Irish developer Steven Troughton-Smith found that old photos from portrait mode iPhone camera currently cannot be improved using the new portrait lighting effects of Apple without resorting to looking for the turns to the operating system.
Are we facing another limitation of artificial Apple software? To test his theory, Troughton-Smith began by transferring a portrait-mode photo taken with his iPhone 7 Plus to his Mac. He then made some quick metadata changes in the file before sending it to her iPhone X. To her surprise, the Portrait Lighting interface for the portrait mode doctored image magically appeared in the photos app. In other words, what prevents us from applying those lighting effects to photos that we have previously taken is nothing more than a set of metadata that we can manually change ourselves to “trick” the system.
Esto you can check by yourself with any image, old or new, as long as it was taken with the iPhone 7 Plus using the old portrait mode. Open the Photos app, select one of your Portrait Mode pictures, and hit Edit. If this is a depth of field image, you will see a yellow "Portrait" label at the top. What you won't see when tapping the Edit button is the Portrait Lighting interface, not even on the iPhone X.
As a result, the user finds themselves stuck with photos in portrait mode and unable to enhance them with new portrait lighting effects. This is especially strange knowing that Portrait Mode and Portrait Lighting images use the same depth map. Apple is not understood to make this distinction. The iPhone X supports depth of field photography both on the front and rear cameras. On the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 7 Plus, portrait mode photos can only be taken with the rear dual-lens camera because only the iPhone X has a front camera capable of detecting depth.
But what could be the reason for this artificial software limitation? Daring Fireball's John Gruber says Portrait Lighting is limited to iPhone X and iPhone 8 Plus for performance reasonsAs these phones run the latest Bionic A11 chip with Apple's enhanced image signal processor and a dedicated neural language for machine learning.
According to Gruber, as is known at the moment, these effects are not enabled on iPhone 7 Plus because the performance was very low at the time of capture. Really requires A11 Bionic chip for proper performance live through the camera and Apple decided not to include it as a feature for iPhone 7 Plus because it gave the feeling more of something that was included without perfecting it completely and without achieving a perfect performance; like half a feature.
The theory is that previewing the Portrait Lighting effects before the capture process would put a performance overhead to the CPU / GPU beyond what the A10 Fusion chip in the iPhone 7 Plus can support. It's easy to understand the importance of preview when using it in the moment, but there is no reason why iOS shouldn't update all Portrait Mode photos in our library so that we can enhance them with the effects of vertical lighting. This point is incomprehensible and perhaps it could be covered by Apple with some important update of the version of the iOS operating system.
Apple previously limited certain iPhone features to the latest hardware.
With Animoji, for example, the new TrueDepth camera is necessary to capture your facial movement, although the Animoji function could have been implemented via the common front camera as well.
I believe that you are only supporting Apple as a fanboy, as it is possible that if the iPhone 7 Plus can achieve deep photos it cannot have the other effects that are generated by software, it seems to me that Apple limited it by advertising and because center their efforts on the iPhone X, adding only a few enhancements to the iPhone 8 (iPhone 7s) just software and not a lot of hardware. Let's be honest with Apple's moves, it's something you see from the iPhone 4 upwards.