This is a fantastic look at how smartphone cameras capture and handle depth in photos. This is a fascinating read all the way around.

It’s from the Halide blog, and does get into how the Halide camera app expands on the iPhone XR’s “humans only” portrait mode. But there’s lots of interesting tidbits here.

One in particular stood out for me:

It seems the iPhone XR has two advantages over the iPhone XS: it can capture wider angle depth photos, and because the wide-angle lens collects more light, the photos will come out better in low light and have less noise.

Remember how we said the XR’s Portrait mode is only available on human portraits? When it comes to faces, you never want to photograph a person up close with a wide angle lens, as it distorts the face in an unflattering way.

That means you really have to take portraits on the iPhone XR from medium shot (waist-up). If you want a close-up headshot, kind of like the iPhone XS, you’ll have to crop, which means you’ll lose a lot of resolution. A wide angle lens isn’t always a plus.

Jump to the blog post, check out the images, especially those that compare the iPhone XR and XS side by side. Be sure to read the captions.

Sometimes, the iPhone XR will take nicer-looking Portrait photos than any other iPhone, including the XS and XS Max.

But most of the time, the XS will probably produce a better result.

Short term, the XR is going to give you better results in low light, because of the wider aperture, which lets in more light. But over time, I believe machine learning is going to conquer that physical limitation, and we’ll see new generations of iPhone cameras that produce unbelievable low light images.