From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

Refining depth of field for Portrait mode images - Photos for OS X Tutorial

From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

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Refining depth of field for Portrait mode images

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- Besides the ability to relight the image, when shooting in portrait mode on a multi-lens smart phone, it's possible to also adjust the depth of field. Now, this is a virtual effect, but the ability to do so is really quite impressive. Let's take a look here at a few options. I'll take a simple portrait example to start, and we'll go into edit mode. If I enable portrait, you'll see that the depth of field becomes available, and right now, it's simulating an aperture of 4.5. Remember, when shooting on a traditional lens, the aperture is a ratio. So the smaller the number actually means a bigger opening. So as we decrease this number, it's going to effectively adjust the depth of field, making it a shallower focus, causing the background to fall out of focus or look blurry. So in this particular case, if I wanted to see this satellite array behind me and have it be clear, I could adjust that, and you see it comes back, or I could take it the other way, and it starts to blur and go more out of focus. The key here is dialing this in so you can still read the subject, but it's not distracting. Now, let's go ahead to another image and try this out. In this case, I'm going to revisit one of the black and white images we edited earlier. Now, while editing this image, you'll notice that it, too, was shot in portrait mode. I can now adjust that blurriness for the background and have it fall out of focus. Now, if you go too blurry, it might be distracting. So you don't have to maximize this, but the ability to keep it in focus or out of focus really helps control where you look within the photograph. In this case, I'm going to take that a little shallower and crop this image slightly. We'll tighten that up just a little bit. There we go, and let's just level that horizon, and now, the shallow depth of field really creates a nicer backdrop and pulls you into this picture. Again, this setting is only available when shooting in portrait mode on your iPhone or other compatible application. Eventually, I suspect we'll see more cameras that start to embrace this multi-lens technology. This is really just a glimpse into the future of photography, but there's a good chance if you have a Mac you also own an iPhone. So go ahead and experiment with portrait mode, even if you're not shooting portraits. It's a great way to really have additional flexibility when editing, particularly for things like macro photography, still life, or even environmental shots where you really want to be able to control afterwards the focus. Just make sure you get the camera close enough and that it recognizes a subject in the frame. If it doesn't see the subject or doesn't tell you that the subject has been identified, this feature won't work later on.

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