Apple put a lot of emphasis on the professional camera features of the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max at its launch event this week.
In fact, Apple dropped so many concepts, terms and acronyms in such a short space of time that your head might have been spinning.
Fear not, now that we have time to breathe, we can go through these features again and explain what they mean.
Focal length is shorthand for how wide an image is captured by the camera’s lens. The smaller the number, the wider the shot.
Technically, this isn’t a 24mm lens, it’s a 24mm equivalent lens, but we’ll ignore that.
2.44 µm (microns) is the size of the pixels that capture the light in the sensor, and quad pixel refers to how four pixels are grouped together to act as one larger 2.44 micron pixel.
Each 2×2 grouping of pixels is assigned a single colour, and four of these pixel bundles are then grouped into two green bundles and one blue and red bundle. Green gets more pixels because the human eye is most sensitive to this colour.
100% focus pixels means that all pixels are used to focus the image. In the past, only some of the pixels were used, but using all the pixels is now common in high-end sensors.
Aperture refers to how much light is let through the lens onto the sensor and is measured in f-stops. The lower the number, the more light the lens lets in.
OIS stands for Optical Image Stabilization, a technique that involves shifting the lens or sensor to compensate for camera movement during shooting.
Other terms dropped during the event were RAW and ProRAW.
RAW can be thought of as a digital negative (remember film negatives?), a file format that stores the raw data captured by the sensor without processing or converting it into a file such as a JPG. RAW files are larger and contain more detail, but require editing before printing or posting to social media.
ProRAW is an Apple file format that uses the industry-standard digital negative (DNG) file format, allowing the file to be edited in high-end editing tools such as Adobe Lightroom.
Another much-used term was optical zoom, which is a technique where the image is magnified by the lens itself, as opposed to digital zoom, which simply crops the image and loses detail.
There’s also HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range photography. This is a technique that combines multiple images into a single image to get more detail in the highlights (bright areas) and shadows (dark areas).
Macro photography is where you get close to your subject – such as flowers or insects – to take close-up pictures.
Apple talks a lot about ProRes because it’s a video codec (short for encoder/decoder, or sometimes compressor/decompressor) that it developed. ProRes, which dates back to 2007, is special because while it compresses video – and this compression will always result in the loss of some image detail (this is often referred to as “lossy”) – the lost image detail is not visually noticeable.
In other words, ProRes is a visually lossless lossy video compression format.
The downside of ProRes is that the file sizes are huge, but it makes editing much easier and better.
To mitigate the huge storage requirements that ProRes imposes on videographers, the iPhone 15 Pro supports recording to external drives – such as the Samsung T7 SSD – which means you’re not limited to the storage space available on the iPhone.
Two other bits of jargon sprinkled throughout the coverage of the camera were log encoding and LUTs.
Log encoding is a profile that records video with a flat, muted colour profile to capture and preserve more detail in highlights and shadows. The iPhone 15 Pro is the first smartphone to support ACES, the Academy Colour Encoding System.
The downside is that this format needs to be edited before use, and one of the editing steps is to apply a LUT, or Look Up Table, which is a file that contains information to remap and transform the flat footage into video with colour and contrast, which can then be further edited to match any desired style.
Editing video formatted in Log – and working with LUTs – requires professional tools such as Adobe Premier Pro.
I hope this rundown helps those of you who were confused by some of the terminology used, and perhaps it’s even encouraged you to be a little more creative — or technical — in your photography or videography.
