The cameras on the rear of the phone are closely spaced together, and when they are focusing on something nearby, switching between them creates a ‘jump’ in the image. This can’t be fixed easily with software or cropping; it’s a concept known as parallax. If you look at your nose and close one of your eyes, and then the other, you can see your nose jumping around. The illusion of the ‘one camera’ is broken, and no amount of processing can fix this.

The source of friction here is that users know what they want, but in an ultra-simple interface the ‘smarts’ of image processing and camera selection have to predict it. If the system assumes correctly, great. But the more complex this system becomes, the more you run into times where a seamless transition can start feeling like a choice that is being made on your behalf.

In Halide, we simply have a Macro mode. You toggle it to jump to the closest focusing lens (and we throw in some AI enhancement magic too). Apple avoids this sort of complexity in their camera app, but relented in an iOS 15 update, making it a setting.

Don’t get us wrong: we still think their goal— magical and transparent switching— is the best for almost all users. But Apple runs into an unenviable challenge — a camera app that works for users of all skill level. We design Halide to serve slightly more experienced photographers, all the way up to seasoned pros. Apple wants to serve the entire population of Earth, from pros to your parents. This requires much more advanced ‘magic’ to bridge these gaps.

Unfortunately, this is a place where the ‘magic’ illusion failed and instead started to get in the user’s way. 

The 75mm Telephoto Camera

And that brings us to the final camera and my personal favorite: the telephoto camera. Introduced in the iPhone 7 Plus, the telephoto was always a fantastic way to get a closer shot from a distance, and longer focal lengths are particularly great for portraits and artistic photography. 

Apple made a small step to this major leap in the iPhone 13 Pro with last year’s iPhone 12 Pro Max. Instead of its smaller 12 Pro sibling, the Pro Max came with a 2.5x (65mm equivalent) telephoto lens, sacrificing a little bit of light for a little bit of reach. While I liked it, I found it awkward overall. It wasn’t enough reach for me to really enjoy, and I missed having the extra sharpness at 2x. The step was just too small.

No more half measures: iPhone 13 Pro and its larger brother, the iPhone 13 Pro Max, pack 3x (77mm) lenses. Unfortunately, however, Apple did not bless this camera with the upgrade of all the other cameras. Its sensor remains disappointingly the same size. This is a serious problem.

Virtually all telephoto lenses make a serious sacrifice: light. For example, on the iPhone 12 Pro, the wide angle lens had an ƒ/1.6 aperture, its telephoto had a narrower ƒ/2.0, allowing in less light. Less light translates into more noise and/or motion blur, making it hard to get a sharp shot.

This year, this gap is even greater. The iPhone 13 Pro’s wide angle camera has an ƒ/1.5 aperture, while the telephoto has an ƒ/2.8, for even less light.

What this means is that the camera that was lacking a bit in terms of clarity, noise and sharpness in previous iPhones has gotten… a bit worse. 

Yes, the tradeoff was clear: we get reach. In bright daylight, you do get some fantastically sharp shots you previously simply could not get. 

But it’s also clear that there’s more processing than ever happening in these photos:

This is the nature of zoom lenses and shutter speeds. When you shoot handheld, the more you zoom, the more susceptible you are to motion blur due to the subtle movements of your arm holding the phone. As a rule of thumb, when shooting handheld you should set your shutter speed to twice the focal length of the lens. The telephoto camera on the iPhone 12 Pro Max had a 65mm focal length, so the math worked out to 1/130th of a second. With the iPhone 13 Pro’s 77m, that works out to 1/144th of second. To keep track, that’s three times more than the ‘regular’ Wide camera.

1/144th of a second is also less time of exposing, or letting in light. Less light makes it challenging to get a great shot.

The iPhone does have one tool to help it get the shot in that short moment. It can make its camera sensor more sensitive. What ends up happening is that your iPhone needs to crank up its ISO level, which translates into more noise. That means the iPhone’s post processing is going to include more noise reduction than ever before, because the shots are so noisy:

In my testing, a lot noisier than the iPhones that came before it.

A regression in noise quality between iPhones isn’t new. There have been iPhone camera generations with heavy, noticeable processing: the iPhone XS notably had some confused reactions at launch from people who thought their skin was being smoothed by the new Smart HDR process, when in reality it was just merging images for a better shot. The reason for the excessive smoothing? The cameras were producing better shots, but with more noise. Increased processing per-shot required more exposures, and the only way to capture extra shots was with more sensitivity.

This phenomenon has returned in the iPhone 13 Pro. This time your camera applies a “beauty filter” to leaves on a tree.

To make matters worse, the transparent switching between cameras rears its head once more here. As the telephoto camera is much less sensitive to light, the Camera app is very conservative in assessing when its image is clear enough to be usable.

That means many shots, even in daylight, actually come from the wide (1×) camera, and then cropped by the camera app.

While there is an admirable amount of detail recovered here, the second shot here is not taken by my telephoto lens — it’s just a crop of the regular Wide lens, chosen because the lack of light at night makes the telephoto lens less usable for quick handheld shots.

This issue is made worse by the greater difference in focal length between the wide and telephoto cameras. In prior years, it was only going from 1× to 2×. Now, the system crops by a factor of 3×. Now consider that the megapixel count isn’t exactly pushing boundaries, when you crop it by that much, you end up with, well…

Apple is doing some funny things to avoid pixelation. In the image above, it ‘fills in’ details in the Speed Limit sign’s text fairly well, keeping it legible. Other areas, however, are modified in seemingly bizarre ways, even making the suspension cables of the bridge disappear around lampposts for inexplicable reasons:

This is where a frequent problem I run into with the 13 Pro. Its complex, interwoven set of ‘smart’ software components don’t fit together quite right. The excellent-but-megapixel-limited Wide camera attempts to ‘hide’ the switch to the telephoto camera, creating a smudgy image. Intelligent software upscaling is stepping in to make the image look less pixel-y, which alters the look off the image significantly — it resembles a painting more than a photograph when blown up.

When switching lenses, I have to hope the camera will switch to the actual telephoto camera, but if the sensor can’t collect enough light, the image suffers from an ‘overprocessed’ look. The image is either an upscaled crop from the Wide camera, or a very heavily noise-reduced frame from the telephoto sensor.

I was a big fan of this shot I took with the telephoto camera:

Many people on twitter felt it looked like a ‘painting’, however.

I can see why: in this low-light scene, the image from the telephoto is getting heavily smoothed. I have to give major props to how much detail is both retained and enhanced, but the image does end up looking unnatural. Focusing on details makes the image look a bit too smudged:

Compare this to a pure (not in-camera processed) RAW image from the same telephoto camera, and you can see why Apple made this choice:

This is where visible noise enters the shot, something Apple’s camera fights hard against. I personally don’t mind it so much. In fact, I think in a dark scene, it adds to the texture, creating a more ‘realistic’ image than the smoothed-over rain shot.

In the end, this is a creative choice. Apple is doing true magic with its processing; it gets very usable, detailed images out of a very small sensor with a lens that just can’t collect the light necessary for great handheld nighttime images. This is without even considering the wild processing that Night Mode enables. If you are a photographer, you should be aware of this processing, however — and make an informed decision if you want to use it or not.

I’ve made up my mind after a few months: For me, the iPhone’s processing on iPhone 13 Pro is simply too heavy-handed at times.

A confusing moment arose when iOS developer Mitch Cohen thought his iPhone camera had replaced a poor woman’s head in a photo with a mess of leaves:

In the end, it turns out this was just a trick of the eye. But the processing on iPhone photos does make the leaves look smudged; the way edges are enhanced and smudging is applied over the shot to reduce noise makes it hard to really makes sense of the image. This is a tell-tale iPhone 13 Pro photo: no noise, but a lot of ‘scrambled’ edges and an almost ‘painterly’ look to the whole thing:

I have taken to going about picking my processing. In the daylight, I will often shoot with our camera app set to native RAW. Shooting in this way will skip most of the aggressive noise reduction and detail enhancement that are omnipresent in iPhone 13 Pro photos. The slight grain is appealing to me, and I enjoy the slightly less ‘processed appearance’. At night, I will opt for the magic that helps me get great shots in the dark: Night mode, ProRAW noise reduction and detail enhancement.

Being conscientious of the magic in computational photography helps me appreciate it so much more.

As I mentioned earlier, the most important creative choice we will have to start making as photographers is to choose the amount of processing on our images by our cameras. If we can make such a choice, at least. Sometimes, the choice is made for you.

A final example of iPhone’s computational processing being hard to avoid:

Since iPhone 12 Pro, Apple has introduced its own RAW format for shots. Previously, taking RAW photos meant you lost out on all of Apple’s magic and powerful image-processing — photos often required lots of editing when shot in RAW vs. JPG. Images were noisy and lacked dynamic range; after all, in regular JPG shots the highlights and shadows were brought out through taking multiple exposures. Enabling ProRAW gives users a way to get this smart processing, with all the flexibility and image quality of a RAW file.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you *opt out* of some of this processing. My biggest issue is not being able to opt out of noise reduction, but on iPhone 13 Pro there’s a far bigger issue. Even if you enable ProRAW in the first party camera, switching lenses in Apple’s Camera app does not mean it will actually switch to the proper camera. Several shots I captured in telephoto mode resulted in a cropped ProRAW image coming from the wrong lens:

Yes, I am aware: This isn’t an iPhone-exclusive problem. The Google Pixel, too, opaquely switches between cameras when it deems it necessary, offering as little as a 0.3 megapixel crop of another camera even when shooting in “RAW.”

The only solution — outside of using an app like Halide — is to watch your viewfinder closely after you change your subject, to see if the camera has switched. This can take up to several seconds, unfortunately.

We find this crosses a border that computational photography shouldn’t cross in a professional context. RAW capture should be explicit, not a surprise. In a RAW capture format, the camera should honor user intent and creative choice. If the user picks a lens— even the ‘wrong’ lens— the software should use that lens. If the ‘Camera’ considers that to be a mistake, I don’t want it to stop me from taking the photo. I want to make my own mistakes. As they say: creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

I understand the first party camera isn’t meant for professionals, and you can still get great photos out of this camera. I still believe that Apple is in a hard place: the Camera app has to work for every single iPhone user, from the novice to the seasoned photographer with decades of experience.

There’s a paradox in the relationship between hardware and software: it’s easy to make smarter software with bad hardware. The decisions are black and white. But as the hardware gets more sophisticated, the decisions involve more shades of grey. How can science quantify an acceptable level of noise or motion blur, when so much of this depends on artistic intent of each photo? As the complexity of computational photography grows, so grows its dominion over our creative decisions, and I am increasingly finding myself at odds with the decisions it makes.

I think that as this trend continues, choosing what level of software processing to allow to your camera’s data is increasingly going to become the most important creative choice in photography.

Closing Thoughts

iPhone 13 Pro is a big shift in iPhone photography. Not only are the cameras all upgraded in significant ways, but Apple’s adaptive, clever computational smarts have never been so powerful. Touching every aspect of the photographic experience, you might be surprised to at times become aware of its power and limitations alike.

If you’re coming from an iPhone 12 and don’t take a lot of photos, you may not see a leap in quality, because so much is now determined by the existing processing which was already fantastic on the previous generation. However, the iPhone 13 Pro makes other leaps forward — with physical upgrades in the ultra-wide camera and 3× telephoto camera. Unfortunately, that magical processing sometimes works against the hardware.

If you’re a serious photographer, the iPhone 13 Pro is a brilliant camera — and you will only begin to scratch the surface of its potential with its built-in software and processing. When using apps like Halide or other third-party applications, the possibilities really begin to present themselves. Apple here has laid the foundation; much like with the LIDAR sensor that was added in the previous iPhone, the camera improvements here lay the groundwork for software to perform magic.

The only thing you need to add is your own creative vision.

All images in this review were shot on iPhone 13 Pro by Sebastiaan de With.