Mobile Photography Weekly

- Hey everybody. Sean Duggan here. This week on Mobile Photography Weekly, we're going to be taking a look at a really interesting feature in dual camera iPhones that allow you take a picture in portrait mode, and what portrait mode does is it uses the telephoto lens to take the picture but it's using the wide angle lens to sense the difference between the foreground subject and the background and it's creating what's called a depth map to separate those two elements in the picture and apply live, real-time blurring to the background.

It's a really cool effect and it's pretty popular. What we're going to be doing is taking a look at an app by BrainFeverMedia called DepthCam that works as a camera app but as you're taking the picture, you can actually see a live preview of what that depth map looks like before you take the picture. So if you know you're going to need that depth map to use later on in another app, you can see if you're getting adequate edge separation in the picture. So earlier I was out on the patio photographing this large conch shell and with the DepthCam app, I was able to see a live preview in the lower left corner of what that depth map looks like so I can see that I have good edge separation.

If I tap the colored button up the top, I get different false color previews of the depth map. If I tap that button in the upper right, I get full screen previews of the different versions of that depth map. And again, this just shows me that I'm getting good edge separation if I need it. So, I took the shot. Let's now dive into the editing controls and take a look at what we can do to modify the depth map. So this is the main editing screen when you first open up an image, and if you tap on the portrait button up at the top, that will actually turn on the blur in the background.

In this case, I don't really want that on 'cause I'm just going to edit the mask itself. So the first thing I'm going to do is tap on this little sun button and that allows me to edit the gray scale tones of the map, or the mask, and I can brighten it up, I can make it more contrasty. And this would actually work if I wanted to make sure that that pillar had a nice dark tone in the mask. Just gonna say "okay" to that. Another way I can edit this is tap on this little pencil button and this gives me editing tools including a magic wand tool which has edge detection capabilities so I can touch up edges if it's not perfect and make it mask and match the edges of the actual object.

And then there's an eraser and brushes and such, including face detection so if there's a face in the picture, it'll automatically detect that and mask that. Just gonna cancel out of there; not gonna do anything with that. There's also some 3D visualization tools here and this is nothing that you're gonna use to edit the mask itself. It's just another way to visualize the depth, the data, in the mask. So that's all that that is there. Again, I'm not going to do anything with that. But pretty cool way to visualize that data. What I'm going to do is I'm goin to tap the Export button here and save this out.

So notice that I can save out the photo plus the depth information, or I can save just the depth map separately. I'm gonna save out the photo plus the depth information, but the cool thing about saving the depth map by itself is that you can then bring that into other apps that allow you to use photographs as masks, or you could even bring it into Photoshop to use it as layer mask in a composite there. But let's go over here to another app made by the same developer. It's called Portrait Cam, and we covered this in a previous episode.

I went into this in a lot of detail. But I just wanted to show what I can do with this. I'm gonna open up the last image that I saved, which is the one that I just modified in DepthCam. And now I can use this slider here to modify the blurring of the background. If I had bright highlight points in here, I could change the shape of the lens aperture. I could add a spin effect. There's all sorts of things that I could do to modify the character of the blur of the background using the depth map information that I was able to capture and then edit in DepthCam.

So it's really an interesting development in how app developers are taking advantage of this new capability that is built in to newer dual camera iPhones.