For photographers, almost every new iPhone has a little something special, and one of Apple’s newest devices, the iPhone 12 Pro, is no exception. It …
For photographers, almost every new iPhone has a little something special, and one of Apple’s newest devices, the iPhone 12 Pro, is no exception. It brings a few seemingly simple, but entirely effective, upgrades that I think shutterbugs are going to love. This week, I took the iPhone 12 Pro on a short trip to a beautiful place, Lake Tahoe, and found that the Night Mode software and ultrawide lens upgrades are pretty exciting. Let’s dive into some of these updates that make the iPhone so great, and gauge how it compares with Apple’s previous phone, the iPhone 11 Pro. Though Apple’s most recent family of iPhones — the iPhone 12, Pro, Pro Max and Mini — deliver a wild amount of camera tech, it’s spread across all four models. How much you want to pay will determine what kind of camera system you’ll get. The iPhone 12 Pro has a triple-lens rear camera setup that’s common on most current high-end phones, and it adds a depth-sensing imaging technology called lidar (it’s on the Pro Max as well). Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, uses lasers to survey the environment you’re shooting. By measuring how long it takes for light to bounce off objects and come back, the sensor creates a field of points that map out distances. It’s not too different from how Apple’s Face ID works. Read more: iPhone 12 review: One of our highest-rated phones of all time The technology promises to help capture image data in low-light situations by better reading the landscape and augmenting the visual data from the camera lenses. Apple says lidar also will improve low-light shots by allowing the camera to focus up to six times faster in darker conditions. I noticed a huge difference from the improved focusing. It happened so fast and accurately while I was shooting, I quickly learned not to even worry about whether the shot was going to turn out well. As with many of Apple’s incremental upgrades over the past few years, lidar takes the iPhone another step closer to having shooting abilities comparable to those of a high-end professional DSLR. Fast focus just makes it feel like a “real” camera setup. And for sure, the iPhone 12 Pro is a very real camera setup. I loved using the new focus feature and the ultrawide Night Mode — they made for excellent and instantaneous in-focus photos. Software also makes a big difference. Though the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro have the same selfie, wide and ultrawide cameras, the real photographic monster will be the coming iPhone 12 Pro Max with ProRaw enabled. The iPhone 12 Pro’s standard 26mm lens, dubbed wide, has now been upgraded from an f/1.8 to a wider f/1.6 aperture. That’ll mean marginally better low-light performance on the same 12-megapixel sensor as the previous iPhone. Then the new seven-element lens, which Apple says allows 27% more light into the sensor, has been shown to dramatically improve the clarity and sharpness around a picture’s edges. Across my photos taken with the wide lens, there’s a shockingly low amount of noise in the shadows, even in the smallest of details. In these images shot with the wide lens, notice how the underwater rocks in the foreground are properly exposed and show virtually no noise, but at the same time we still haven’t lost any detail in the bright sky and the distant mountain range. In the below image, shot in the clear emerald waters of Sand Harbor along Lake Tahoe’s eastern shore in Nevada, the f/1.6 wide (26mm) lens captures varied tones, ranging from the shadows of the rocks underwater to the bright white splash of the paddle and the bright yellow kayak. Night mode is a low-light assist capture feature that’s now available on the selfie, wide and ultrawide iPhone 12 Pro lenses, (on previous iPhones it was only on the standard wide lens). The feature will activate automatically when the camera detects a dark scene. When it’s on, the Night Mode icon at the top of the display turns yellow. Overall, Night Mode is going to be one of the most aggressively awesome new features on iPhones, because it’s now available on every camera in the iPhone 12 line.
