iPhone 15 Camera Update - Released

[Emanuel]

100% agreed @SRV1981& @kye what's amazing here, this is that horrible fake DOF my OnePlus 9 Pro has and it's a big shit, so kudos to this release (it's a smartphone, guys, no idea if everyone has stopped to think it twice on what we're talking about here for real ; ) The one we can take everywhere in our pocket, the real pocket camera, this time no excuses...

[stephen]

Cinematic Mode doesn't use Apple log. It has all the deficiencies of previous gen iPhone video  like tone mapping and sharpening. They were skillfully hidden in post. Skin tones in the last third of the video where face was lit with warm side light are a little bit off.

[gt3rs]

5 hours ago, kye said:

@gt3rs - what do you think of the above video from @SRV1981 with the diffusion filter?

I thought the images looked pretty good with fine skin-tones (up until the DR of the camera failed and it went bizarrely saturated and then clipped).  The model has impeccable skin though, so it's hard to tell as there didn't seem to be fine chroma detail in her face.

Too me it looks like a too strong skin retouching filter... maybe to "sell" the diffusion filter they did use davinci or similar skin smoothing filters... it is wired as some parts are almost too sharp and others are blotchy and blurred...

From 0:45 onwards is imo unusable.

But as it use Cinematic so it cannot be Log so it is heavy processed already to start with.











Not a fan of this kind of video but here the image from iPhone looks much better than the above one less plastic/fake

 

[SRV1981]

2 hours ago, gt3rs said:

Too me it looks like a too strong skin retouching filter... maybe to "sell" the diffusion filter they did use davinci or similar skin smoothing filters... it is wired as some parts are almost too sharp and others are blotchy and blurred...

From 0:45 onwards is imo unusable.

But as it use Cinematic so it cannot be Log so it is heavy processed already to start with.











Not a fan of this kind of video but here the image from iPhone looks much better than the above one less plastic/fake

 

Well tone mapping vs logging. All look pretty good and for non-paid work I’d be happy with any of it. So will my wallet 😂 

[Emanuel]

8 hours ago, stephen said:

Cinematic Mode doesn't use Apple log. It has all the deficiencies of previous gen iPhone video  like tone mapping and sharpening. They were skillfully hidden in post. Skin tones in the last third of the video where face was lit with warm side light are a little bit off.

Yes, still the gap with the previous generations is huge!

[kye]

Finally, a proper test... Let's try this again @gt3rs 🙂

 

To be honest, the differences between the SDR (processed) and Apple Log modes is quite staggering.

[PannySVHS]

On 10/2/2023 at 5:34 AM, Emanuel said:

Marty, a mirrorless camera is not a cell phone but not vice versa as we all know. Here's why this can be a game changer -- on second 135

Without mention, the BMD App... Apparently, this new tool, worthy of a new capture device by itself, is also able to bypass device's overprocessing because is using Apple Log?

🙂 @Emanuel My personal gamechanger would still be as stated a GH5II-ish LX15 with a clutch mechanism for manual focus and full HDMI. 10bit S16 pocket cinecam heaven.

The comment section under Gerald Undones test gives away quiet a few details about not so pleasant processing even in log, such as noise reduction and color clipping in the highlights. Apple fans will buy it anyway. Action mode, overall impressive image quality in log and tele lens are pretty cool, of course.

I don´t dig the videos of people sneaking into awesome locations and filming girls for lookin pretty and doing endless and brainless gimble like pushins- and outs, selling luts and pushing their affiliate links as well. Commenting youtube fan herds scream their amazement. I don´t like that noise and buzz and hysteria. A GH4 with its 9 year old sensor would look just as good if it had internal 10bit or via mini hdmi out. That phone is an achievement of technological developement. The fancrowd seems to develop back into infantile states of hysteric consumerism.

Slashcam results and test is looking very good. One of the coolest test sites. They are the only site which hinted me to the creamy high resolving image of the GH5II and its cinematic textures without oversharpening. Thanks for posting their findings and test of the iphone 15! @kye

[gt3rs]

20 hours ago, kye said:

Finally, a proper test... Let's try this again @gt3rs 🙂

 

To be honest, the differences between the SDR (processed) and Apple Log modes is quite staggering.

Now we are talking, the log footage seems very usable and night and day compared to the SDR over sharpend, oversaturated and too much NR. The skin tone and skin texture are much more natural... then if people want to create a plastic look out that I have no problem but the video really demonstrate that the starting image in log is indeed a big step up compared to the past. 

I'm still confused about the cinematic mode and log as many says that you can not have both at the same time but the above video clary use log with cinematic mode. Either is just BS or maybe the default camera app does not allow this but the Blackmagic one that seem to be used on the above video allows it. 

It would be nice to see if there is a any big difference in Blackmagic app h265/log vs ProRes/log.. I need to search if somebodies has already done this.  

Time to upgrade my iPhone....

[kye]

13 minutes ago, gt3rs said:

Now we are talking, the log footage seems very usable and night and day compared to the SDR over sharpend, oversaturated and too much NR. The skin tone and skin texture are much more natural... then if people want to create a plastic look out that I have no problem but the video really demonstrate that the starting image in log is indeed a big step up compared to the past. 

I'm still confused about the cinematic mode and log as many says that you can not have both at the same time but the above video clary use log with cinematic mode. Either is just BS or maybe the default camera app does not allow this but the Blackmagic one that seem to be used on the above video allows it. 

It would be nice to see if there is a any big difference in Blackmagic app h265/log vs ProRes/log.. I need to search if somebodies has already done this.  

Time to upgrade my iPhone....

TBH the image quality on the new log makes me a little sad for all the potential image quality sitting unused in previous models.  After all, the codec made no difference to the look (Prores SDR was still awful) so in previous phones it wasn't the codec, it was the processing.  Sure, the smaller and less capable sensors from previous models wouldn't have been as good, but they'd still have looked better than the SDR mode on the latest one.

Upgrading isn't a priority for me yet, but I must admit I'm tempted to pull a couple of stills from the above and see what tools I can use to make the SDR one look closer to the LOG one, and then try applying those tools to my own iPhone 12 footage and see if it's useful.

As you say, the image quality is now proven thanks to this latest test, so now we just need to figure out the right tools and settings etc.

[Phil A]

The disappointing but absolutely not surprising part is, that this feature doesn't come to the older iPhone Pro (Max) models. It would probably be technically possible to implement the log profile via an update on e.g., iPhone 14 Pro as it already has a 48mp sensor with HDR, but that's not helping the sales cycle from Apple's perspective. I don't think it's impossible from the hardware side to skip some of the (over)processing of the image.

[gt3rs]

I found a good test video of h265/LOG vs ProRes/LOG with the Blackmagic App.... for most cases you probably can get away with h265/LOG saving the clumsy SSD that defats a bit the concept of using a phone. Files are much smaller and you can do 4k 60p LOG internally.... good to have options

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpO06mdN7mk

[SRV1981]

For non paid I’m taking a break from dedicated cameras and will be looking to upgrade to iPhone 15 just shocked 

[kye]

10 hours ago, gt3rs said:

I found a good test video of h265/LOG vs ProRes/LOG with the Blackmagic App.... for most cases you probably can get away with h265/LOG saving the clumsy SSD that defats a bit the concept of using a phone. Files are much smaller and you can do 4k 60p LOG internally.... good to have options

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpO06mdN7mk

Great video and looks like a good channel to follow in future - people doing controlled and straight-forward tests are rare unfortunately!

This result is what I was hoping for and good to see.  When I did the image quality tests comparing different codecs and then doing the mathematical comparison with the original file it showed how much more efficient the newer codecs were over Prores, which is a now getting quite old.  There are situations where I would still prefer Prores over a h26x codec, but those are getting less common as resolution increases (and the pixel-level compression artefacts get smaller).

I wonder, can it shoot lower resolution Prores internally..  for example, Prores 4444 1080p?  Imagine if we could independently choose the options like in BM cameras: profile (SDR, LOG), codec (H265, Prores LT/422/HQ/4444/4444XQ), Resolution (2K, 3K, 4K), Framerate (23.976, 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, 60, 120, 180, 240), and destination (internal, SSD).  

That would be a dream!  

I'd set it to LOG / Prores 4444 / 3K / 48p / Internal and just leave it there.

2 hours ago, SRV1981 said:

For non paid I’m taking a break from dedicated cameras and will be looking to upgrade to iPhone 15 just shocked 

Yes, for ease-of-use it's definitely becoming a powerful option.  I've used my smartphone as a second camera for a while, and on my recent trips my smartphone replaced my action camera as the second camera with super-wide angle.

[SRV1981]

 

[PannySVHS]

This looks partially like Grading 1.0, some of the shots look like videos of the first magic bullet grading craze gone wrong. Now i begin to understand the screw up was so much less due to the slim 8bit 420 codec of the GH1 back then, but much more because of the decisions gone wrong by some overly "creative" color grading. This is the case with the video above. A few seconds look great though. Not the best example to demonstrate a cameras image quality all in all. Footage itself is shot pretty well. Stabilsation looks great and lenses seem well resolving and in some recognisable regards with good rendering. But colors, shadows, which are even partially inverted, and highlights look pretty awful.

One wish, i have for posted videos, is to let the reader know the findings of the one posting a video in this forum, please. Otherwise to me it just feels a bit unmotivated and for me personally also a bit less joyful to participate in an evaluation or discussion. Thank you, cheers and best 😊

[kye]

I agree - the colour grading looks to be with one of the film emulation suites, and is very very heavy handed.

However, I think that this video shows a number of things...

The shots included a wide range of difficult situations and held up.
There were high-DR scenes, including the sun.  There were low-light scenes, including a fire which wasn't clipped to hell.  There was slow-motion, etc.  None of it looked like there were any issues at all - sure it wasn't an Alexa 65 amount of DR but the images didn't really suffer either.

The footage didn't break-up under an extreme grade.
This is quite an accomplishment and anyone who knows what it's like to grade images from very small sensor size cameras know that when you push the image, especially to include huge amounts of saturation like this one has, the image very quickly shows its digital thin-ness and brittleness, but this didn't not happen.  There were lots of skin tones pushed severely and no-one looked pallid-yellow or lobster-red.  
It's very difficult to push that amount of saturation without lips becoming glowing-red or there being yellowish areas (or both), and then when you try and compress the hues by pushing both sides towards the middle hues, it's hard to keep the right colour contrast - so many tools make people look like their whole face is covered in foundation by making the whole face the same hue.

This is a real-world test by a real-world person.
In the same way that the SlashCam test is valuable because it has been shot competently and hasn't been messed with in post, this is a valuable test because the person who made it obviously isn't a professional cinematographer or colourist, it wasn't shot in controlled conditions with pristine lighting catering to the exact weaknesses of the sensor and including models who had perfect skin even before they spent an hour in make-up.  Any camera can look glorious if you do that.  This sort of test indicates what anyone who gets the phone, waves it around, then colour grades it with Dehancer/FilmConvert/Filmbox/etc can expect to get.

It's not a beautiful film, but it's a useful test of the camera.

[SRV1981]

7 hours ago, kye said:

The footage didn't break-up under an extreme grade.

This was my initial gut instinct when watching. I’m a naive user of NLE software and would be happy with that color grade. When I get the 15 I’ll be sure to check some tutorial videos and give it a go.  The simplest process and workflow will probably be what I go with, whether it’s LUT and Dehancer etc. 

to me, the point is you can now create 80-90% of the quality a mirrorless does in most lighting conditions without the cost of equipment and burden of the size of equipment.  Low light and DOF yes that will need some workarounds or acceptance of “good enough” and since I’m personally not being paid and the quality bump of a mirrorless with the cost of size and price - I’ll take the good enough phone at this point. 
 

someone in this forum made that point about 3-6 years ago and I, in my head, rolled my eyes at their words.   Now I’m eating those words but won’t tell you if those words are carnivore or vegan 😉 

[kye]

18 minutes ago, SRV1981 said:

This was my initial gut instinct when watching. I’m a naive user of NLE software and would be happy with that color grade. When I get the 15 I’ll be sure to check some tutorial videos and give it a go.  The simplest process and workflow will probably be what I go with, whether it’s LUT and Dehancer etc. 

to me, the point is you can now create 80-90% of the quality a mirrorless does in most lighting conditions without the cost of equipment and burden of the size of equipment.  Low light and DOF yes that will need some workarounds or acceptance of “good enough” and since I’m personally not being paid and the quality bump of a mirrorless with the cost of size and price - I’ll take the good enough phone at this point. 
 

someone in this forum made that point about 3-6 years ago and I, in my head, rolled my eyes at their words.   Now I’m eating those words but won’t tell you if those words are carnivore or vegan 😉 

I suspect that basically everyone can do significantly better than that colour grade if they follow a couple of simple suggestions when they're colour grading.  

The first is to find a reference image, or set of images, that they like, and to refer to them throughout the colour grading process.  It's easy to adapt to what you're seeing and to make tiny little changes until you've gone far astray.

The second is to apply small changes that each make the image a small amount better.  Obviously you will need to convert LOG footage to 709 and that step will be a big improvement, but apart from that just make small improvements.  When you make each change, you should be able to compare the before/after of that change and each one should make the image better.

If you applied the above and just played with each control, even not knowing what they did, you'd find the occasional one here and there that made the image nicer in your eyes, and by keeping each one that is an improvement you'd gradually be making the image nicer, and I genuinely think you'd do far better than that grade.

[kye]

Controlled and properly shot/graded side-by-side Alexa 35 vs iPhone comparison..  

It looks great but (spoiler alert!!) it's not as good as the $110K camera package, especially when pointing into the sun..

 

[SRV1981]

1 minute ago, kye said:

Controlled and properly shot/graded side-by-side Alexa 35 vs iPhone comparison..  

It looks great but (spoiler alert!!) it's not as good as the $110K camera package, especially when pointing into the sun..

 

Amazing what iPhone could do and literally just came here to post this video haha