iPhone 13: A Photographer's Review

[Music] every year the iphone gets a bump in camera quality of course this is no exception so we're going to look at the iphone 13 and how it performs and also comparing it to the 13 pro and pro max because there are two camera systems this year it's a little more simple than talking about last year so the 13 and 13 mini they're the same the wide-angle lens when you use all the time has a whole new sensor inside that gathers 47 more light that's quite a bit and it's similar to what they were doing last year in the pro max so even if you get a base entry level iphone you're getting all of the image quality in that wide lens its aperture is f 1.6 and they've moved the stabilization from the lens to the sensor shift optical stabilization which was already really good i'm not sure if normal people are going to notice this difference but it does subtly keep improving especially with video but for photos it means longer exposures like night mode turn out a lot better and that is where we're going to see the biggest quality improvements when the light starts getting lower so we went out and shot some night mode tests ever since we got night mode on the iphones it kind of felt like magic how much we could shoot in really low light and still get something usable so right now i've got an iphone 12 pro and 13 pro and not a lot of light it's actually really pretty dark back here and the first noticing is that there is a big difference in how long of exposures i need so i'm finding in some examples when the iphone 12 needs three seconds to expose the 13 will do it in between two and one seconds that difference means you don't have to hold still for as long you don't have to wait for as long and it also processes the photo a little bit faster after you take it an interesting side effect is the sky actually shows up less because it doesn't need to expose so long but it also has a very different lighting profile like it wants to maintain contrast a lot more than the iphone 12 does so i can really see it in these two photos of jason on the iphone 12 it's pretty flat it's kind of really pushed the hdr and made everything the same tonally but on the iphone 12 pro we've got a lot more visible contrast there's a lot more shape to the light [Music] if i look at a long exposure of these palm trees behind me i can see that on the 12 it's a little bit muddier and a lot of that's due to the longer exposure there is wind moving the trees they have more time to have motion blur i will talk about the pro models at the end but i just want to point some differences out along the way the 13 has a 1.6 aperture so it is a tiny bit slower than the 1.5 on the pro i actually missed that during the keynote i just i didn't notice so they are a little bit different they're not exactly the same on the wide angle let's remember that most people aren't upgrading your iphone from last year's model typically it's you know every three four years and that means you're inheriting a lot of new features you might have forgotten about so let's keep in mind great things like water resistance i mean it's not waterproof i'm not gonna go underwater with this thing but i can be around the ocean and not as stressed out because it can handle some splashes now let's just look at a few normal photos with good lighting and talk a bit about the secret sauce of apple's photography and that's smart hdr which is now in its fourth version i think if you're considering an update if you have anything since the iphone 11 that was the real turning point that's when things got really good it got its ultra wide lens which of course we'll talk about but smart hdr got much much better if you have an iphone 10 or 10 s you can really see the difference in dynamic range and that's kind of the generational jump that i can just see at a glance so you don't need to upgrade every year but that's about the cut-off point that i'd say that you know if you don't have an 11 this is a good time to get a new phone now that ultra wide lens when it showed up on the 11 was just one of my favorite things we've been shooting with it all the time ever since it arrived like it's wider than any of the normal lenses that most photographers use but it's so useful apple says the ultrawide system has been updated in the 13 but just looking at specs it's not really obvious how and when i look at the photos as well same thing it's kind of crummy in low light but as long as you're in a well-lit situation it looks amazing but if you are tempted by that pro stick around because it's a lot more exciting in there another new feature in the camera app is photographic style it's kind of hard to explain apple did it by showing their computational photography info chart where somewhere during the image processing pipeline they edit what it looks like and then it is saved out to the final so it's not a filter it's actually changing the raw data of the image the way i was thinking about this is like if you ever shoot with a bigger camera and you're editing in let's say lightroom when you make changes to the raw photo it retains a lot more image quality than if you add the filter afterwards to like a jpeg that's what apple seems to be doing is they are editing it at the source so that the quality stays just as good these photographic styles seem to be a response to how some people feel like the android or pixel photos are more to their liking is it more contrasty or more saturated whereas apple has always gone with a more neutral natural look i prefer that natural look because we always do our editing afterwards in a third-party app or i add one of my luts on top of the image so the more natural the better i'll make the changes but of course i know a lot of people really like the way that pixels and samsung's make their photos look so if that's your preference now you can change to that photographic style and just leave it on as a preset and it'll always be there next time you go to shoot but if you want to see more samples just follow me on instagram or twitter i will be posting way more photos over there the iphone 13 has the same selfie camera as it did last year which is good but i wish they'd keep moving forward on it because people use it as often as the other ones the notch did get smaller so i kind of wonder why they didn't just keep the knots the same size put a bigger camera in there a little tip next time you're taking a selfie remember to tap that button that makes everything wider so you're using the full sensor portrait mode still works the same way it looks great as long as you don't zoom in too close because there are errors where it cuts out the edges of people so i find it still to work best if you keep it subtle you can edit the f-stop afterwards make that blur in the background a little bit less and if you didn't already see they're doing the same thing in video this year i did a whole video that is a filmmaker's review yeah i know usually i just do this one video but there was so much on the video side i decided to split it up so make sure to subscribe to watch that other video also all of the iphone 13 models have a larger battery this year which is a great feature for photographers because i still burn through a whole battery in a day i can't go shooting and not have to charge so the extra 1.5 to 2.5 hours is very well [Music] now the iphone pro and the pro max they are the exact same camera system this year which i really appreciate because i like the pro and i typically prefer the smaller size i'm not missing out on any quality by not going for the max so they both feature that 1.5 aperture in the wide lens which looks really really good again you don't really notice the difference until you're in low light but a lot of situations are low light like just being in i'm low light right now indoors is usually relatively low light and it does a better job of that which i always appreciate and let's just take a second to appreciate how big these camera systems are like if i compare the 12 pro to the 13 pro it's thicker like you can really see the difference and those larger sizes are usually necessary to really make big quality improvements so i totally don't mind they also made it thicker for the battery worth it to me but now let's talk about the thing i was most excited about in my reaction and that is the ultra wide because it has been massively updated in the iphone 13 pro it is now f 1.8 so it's getting close as fast as the wide lens because like i said it hasn't been great in low light so now it should be better and it is i mean it makes a difference for sure it didn't jump out to me as much as i expected i thought there was going to be a huge difference here but it's marginal like you can zoom in and you can find it i don't know i was kind of hoping for more okay i think i just really found what the ultrawide is doing that bigger sensor is definitely extending the dynamic range if you look at some comparisons to the 12 pro the shadows are so much more visible without bringing in extra noise this is a bigger difference than i was seeing in the night mode and i'm glad to see that there is an actual improvement here that extra sensor size is doing some work so as we've been going on this hike i've been noticing something that's bugged me for a while and that's the iphone camera app is missing a white balance selection i know i already said it's kind of overloaded but in situations like this the ground is really red and the trees are really green and it gets confused and i need to use third-party apps like halide or you know something else because it's not in the default camera app that's one of the main reasons i switch over so i'd love for apple to add wet balance [Music] but it now also has sensor shift stabilization on the pro so you're going to get even more stable footage by the way this is such an underrated thing about these phones like i wanted to talk about more in the filmmaking video but that stabilization is so much of why iphones look cinematic is because they're smooth i mean even more so than a blurry background the other big lens update is now a three times telephoto lens which i absolutely loved i've never used the telephoto a lot it didn't zoom in enough to really justify itself in my book so i'd use the ultrawide more often but now it three times it feels like a significant telephoto it's a real zoom when you're trying to see that thing far away it gets closer to it and you start to get some of the compression meaning the subject and background feel closer together that is traditionally associated with telephotos 77 millimeter equivalent which is a pretty standard portrait lens i think it's a lot more useful than ever the aperture did become a little slower so it's 2.8 the image quality isn't as good on that telephoto as the wide in any low light situations but the zoom is worth it i do think this is a big step forward just hike to the top of diamond head first thing in the morning this is a good opportunity to talk about the zoom range on this thing it's now 15 times in total so that's between the ultra wide which is 0.5 zoom you're zooming out all the way up to three times zoom check out the difference of how far that means i can zoom in now [Applause] [Music] okay so anya is just discovering the joys of macro photography these flowers are amazing they have little water droplets and all of a sudden the ultra wide has autofocus this is only available on the 13 pro and pro max big advantage to them and part of the reason that i think anybody really into photography is probably going to be looking at those instead of 13 or the mini this year apple says it can get up to two centimeters close but it feels so much closer when you're in there and compared to you know a real big proper macro lens it's not a sharp especially around the edges but that's completely not the point you're still able to get so close closer than most people have ever taken photos before so i think for regular photographers that just are interested in this kind of thing you're suddenly going to be able to open up a whole new world of possibilities another photographer friendly feature in the pros is that the screens now can be brighter i don't know if you're going to see it if i just hold them up but the max brightness is a little bit more so when you're outdoors especially is when it matters so that when the blazing sun is out you can still see your screen and a problem traditionally has been that whenever the camera starts to get hot it will automatically dim the screen it seems to do that a little bit less now i've also heard when you're playing games same thing screen improvements make a big difference for any visual creators and are so much of the reason that i think most professional photographers choose iphones not because they're always shooting on the iphone camera but they want to see their photography on the best possible screen also i had the chance to talk to some of apple's lead engineers on the camera team about the updates to the iphone 13. what one thing i wondered about though was the the stabilization you had moved away from optical what advantages are you finding with stabilizing directly on the sensor how does that work better or what's the advantage for you guys that's actually the way they often do it in dslr's actually and it's a huge challenge because you now have all the signals with high speed coming off which you have to uh sort of uh transmit with integrity and much greater reliability as well um so uh it was a huge challenge but it was necessary because the the weight of the lenses themselves was getting so large uh that it was hard to get the response times that we were after to be able to stabilize not just handshake but vibrations and things like that so that's really why we switched to sensor shift and we added a whole load of uh control loops and tracking mechanisms so that the uh the frequencies which we can stabilize are more extensive than we had previously so if you want to hear more that be sure to check out the stallman podcast on any podcast player out there and if you want to know more about the iphone i've got a whole playlist of apple related videos you should tap it right now and i'll see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Tyler Stalman

Views: 771,332

Keywords: Tyler Stalman, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 pro, camera, review, photography

Id: 9ttex40zt60

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021