Apple iPhone 15 Pro brings pro portrait features to smartphones

The new iPhone 15 Pro series – available in 6.1-inch iPhone 15 Pro and 6.7-inch iPhone 15 Pro Max – includes three individual camera modules, including a wide-angle main camera, the super-wide camera, and a 120mm equivalent 5x zoom lens. The new enhanced Portrait Mode uses computational photography to automatically detect if there’s a person or an animal in the frame, capturing the depth map of the scene using the LIDAR sensor. As a result, photographers can add simulated blur in post-production or choose what object in the scene should actually appear in focus.

The iPhone 15 Pro zoom lens is relatively paltry, at an equivalent of a 120mm lens, but it maintains a f/2.8 maximum aperture all along. Combined with an improved optical stabilization system, this should make the telephoto lens usable in practical situations. The main camera gives users a new 24MP super-high-resolution default. An additional 2x Telephoto option gives users three optical-quality zoom levels — 0.5x, 1x, 2x — for the first time on an iPhone dual-camera system.

The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are designed with aerospace-grade titanium that’s strong yet lightweight to deliver Apple’s lightest Pro models ever. The new iPhone features camera upgrades enabling the equivalent of seven pro lenses with incredible image quality, including a more advanced 48MP Main camera system that now supports the new super-high-resolution 24MP default, the next generation of portraits with Focus and Depth Control, improvements to Night mode and Smart HDR, and an all-new 5x Telephoto camera exclusively on iPhone 15 Pro Max. iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max is available in four stunning new finishes, including black titanium, white titanium, blue titanium, and natural titanium.

With the power of computational photography, the 48MP Main camera, built exclusively for the Pro lineup, gives users even more flexibility with a new 24MP super-high-resolution default. The Main camera allows users to switch between three popular focal lengths — 24 mm, 28 mm, and 35 mm — and even choose one as a new default. In addition to 48MP ProRAW, the Main camera also supports 48MP HEIF images with 4x more resolution. iPhone 15 Pro features an expansive 3x Telephoto camera, and iPhone 15 Pro Max provides the longest optical zoom ever on iPhone: 5x at 120 mm.

Additional features that benefit all cameras on iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max include:

• Night mode gets better with sharper details and more vivid colors, now powered by the Photonic Engine, including Night mode portraits, enabled by the LiDAR scanner.

• New Smart HDR captures subjects and the background with more true-to-life renderings of skin tones while ensuring photos have brighter highlights, richer midtones, and deeper shadows when viewed in the Photos app. This advanced HDR rendering is also available to third-party apps, so images can look even better when shared online.

• The best quality video in a smartphone is upgraded thanks to A17 Pro.

The preferred smartphone for creative pros and filmmakers gets even better with new pro workflows. Users can now get up to 20x faster transfer speeds with an optional USB 3 cable. iPhone and third-party solutions like Capture One also help photographers create a pro studio, allowing them to shoot and instantly transfer 48MP ProRAW images from iPhone to Mac. ProRes video can be recorded directly to external storage, enabling higher recording options up to 4K at 60 fps, and greater flexibility on set when using iPhone as the main camera. iPhone 15 Pro also introduces a new option for Log encoding and is the first smartphone in the world to support ACES, the Academy Color Encoding System, a global standard for color workflows.

Coming later this year, iPhone 15 Pro users will be able to capture precious moments in three dimensions and relive those memories with incredible depth on Apple Vision Pro when it is available early next year in the U.S.