Let there be light

The Portrait Lighting mode is the further development of last year's introduced Portrait Photo mode and is part of the iPhone 8 Plus - for now in a beta version. The Portrait Photo Mode used the dual camera to separate the person being photographed from the background and thus achieve depth-of-field effects that are otherwise more familiar from DSLR photography (or that had to be "artificially" created afterwards). The result: photos quickly look "professional" and no longer like smartphones.

The Portrait Lighting Mode uses the same technical approach, but adds lighting to it. This makes it possible to brighten or darken the foreground and background independently of each other. Something that can otherwise only be achieved with lighting.

Five lighting modes are available, which can also be changed afterwards if the photo was taken in portrait mode. For example, the background can be darkened to black in "Stage Light Mode" at the push of a button. Something that was sometimes still not possible in tests. more bad than good but seems to have been perfected in advertising. Maybe that's why the comment function is deactivated for the "Portraits of Her" spot. And maybe that's why the video has a remarkably lousy rating ratio of 14,300 thumbs up to 14,800 thumbs down.

Because at least in the commercial, the feature looks impressive. The lady in the film is Shannon Wise, the singer of the band The Shacks, who performs the song "This Strange Effect". (hae)