Jason Heiner/ZDNET
Apple focused a lot of its attention on the professional camera features in the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max during this week’s launch event.
In fact, Apple dropped so many concepts, terms, and acronyms in such a short period of time that your head might have been spinning.
Also: Everything Apple just announced: iPhone 15, Apple Watch Ultra 2, AirPods
Don’t be afraid, because now that we have time to breathe, we can go back to these features and explain their importance.
Let’s start with the information given in this one slide:
Apple/ZDNET
focal length This is a shorthand for explaining how wide of an image a camera lens will capture. The smaller the number, the wider the catch.
Technically here, the lens is not a 24 millimeter lens, but a 24 millimeter-equivalent lens, but we’ll ignore that.
2.44 µm (μm) is the size of the pixels that capture light in the sensor, and quad-pixel Refers to how four pixels are grouped to function as a larger 2.44 micron pixel.
Also: Comparison of each iPhone 15 model: Key differences you need to know
Each 2×2 group of pixels is assigned a single color, and four of these pixel bundles are grouped together into two green bundles and a blue and red bundle. Green gets more pixels because the human eye is most sensitive to that color.
100% focus pixel This means that all the pixels are used for the purpose of focusing the image. Previously, only a few pixels were used, but now the use of all pixels is common in high-end sensors.
hole It measures how much light is passed onto the sensor by the lens, and is measured by stop the f Number. The lower the number, the more light the lens will let in.
OIS This stands for optical image stabilization, which is a technique where the lens or sensor is moved to compensate for the movement of the camera while taking a shot.
Other terms dropped during the event were Raw And proraw,
RAW can be thought of as a digital negative (remember film negative?), which is a file format that saves the raw data captured by the sensor without processing it or converting it to a file like JPG. RAW files are larger and contain more detail, but require editing before printing or posting on social media.
ProRAW is an Apple file format that uses the industry standard digital negative (DNG) file format so that the file can be edited in high-end editing tools like Adobe Lightroom.
Also: What is ProRes and why does Apple keep mentioning it?
Another much used word was optical zoomwhich is a technique where the image is enlarged by the lens itself, as opposed to digital zoom, Which simply overpowers the image, and results in detail being lost.
there also hdr, which stands for high dynamic range photography. This is a technique that combines multiple images into a single image to get more detail in highlights (bright areas) and shadows (dark areas).
macro Photography is where you get close to the subject – such as flowers or insects – to take a close-up shot.
Also: A17 Pro deep dive: A look at Apple’s new iPhone 15 Pro chip
Now, let’s go to the video – and the first thing I want to explain is Is ProRes,
Apple talks about ProRes a lot because it is a video codec (abbreviated to encoder/decoder, or sometimes compressor/decompressor) developed by Apple. ProRes, which dates back to 2007, is special because, when it compresses video – and this compression will always result in the loss of some image detail (this is often called “lossy”) – it is the image detail that is lost visually. Not noticeable from.
To put it another way, ProRes is a visual lossless, lossy video compression format.
The downside of ProRes is that the file size is much larger, but it makes editing much easier and better.
To alleviate the heavy storage requirements that ProRes imposes on videographers, the iPhone 15 Pro supports recording to external drives – such as a Samsung T7 SSD – meaning you’re not limited by the available storage space on the iPhone.
Two other pieces of jargon were sprinkled into the camera’s coverage log encoding And LUTs,
Log encoding is a profile that records video with a flat, muted color profile to capture and retain more detail in highlights and shadows. The iPhone 15 Pro is the first smartphone to support ACES, the Academy color encoding system.
Also: iPhone 15 Pro vs iPhone 14 Pro: Which model is the best to buy?
The downside is that this format needs to be edited before it can be used, and one of the editing steps is to apply a LUT, or Look Up Table, to it, which is a file that contains information about how to remap flat footage and The video contains information to be transformed including color and contrast, which can then be edited to match the desired style.
Editing log formatted video and working with LUTs requires professional tools like Adobe Premier Pro.
I hope this list helps those of you who were confused by some of the terminology used, and perhaps it will even encourage you to be a little more creative – or technical – in your photography or videography.
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