Apple Just Released Their Fake Bokeh Portrait Mode to Everyone
Professional looking, shallow depth of field portraits are now available to a lot more people. Earlier today, Apple released its first major iOS 10 update, and included in that update is their much-anticipated fake bokeh “depth effect” Portrait mode for iPhone 7 Plus.
Open it up, and the screen will automatically generate a depth effect around your subject (preferably human, but it works for other things too). Take a picture, and the camera will save both versions of the shot for you to compare. Here are some samples published by Apple alongside the announcement:
Apple sent us an iPhone 7 Plus review unit a few weeks ago, and we’ve been testing Portrait mode ever since. Even in Beta the mapping worked better than we expected, but now that the feature is out to everyone, maybe it’s time for a side-by-side Bokeh vs Fake Bokeh shootout with a real camera… like the Fuji X-T2 (hint, hint).
Of course, faking bokeh by depth mapping an image and adding in blur is not an original Apple invention by any means, but the Cupertino tech giant seems determined to do it better than it’s been done before. But we’ll let you be the judge of that.
In the meantime, if you’re an iPhone 7 Plus owner, you can now give Portrait mode a shot for yourself. Just update to the latest version of iOS and have at it.
