iPhone 13 Pro: The Best iPhone Camera Yet

Steve Caplin

For most users, camera enhancements are the main reason to upgrade their iPhone. Knowing this, Apple bills every new model as having “the best camera yet.” It’s such an obvious claim it’s barely worth saying. With the iPhone 13 Pro, though, there really has been a dramatic leap forwards in capability.

The Three Cameras

Unlike the iPhone 13, the Pro boasts not two but three separate cameras, adding a 3x telephoto to the already bulky back of the phone. Here’s a view of London’s Oxford Circus, taken from the top of a double-decker bus (on my way back from the Apple Store, of course) with the Ultra Wide, Wide Angle and Telephoto lenses. The difference in zoom length is remarkable.

The Telephoto Size, Explained

Apple’s previous 2x Pro lens was called ‘telephoto’ by Apple, but frankly double the size doesn’t sound like that much of an enlargement. In fact, though, Apple are missing a marketing trick here: the captured image is double the height and double the width, so it’s actually a 4x enlargement. Which means the new 3x lens isn’t just one and a half times bigger than the 2x lens, it’s two and a quarter times bigger.

This image explains it. The bust of Sophocles, taken with the standard lens on the left, occupies one third of the height of the full frame, fitting neatly within the centre rectangle of the 3×3 composition grid. Moving to the 3x telephoto camera, though, produces an image that takes up not just one square, but all nine: the image really is nine times the size.

Preview vs. Captured Image

From the previous screen shots, it appeared as if the telephoto lens captured a rather soft image. But that’s just the on-screen preview, before all of Apple’s ingenious processing occurs. Here are the standard and 3x images as captured by the phone, and you can see just how crisp the images really are.

Impressive HDR

This shot of rooftops was taken directly into the sun. My naked eyes could see just the silhouette of the houses, with no visible detail; and yet the iPhone 13 Pro was able to pick out the detail of the windows below. The sky has clearly been smoothed to remove noise, but this doesn’t result in any loss of detail in fine elements such as the finial or the television aerial.

Getting Closer

The iPhone 13 range includes a macro camera for the first time, which operates automatically when you get close to the subject with the Ultra Wide camera selected. As can be seen here, the camera has picked up a remarkable amount of detail on this 13th century silver penny, despite it being encased in polythene.

The choice of the Ultra Wide camera for macro photography is a curious one. You can get really close – in this case, less than half an inch away – but with the lens that close to the subject, it’s hard to arrange the lighting so that the phone’s own shadow doesn’t get in the way. The macro facility built into the Telephoto camera would have been a lot easier to use; but then you wouldn’t get that cool out of focus effect at the edges.

Low Light Rules

Previous iPhones had good low light capability for the standard lens, but struggled with the Ultra Wide and Telephoto lenses. Now, Apple has added that functionality to all three lenses, aided no doubt by the Lidar sensor on the back of the phone. This image was shot with the 3x lens in a room so dark I could barely see which way to point the camera. It’s somewhat noisy, but it’s remarkable that it managed to capture any data at all.

Portraits Come Closer

Portrait mode has been implemented on iPhones for some generations, and it allows people in the foreground to be crisp while the background is out of focus. Now, Apple has brought Portrait mode to the iPhone 13 Pro’s 3x Telephoto lens as well. This has the distinct advantage that you don’t need to get so close to your subject – and as most photographers know, you can avoid facial features looking oversized by taking portraits from some distance away with a telephoto lens. 

In this instance, I’ve used the 3x lens to capture this group of plants. It’s truly remarkable how the camera can now correctly interpret what’s in the foreground and what isn’t: not only is the background correctly out of focus, even when seen through the plant, but the strand of spider web that stretches from the highest flower is fully in focus.

Choose Your Style

Apple now allows you to set your preferred photography style, with the ability to opt for Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm and Cool presets for each image. Tapping on the icon allows you to scroll through the variations, so you can choose the best effect for each image.

You’re not limited to just the preset styles, though. Here, I’ve adjusted the Vibrant setting to crank up the Warmth; and the style has now renamed itself Vibrant Warm in recognition of that. You can’t assign a different preset to a photo after you’ve taken it, although you can of course use the Photos app’s built-in controls to make all the adjustments you want.

Cinematic Video

One of the biggest announcements at the iPhone’s launch was so-called Cinematic Video, which allows you to add an out-of-focus effect to the background or to the foreground. The automation of this feature was demonstrated by having an actor in the foreground turn her head to look at another actor entering the scene, at which point the focus automatically shifted to the new person.

The ability to set a shallow depth of field, and to choose where to focus, is impressive in itself. Far more impressive, though, is the ability to change that focal point while editing the video afterwards. Here, a short video focuses on the globe in the foreground. But by tapping on the background, you can switch the focus to that point.

The various focal changes are indicated by yellow dots in the timeline beneath the editing window, and you can place them by simply changing the focal point where you want it. You can also delete unwanted focus keyframes. If you tap to focus on the background while filming, though, you’ll find the iPhone has an over-enthusiastic tendency to think you ought to be focusing on the foreground, and will switch back. It seems to be better to set all your focusing after shooting.

As well setting the focal points, you can also set the focal length from anywhere between f2 to f16, to choose exactly the degree of lack of focus – and, of course, you can do this while editing the video after shooting.

Conclusion

The iPhone 13 Pro has, without at doubt, the best camera in an iPhone yet. Despite being only 12 MP, it’s the quality of those pixels that counts, rather than the quantity. With very much larger sensors, the cameras can capture that much more light – and, inevitably, this results in much-improved photographs. Other cameras may boast up to 100 MP, but it’s Apple’s sensors, as well as the mind-bogglingly sophisticated processing, that produces such stunning results.