Mastering The IPhone 12 Pro Max Camera

Telephoto Camera

The telephoto camera is for taking stunning portraits and square pictures. It consists of a 6-element lens.

Figure 6: Identifying the 12MP Telephoto Lens

The neat and clean design of the iPhone 12 Pro Max makes it look elegant. The cameras are placed in the same position as the iPhone 11 Pro Max, but when compared with the iPhone 11 Pro Max; iPhone 12 Pro Max has a bigger image sensor, a faster main camera lens, and better image stabilization. Autofocus also has an improvement with the LIDAR sensor.

Versatility of the Camera System

The camera hardware is powered by the super A14 Bionic with a new image signal processor, which helps in improving image quality and other popular photography features that are not possible with general cameras. It also includes the Apple Pro Raw, which allows users to exercise better control over colors, details, and dynamic range on the iPhone or other photo editing apps.

Figure 7: iPhone 12 Rear Cameras

The iPhone 12 Pro Max also offers the best quality video shooting through its end-to-end HDR video with Dolby vision up to 60 FPS and comes with better stabilization. Well, more about this will be discussed when we dive more into the video capabilities of the iPhone in the videos section.

Augmented Reality (AR) for Innovative Camera Usage

The new LIDAR scanner measures light distance and makes use of pixel depth information of a view. This helps in faster and more realistic, as well as reliable AR experiences, and also improves autofocus by 7x in low lights for more accuracy and reducing the capture time of the photos. This amazing LIDAR scanner unlocks various night mode portraits, which help in rendering a low light Bokeh effect. This feature has also resulted in programmers creating various apps that take advantage of this innovative feature to create apps that can measure distances between two points.

iPhone 12 Pro Max Tech Specs

Apple has brought a lot of new exciting features and hardware changes in its most recent lineup. If you are someone who is switching from Android to iPhone 12 Pro Max or an existing iPhone user and finding it hard to get used to these newly introduced changes in tech specs and design of iPhone 12 Pro Max, let me walk you through all the new changes - technical aspects and specifications.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max’s Technical Specs

The iPhone 12 Pro Max is the biggest, heaviest, and most expensive iPhone to be released by Apple so far. It comes with a 6.7-inch touchscreen shipped with the iOS 14 and powered by a hex-core Apple A14 Bionic CPU. As at the time of writing this book, this processor is acclaimed to be Apple’s fastest chip in the market which allows it to give the iPhone 12 its superior performance and support for the graphical demands of the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max features dual GSM SIMs for Nano-SIM and eSIM cards.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max is a pioneer in its supports for the 5G technology, which is the fastest technology compared to the iPhone 11 Pro’s support for the 4G LTE network. This is one of the main features with which no other phone can be compared with the iPhone 12 series.

The Intel modem chip that comes with iPhone 12 Pro Max supports Gigabit-class LTE, 802.12 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi 6 support, Band 40 support, Bluetooth 5.0, and UI ultra-wideband chip for better spatial awareness with better indoor tracking capabilities. It also has sensors that it uses for its gyroscope, ambient light sensor, accelerometer, compass/ magnetometer, barometer, and proximity sensor. Not to be left out is its support for face unlocks with 3D face recognition.

Figure 8: Various Colors for Shipping iPhone 12

The iPhone 12 Pro Max has support for Qi wireless charging, including proprietary MagSafe fast charging.

The battery life of the iPhone 12 Pro Max is terrific and is powered by a non-removable 2815mAh battery.

The iPhone 12’s Pro Design and Display

The iPhone 12 Pro Max shares similar physical attributes as its predecessor iPhone 5s but has a noticeable camera bump on its back that houses the triple camera array, which is not present on the iPhone 5s but was introduced in the iPhone 11 series.

Figure 9: iPhone Screen Display with Resolution

Such camera bumps are not entirely new in the mobile phone industry, as a matter of fact, was introduced in the earlier version of iPhone 11 in response to the demands of many iPhone enthusiasts who wanted Apple to improve the quality of the iPhone’s camera, especially when compared to other Android phones. However, unlike the camera bump of Samsung Galaxy S10, Huawei P30 Pro, and other Chinese manufacturing competitors, that of the iPhone 12 Pro Max is considerably chunkier.

The phone comes with a resolution of 2788 x 1284 pixels and a pixel density of 458 pixels per inch (PPI) with a contrast ratio of 2M:1 for its LCD. Similar to the iPhone 11 series, Apple continued the “Super Retina XDR” on its iPhone 12 Pro Max OLED Multi-Touch display. The display equally has support for Apple’s newest advancement in technology that allows for tapping to wake up or activate the screen, Haptic Touch, swipe gesture in place of the Touch ID Home button, a wide color range that enables it to provide a realistic color and a True Tone, useful in matching the ambient light to the display’s white balance.

iPhone 12 Pro Max Camera

If there is one feature that was consistently highlighted as a significant advantage over previous editions of the iPhone, it has to be the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s camera or cameras. The iPhone 12 Pro Max comes with three rear cameras that include the standard wide-angle camera, an ultra-wide-angle camera with a 120-degree field of view, and a telephoto camera lens. Switching between these cameras is, however, remarkably easy and can be executed by flips of on-screen buttons.

The ultra-wide-angle camera can capture up to six times more scenes compared to what the standard wide-angle lens can capture from the same distance from the subject, which makes it a good way of capturing architecture images, landscape photos, tight shots, group pictures, and many other creative pictures.

Figure 10: Triple iPhone Camera Array

The iPhone 12 Pro Max’s camera interface has also undergone some changes that allow users to have that great user experience when trying to capture scenes outside the frame through the use of the ultra-wide-angle camera. The iPhone 12 Pro Max has a 7x optical zoom in and zooms out the range, and its range of the digital zoom is about 12x. It also contains a LiDAR scanner to provide a better night mode experience.

The portrait mode helps you capture photos with a clear focus on the subject and blurred background with bokeh and depth-control.

The addition by Apple of a new Night Mode that takes advantage of the iPhone's high processing capabilities combined with the new wide camera sensor to create crisp, bright, clear photos even in conditions that have very low lighting.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max also comes with Smart HDR 3, which allows for better recognition of people by differentiating them from the rest of the shot. Even though this feature preserves the background elements, it tends to ensure that faces retain their natural-looking skin tones, highlights, shadows, and gestures. The Smart HDR 3 uses machine learning in the capturing of natural-looking images that help improve the highlight and shadow detail.

iPhone 12 Pro Max HDR Feature

The iPhone 12 Pro Max was one of the most awaited smartphones of 2020, quite frankly, all variants of the iPhone are flagships when compared with their competitors. The iPhone 12 Pro Max comes with features and specifications that include, but not limited to; super retina XDR OLED, HDR10, 800 nits (typical), 1200 nits (peak) display, 6GB RAM, and the A14 Bionic chip. DxO mark rating for iPhone 12 Pro Max is 128, putting it in one of the top five phones featured till now.

(It has been tested in every condition possible, DXO mark ratings are reliable because of how much work they put into trying out the different features in a phone. They even take pictures at a different time of day to effectively test a phone.)

As already explained; HDR stands for "High dynamic range" and is a way of how an image is further processed.

While HDR is on, every photo you take on your iPhone will be optimized automatically and will be balanced with a better exposure setup. This iPhone 12 Pro Max can take advantage of Dolby Vision HDR recording.

Starting with Dolby's vision, it is the first mobile to feature Dolby HDR video recording. It can shoot and edit as well.

On iPhone 12 Pro Max, you can record Dolby Vision 4K at 60 fps, but iPhone 12 is limited to 30 fps. We talked a lot about HDR, So, what is HDR? The answer is as simple as it gets.

A common scenario would be if you want to take a photo of someone in front of a beautiful scene and when doing so may mean that they'll be exposed to overly bright backlighting. Rather than choosing between where to focus; the background or image, or vice-versa. HDR makes it possible so you can get both in one photoshoot.

Utilizing the HDR Mode On iPhone 12 Pro Max

HDR mode consecutively takes pictures at different exposures such as normal light that allows adjustment for the darkest and brightest details, then taking advantage of its A14 Bionic chip that is able to apply advanced computational mathematics to mix the different shots and produce a stunning photographic effect.

For a person who shoots outdoors, the iPhone 12 Pro Max provides a technology that is called ‘‘Smart HDR 3’’. Older HDR software was dreadful, at least when compared with the Smart HDR3, which made images look manipulated.

Technically Defining HDR

HDR 3 uses machine learning (ML) technology of the real-world to train its neural engine, a component on its microprocessor A14 Bionic. When you use your iPhone to consistently take pictures of a particular type of scene, after a while it starts to recognize specific scenes and then automatically create the right exposure for each one. So, when you go on your travels, those of mountains, clouds, snow become recognized easily with the help of HDR3.

Putting it in another way, you can shoot something which you have shot before, and it will know by itself what exposure would be better without the need for toning.

There is something called ‘Deep Fusion’ also, which means instead of just combining images and providing final output. It selects the best pixels for the colors, sharpness, highlights, and shadows before telling the engine to combine those pixels into the final photograph.

Chapter 2
About the Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max Camera

The iPhone 12 Pro Max has one front camera and three rear cameras. The front camera uses a TrueDepth Camera System, which aids its Face ID recognition feature in the improvement of the phone’s security. Face ID is now a lot faster than previous versions and works from a much farther distance, wider angle range, and still very secure. That means that the phone is now able to recognize you even from a considerable distance from the phone and can open itself when you are walking towards it.

The front-facing 12-megapixel camera of the iPhone 12 Pro Max is an upgrade to the 7-megapixel camera that came with the iPhone XR, which makes it suitable to be used for both selfies and slofies.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max camera has one of the best cameras ever found in any smartphone. The triple camera set up along with the LIDAR scanner can shoot excellent images with zero noise.

There are different modes to shoot according to your environment. You just need to configure the right settings on your device, and you are good to go. Camera Settings of the default camera app on the iPhone12 pro are not so difficult to configure.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max’s new front-facing camera makes it easy to switch from portrait mode into landscape mode and vice versa, which allows for the capturing of more objects within a frame. It is equally able to capture 120 fps slo-mo videos, which is what enables a new feature call Slofies.

Figure 11: iPhone 12 Pro Max with Amazing Capability

These slow-motion videos are similar to the slo-mo videos associated with the rear-facing camera in previous iPhones. The new camera is, however, capable of recording up to 60 fps videos when in 4k mode and provides support for extended dynamic range videos at 30 fps.

Slofie is not the only feature the iPhone 12 Pro Max’s TrueDepth Camera System supports, it also has support for animated 3D emoji characters called Animoji and Memoji, which are frequently used to simulate the way we want a person’s face to appear. Where Animoji provides animal styled emojis, Memoji offers customizable avatars that the user can personalize.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max model is the first Apple phone to have an upgraded triple-lens rear camera system that includes a primary camera with an f/1.8 6-element 12-megapixel wide-angle lens with a focal length of 26mm which is equivalent to a 13mm DSLR lens, a second camera with an f/2.4 5-element 12-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens and a focal length of 13mm and a third camera with an f/2.2 aperture 12-megapixel teleport lens. The telephoto lens has support for 2x optical zoom out even though it does not have the optical zoom feature. The iPhone 12 Pro Max also has support for a front-facing f/2.2 aperture 12-megapixel camera for selfies and pictures from the front.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max model also uses its standard wide-angle camera to support Sensor Shift Optical Image Stabilization. The combination of the standard wide-angle lens, teleport photos, and the ultra-wide-angle lens is what gives the iPhone 12 Pro Max its powerful camera capabilities.

The triple-lens system on the iPhone 12 Pro Max models makes it more suitable for capturing portrait images of many people by using its Wide and Telephoto framing in Portrait Mode.

Figure 12: The Three Camera Types of iPhone 12 Pro Max

Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max Camera Features

One outstanding feature of the iPhone 12 camera is its ability to capture a space that is up to four times more than a standard camera view can capture by using its ultra-wide feature.

Figure 13: Comparing Night Mode On and Night Mode Off

Another outstanding feature the iPhone 12 Pro Max has over its predecessors is its ability to capture pictures even in the dark, using intelligent machine learning, the computational algorithm that makes the phone take multiple shots in night mode and then fuse them to create a crisp, clear and visible image from objects that even the naked eye cannot see because of how dark the environment is. So, when next you are in a dark room, and you suspect there is someone or something else there, you can just take a shot in the direction you suspect the object is located and take a picture.

Nonetheless, photos are not the only area where the iPhone 12 Pro Max excels, there is equally a new QuickTake feature that enables users to take rapid video clips without having to switch to video mode when taking still pictures by tapping and holding the shutter button quickly.

Lovers of social media will love the slow-motion selfie videos which Apple has decided to call slofies. This feature uses the TrueDepth camera capability of the 12-megapixel sensor front camera, which also has support for 4k video capture.

Relevant Camera Settings to Know

The iPhone 12 Pro Max has a very powerful camera that requires a user knowing how to effectively take advantage of it by learning how to tweak the iPhone camera settings. Many of these settings are not peculiar to the iPhone cameras alone, they are also useful in the photography world and among photo enthusiasts.

Focus

This is a very dominant feature in any camera for someone that wants to take pictures that are crystal clear, not less when the person is using an iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Figure 14: Camera Focus for Digital Camera

Failure to consider focus can lead to blurry images that can affect the reputation of the iPhone camera.

Those who are not camera professionals are, however, able to get by because of the tremendous depth of field that the iPhone 12 Pro Max has, which makes it able to ensure that both the background and the foreground are sharp with its automatic feature.

Exposure

Another critical feature that photographers play around with when utilizing cameras is exposure. Although many digital cameras can adjust their camera’s exposure automatically, many other users prefer to be able to control that themselves, especially when the camera is not able to get it on its own.

Figure 15: Exploring the Exposure Feature of Cameras

The Exposure Slider for the iPhone 12 Pro Max makes it possible for users to manually control the camera’s exposure, thereby overriding the iPhone’s exposure settings.

The exposure slider is generally handy when correcting the brightness of a shot even though you can equally use it to over or underexpose a shot when trying to achieve a specific visual effect.