apple says this will be about 26, better in low light and that's significant, because there's also a difference between regular low light and night mode, and I bet this is going to mean that night mode doesn't kick in until it gets a little darker. It should push everything a little darker in a good way. So this is.

This is going to be great, also a bit of trivia on most mobile phones, the aperture is fixed, meaning the lens doesn't open and close like it would on a traditional SLR or mirrorless camera. So that means no matter how bright it is outside you're, still using 1.6 all the time. It just reduces the shutter speed and the ISO a bit of bad news. The ultra-wide lens didn't change, and this is kind of the worst quality lens of the bunch like I use it all the time. I love it.

It's great, that's why I wanted to get better, because the corners can still be a little. Soft a little out of focus, and it's usually noisier because the aperture is slower than the other lenses. So I'd love to see it improve, but the good news is, they did add night mode to that ultra-wide lens. So now it does that longer exposure if it's really dark, so it's not the same as a faster aperture, but it's a huge improvement and night mode is kind of magic. By the way, it's not just a long exposure.

It takes every different part of the image and exposes it different amounts of times and then combines it back together. It's totally crazy! If you want to know more details about all of this stuff, I'm going to go way more in depth on the podcast, so just search for stall man podcast in whatever pod player you like or here on YouTube as well. But one thing I'm going to look out for at night is flares. This was a pretty big issue on the iPhone 11, where looking directly into a light source, you'd see little streaks of that light in other corners of the image. Hopefully they improve this a bit.

The selfie camera also didn't change, but it did receive all of this. Software-Based accelerated features that we have on the other cameras, including smart, hdr3, deep fusion, night mode and Dolby Vision, video and deep fusion. By the way, I'm glad to see it everywhere, but I hope they've tweaked it a little because sometimes it was too sharp like over sharpened. It looked a little synthetic, it's a great feature, but that algorithm could be a little better and now speaking of Dolby Vision. I think this is going to be one of the most visible features to a lot of people like you may not know what Dolby Vision is you probably don't you've never had to deal with it.

Basically, it's a mastering method and format that professional colorists and filmmakers use, and don't worry, you still don't need to know what it is, but you should know that there is now HDR video on the iPhone 12. , and this is a place where, having that really fast, a14 bionic chip makes a big difference because on every single frame it needs to do a full analysis of the scene. Identify all the objects. Do tone mapping and combine multiple exposures to create a HDR video. This is amazing.

This is not something you can do very well in most big cameras. For example, if you shoot HDR video with a red, you need to combine it on a big computer after, and it takes some time. So the fact that an iPhone can do this live is incredible and maybe even more crazy than the HDR video is the 10-bit video. So this was a huge deal that in 2020 they announced this was coming to the big mirrorless Sony and canon cameras that just happened this year, and it happened the same year to our phones, and you never wanted or needed 10 bites. That's fine.

It may not actually make a difference for you bit. Depth can be a little confusing because you don't really see it immediately. Its big impact is, if you edit the footage, you're able to adjust the colors a lot further and manipulate the image a lot more. It will make a huge difference for any professionals out there all right now, let's get more confusing on to the iPhone 12 Pro and pro max. I might get these features confused a little because there's a lot going on here.

So most of this I'm going to focus on the pro max because that's where they really put all of their energy, the iPhone 12 Pro seems not as changed from the iPhone 11 Pro like. It's still got better features than the 12, but it's not a huge jump in the same way that the pro max is so, let's jump into the best stuff. The lens also has that faster 1.6 aperture, but in addition to that, the sensor is 47 larger. That's a ridiculous jump and bigger sensors can have the biggest impact on your image quality. This could be a very huge difference and make it hard for people trying to decide between the different phones, because yeah, okay, you've got OLED on all of them now, but you're choosing a lesser camera.

That's going to be hard for a lot of people and according to apple, that creates an 87 improvement in low light, which I got to see to believe that sounds amazing. The iPhone 12 Pro max, I'm just going to keep saying them to keep it clear. The biggest one now has a new telephoto lens, and it is 65 equivalent millimeters instead of the previous 50. , that's a big jump. So, instead of a two time zoom, it is a 2.5 times zoom. So that means on the pro max.

You have a total range of five times zoom on the pro you have a total range of four times zoom and on the iPhone 12, you have two times that's a huge range difference and really gives a leg up to the iPhone 12 Pro max. These aren't going to sound like words any more by the end of it, a weird detail, to confuse things a little more, that further zoom range the 2.5 times. It is a slightly slower aperture than on the iPhone 12 Pro, so it is 2.2 compared to 2.0. Just something I noticed kind of weird, but another perk of the 12 pro max is that it is now stabilized at the sensor level instead of the optics. So instead of trying to move the lens around, it is now moving the sensor.

This is a great feature that we've been seeing on a lot larger cameras like canon's, r5 and Sony's a7 s3. They both have sensor stabilization, and it's been fantastic apple says this should offer five times more stabilization up to one more stop of light, and that means you could hand hold a photo for two seconds which that's pretty cool and if you go pro, another benefit is the apple pro raw. So this is raw support which we've had on the iPhone 11. You could always shoot raw files, but there was a bit of a disadvantage because they were they're sort of completely raw, and you're losing out on some of that magic. That apple applies with their neural engine and combining different photos.

Things like deep fusion. All of that was gone and if you're wondering like do you do I do we need to shoot raw on our iPhones? Usually you really shouldn't, it's not necessary. If you're doing something professional with it yeah it can make sense, it can let you adjust the photo a lot more. I've always found in low light. It makes things a lot sharper, there's great apps out there like halite, that can help you do this.

If you want to know more again I'll be talking to people on the podcast. That know a lot more about this than me. So the other thing on both pro cameras is LIDAR, and I had initially mostly been thinking about this in terms of augmented reality. It's going to be able to scan the whole environment around you and create a depth map. I was actually just doing this the other day scanning our new house that we bought we're doing renovations, and we're trying to map out the floor plan.

So I was using AR on my iPhone to do this. Lidar is going to make it way more, accurate and way faster, but the advantage for photographers is that LIDAR can also see in complete darkness. So this should take care of a lot of autofocus issues, because sometimes it's not so dark that you couldn't take a photo, but the autofocus starts to struggle it bounces back and forth. It can't find the subject. Now it's going to be much faster at recognizing.

How far away the subject of your photo is even when it's pitch black and finally, they doubled the storage capacity of the base model. So now it's at 128. , that's great news anyway. That was a lot to understand. I hope some of it made sense to you guys if you have any questions, just hit me up on Twitter, I'm at Stalin there and on Instagram everywhere else.

I can't wait to get one of these in my hands and start testing it thanks for watching guys. You.

Source : Tyler Stalman