iPhone Portrait Lighting

A new feature of the iPhone X and iPhone 8 Plus is Portrait Lighting. This is an extension of Portrait Mode from the iPhone 7 Plus, but now there are multiple modes including contour and stage lighting. You can use these to make a subject contrast more with the background or almost eliminate the background entirely.

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Video Transcript: So one of the new features of the iPhone 10 is the ability to use more modes in portrait photography. This is the same, by the way, for the iPhone 8+. It has the same mode. So let's take a look at it.
We're in the Camera app now and I'm going to go to Portrait. You can see at the bottom here, where it says Natural Light, I've got several other options off to one side. Natural Light is the same as say the iPhone 7+ where it can use the dual cameras to take an image, one image of the close object, the subject, and another image of what's behind and kind of fade that out. You can kind of see that effect there. Look at Photo and see how everything is sharp. Then Portrait with natural light selected and that's the standard mode that we've known for a while.
So now we have these different options here. The iPhone 8+ and the iPhone 10 can do this with the main cameras, the rear cameras that you would use to take photos of other people. But the iPhone 10 can actually do this also with the front facing cameras which is what I'm using right now. 
So we've got Natural Light and I just tap and it kind of moves and turns into this wheel here. You can switch to the next one which is Studio Light. You've got Studio Light and Contour Light. Both are going to change how my face is lit up. So notice like particularly the sides of my face. That's kind of a nice effect.
Here is Stage Light. For Stage Light I want to put myself in the middle of the circle. There's Stage Light Normal and Stage Light Mono which is going to make it black and white. If I take a picture here and make sure I put my face in the circle then if I look at the picture you can see that it basically blacks out the rest of the image. So it's kind of like taking just a picture of yourself on a black background no matter where you are. No matter what's going on behind you. So that's kind of nice.
Now here's one of the coolest things about this. There's two images there, right. Taken by the two cameras. It saves both images. So if I go into Edit, notice at the top it says Portrait, if I tap on Portrait I can turn it on or off. I've got these controls here at the bottom. I can switch which one it is. So it saves the images there. So now after the fact, after I'm long gone from the scene, I can go and change which mode I'm using. So that's really nice. You don't have to decide right there. You can actually just take a Portrait mode, Natural Light every time and then worry about switching later on to whatever mode that you want. 
So that's a look at the new Portrait mode feature of the iPhone 8+ and the iPhone 10. It definitely is a really great tool in the Toolbox for taking photos. The iPhone 10 is a clear winner here because you can use it in the selfie front camera mode which I imagine is a really good use for this.

iPhone Portrait Lighting

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