The right scenes work well with slow sync, especially if you have a person, animal, or object roughly 10 feet away from you and a background that’s recedes far further.
The deeper sensors in the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus (and X) cameras help here, too, as they reduce noise in low-light conditions.Įven on a large outdoor shot at night, the slow sync flash created a less noisy image, while allowing a foreground highlight. This new feature, which essentially has no controls in Camera to modify, turns otherwise poor night shots that will be grainy or blurry into vibrant ones that have crisp detail. Previously, the iPhone only used flash to flood a scene and take a shot exposed only as long as necessary to capture the closest foreground image. This illuminates a subject in the foreground with the flash, while the longer exposure time captures enough light from the background to show detail. Slow sync is an old technique that effectively combines flash and a slow shutter speed.
Tipped by pictures taken by Matthew Panzarino, the editor in chief of TechCrunch (and once a full-time professional photographer), I gave the new “Quad-LED True Tone with Slow Sync” a chance with an iPhone 8 Plus. With every new model, I’ll shoot some tests and, dissatisfied, flip the switch from Auto to Off and leave it there.
I confess I haven’t used the flash on an iPhone for years, until now. Shooting with flash on an iPhone 8 and 8 Plus However, because HDR provides more tonal range, you have more “space” out of which to carve the right balance without blowing out or filling in details. This means with some shots, you’ll need to plan for post-capture tonal adjustment. I’ve noticed that HDR in iOS 11 tends to be darker than I expect, especially when I’ve tapped to set exposure in the frame and then taken the picture, as the HDR synthesis overrides an exposure setting. The Camera app doesn’t always shoot HDR: it only does so when it detects sufficient detail will be blown out or shifted to black. HDR shots tend to capture images a little darker than I expect in iOS 11, often requiring some adjustment. Shooting a daytime sky will almost always look blown out in the Camera preview, but the HDR result almost always shows a fair amount of tonal detail. To get the best results for non-spontaneous moments, you should shoot and immediately look at the results to see how well the range gets captured, especially when very dark or light areas are in the frame. (The future of smartphone photography is probably more than two lenses!) The Camera app shows only a single exposure, rather than a rolling combination of different exposures as in a post-processed HDR.
The iPhone can’t yet preview HDR, although I imagine that’s in the future, possibly requiring more advanced image processing hardware or a second wide-angle lens. I’ve been shooting with Apple’s HDR since it was introduced, but it’s only the change in the iPhoto 8 and 8 Plus to only retain the HDR image by default that has had me re-evaluate the way I frame, adjust exposure, and react to pictures with an extended dynamic range. You can combine flash and Long Exposure to get interesting night-time effects. As a result, it’s better to use these for online display at smaller size instead of “hero” images that might fill a browser window or for printing. Long Exposure effectively makes a photo appear to have lower resolution, and zooming in reveals artifacts instead of detail. Switching to any of the other three modes, however, crops to a greater or lesser degree on each side to make sure the same area of the photo appears and is stable across all the frames, and the resulting video or exposure isn’t jumping all over the place or has jagged uncaptured edges. The Live option retains the original crop of your photo as you saw it in the Camera preview. Likewise in Photos 3 for macOS High Sierra, you double-click a Live Photo, click Edit, and then will see options in a popup menu at the bottom alongside the trim control. You can then tap Edit for additional controls, including changing the key image or trimming the long exposure range. This reveals the four available options for Effects: Live, Loop, Bounce, and Long Exposure. Once captured, you can edit in Photos in iOS by selecting the image and then swiping up. Live images are still captured the same way: tapping the Live button in the Camera app (if it’s not already enabled and showing yellow) captures a total of three seconds of images before and after the point at which you tap the shutter-release button.
Live Photo seemed like a gimmick at first, but iOS 11 finally makes it into something worth experimenting with. Finally, the iPhone 8 Plus enhances Portrait mode with new studio lighting options that work best when you spend a little time finding the optimal background and light conditions.