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What is that creamy smooth background in photos? Or those dreamy looking Christmas lights? Is it possible to get that look on your phone without the use of any added lenses. The short answer is “YES!”. However, that depends on what phone you have. Before we get into that, let’s first discuss what the bokeh effect is and what phones are actually doing to achieve that look.
What is “bokeh”?
Bokeh is defined as “the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image produced by a lens.” This is often one of the things that sets apart professional looking images from amateur. Traditionally, it would take high quality (expensive) lenses to yield these results. Here is an example of an image I took today with my Nikon D800 with a 50mm lens with the f-stop set to 2.0. (If you have no idea what that means, don’t worry. We’ll post about that another time.)
Notice how blurry and soft the background is while putting more of the attention on the flowers. This creamy looking bokeh effect is what so many people want but often can’t get because they don’t have the right equipment. That’s where mobile phone cameras and software has stepped their game up to try and compete with SLR and mirrorless cameras.
Can you use a camera phone to create the same bokeh effect?
Many new phones now have the ability to “fake” the bokeh to achieve similar results. Most phones call this “portrait mode”. That’s because a shallow depth of field is often used in portrait photography. Unfortunately, if you have an older phone there’s a good chance you may not have this feature. If you are using an iPhone for instance, the 6s does not have a portrait mode where the X does.
Below is an image taken with my iPhone X that is in the regular photo mode but with the 2X built in lens. The zoom helps get a bit of blur, but not much.
Here is a screen shot so you can see what settings I was using.
Now compare the above photo with this one taken in portrait mode on the same phone. Notice how much more blur the background has. However, there is a downside to this mode. It can look great, but you do have to be careful at times. Look closely where I circled the flower, stems, and leaves. You’ll notice that it’s edges are blurred but the rest are sharp. That’s because the software couldn’t tell whether it was meant to be part of the foreground or background. Remember, portrait mode fakes this effect using the dual lenses to tell the background from the foreground. It doesn’t always get it right.
I can’t speak to phones like the Pixel line by Google or android devices, but I know that most of those also have a portrait mode and may even yield better results. The fact remains though that although phones have come a long way, you just can’t beat real bokeh from a quality lens. But every new advancement in phone technology gets closer and closer to making it hard to tell the difference.
Be sure to comment below with your questions and we’ll respond as quickly as we are able. We also have a facebook group page for discussions as well, so make sure to join the group and interact with our other followers. We’d love to see some of your favorite images taken in portrait mode!
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