Camera tech in phones go beyond taking snaps

Dubai - Innovations transform users into photographers, editors and much more

Smartphones have, essentially, transformed its users into photographers, thanks to all the latest innovations incorporated into these handheld devices. Research suggests that over a trillion photos were taken yearly from 2017, and the biggest driving factor behind this are mobile phones.

Manufacturers, therefore, have been engaged not only in releasing more devices to the marker, but also in a never-ending game of improvement.

Apple, in particular, has significantly improved this key segment of smartphones with iOS 13, bringing a slew of enhancements that will help aspiring photographers - and even professionals - make the most of their snaps.

Portrait Lighting has been a game-changer in smartphone photography, and iOS 13 now allows you to virtually adjust the position and intensity of your lighting; doing so will smoothen skin, sharpen eyes and brighten facial features.

Conversely, decreasing the light intensity will result in a subtle, more refined image. Meanwhile, the newest addition to Portrait mode, High-Key Light Mono, results in a classic look with a monochromatic background.

Updates to Apple's Portrait Segmentation API, on the other hand, now supports hair, skin and teeth segmentation, allowing developers to create new effects.

Organised memories

After taking photos and videos, it is also equally important that all of your media is organised in a manner that is seamless and hassle-free.

iOS 13's new Photos Tab, meanwhile, has different levels of curation, making for easier navigation and searching, sorting media out by time frame: Days hides similar shots, highlights media that are interesting and include motion as featured photos for each day; months presents images by events, with names of locations, holidays or even concert performers to highlight moments; and years shows important events around the present day in years past.

And you won't even miss a birthday; if you've assigned this field to those in your People album, it will highlight their photos on their special day, with years also highlighting them over the past.

Live Photos and videos are also auto-played, while smart photo previews zooms into the best part of a shot and goes to full size with a tap and search has also been enhanced thanks to the ability to use multiple keywords. And in conjunction with the Music app, soundtracks for Memories are selected based on what you listen to in the former.

Beyond taking photos

And before, taking photos stops at that; today, smartphones give us the power to improve them further.

In iOS 13, a wide variety of editing tools is at your disposal - plus a host of new stuff, including controlling intensity of any lighting adjustment of filter to fine-tune looks, boosting muted colours with vibrance, balancing the warmth of images, sharpening them to make edges smoother and reducing noise, among many others - including vignette and perspective correction - to get the results you prefer.

As for videos, iOS 13 lets you do practically everything on a motion shot as what you would do on a still photo as adjustments, filters and crop now support video editing. Video edits are also now non-destructive, meaning you can undo an edit, remove an effect or trim so you can go back to your original video.
- business@khaleejtimes.com

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