Archive for September 19, 2024

Thursday, September 19, 2024

iPhone 16 Pro Camera

Nilay Patel:

The reason Apple calls it “Camera Control” and not just “shutter button” is the capacitive controls on the top, which should ideally let you adjust various settings with a quick swipe. I was really hoping I’d find myself using the capacitive controls to adjust things like exposure and focal length, but it’s all a bit fiddly switching between everything with the light presses and far too easy to end up changing things you weren’t intending to. The whole thing would be greatly improved if a second light press dismissed the control; once they’re open, they tend to stay open, leading to inadvertent changes when your finger slides along the button.

[…]

The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro hit a kind of tipping point — they produced photos so aggressively processed that all kinds of people started noticing and complaining about it. I have been reviewing phones and cameras for a long time, but I will never publish a review as efficiently devastating as Alix Earle asking her 7 million followers why her iPhone 15 camera sucks. If people who’ve built multimillion-dollar content businesses with their phone cameras aren’t loving the cameras on their new phones, something’s gone wrong.

[…]

The bad news is that, by default, the iPhone 16 Pro camera is even more aggressive about evening out shadows and highlights than the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s subtle, but it’s there — you can see it with basic photos of plants, with pictures of people, with street scenes — it’s all just a little bit brighter and a little bit flatter.

[…]

The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro allow you to exclude yourself from this narrative entirely with a huge upgrade to the Photographic Styles feature that allows you to adjust how the camera processes colors, skin tones, and shadows, even after you’ve shot a photo. […] The tone control is semantically aware — it will adjust things like faces and the sky differently, so it’s still doing some intense computational photography, but the goal is for you to be able to take photos that look a lot more like what a traditional camera would produce if you bring the slider all the way down.

Though the tone control happens in software, it’s not available for older iPhones. He says, “it’s possible to argue that this one single camera adjustment makes upgrading to an iPhone 16 or 16 Pro worth it.” The styles data is stored in the HEIC file so that the effect can be undone after the fact, though only using Apple’s app.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

Apple seemingly doesn’t ever refer to Camera Control as a “button”, but it is a button. You can see it depress, and it clicks even when the device is powered off (unlike, say, the haptic Touch ID Home button on iPhones of yore and the long-in-the-tooth iPhone SE). But it isn’t only a button. You can think of it as two physical controls in one: a miniature haptic trackpad and an actually-clicking button.

[…]

Just writing that all out makes it sound complicated, and it is a bit complex. (Here’s Apple’s own illustrated guide to using Camera Control.) Cameras are complex. But if you just mash it down, it takes a picture. Camera Control is like a microcosm of the Camera app itself. Just want to point and shoot? Easy. Want to fiddle with ƒ-stops and styles? There’s a thoughtful UI to enable it.

[…]

Camera Control is designed to be used in both wide (landscape) and tall (portrait) orientations. Moving it more toward the corner, where my finger wants it to be, would make it better for shooting widescreen, but would make it downright precarious to hold the iPhone while shooting tall.

It seems to be better placed for camera use than the Action button.

But, when your iPhone is locked and the screen is off, or in always-on mode, clicking Camera Control just wakes up the screen. You have to click it again, after the screen is awake, to jump to shooting mode.

But this is what I love about the Action button—no matter where I am I can press it to get to shooting mode.

There are now 15 base styles to choose from, most of them self-descriptively named (Neutral, Gold, Rose Gold), some more poetically named (Cozy, Quiet, Ethereal). The default style is named Standard, and it processes images in a way that looks, well, iPhone-y. The two that have me enamored thus far are Natural and Stark B&W. Standard iPhone image processing has long looked, to many of our eyes, at least slightly over-processed. Too much noise reduction, too much smoothing. A little too punchy. Natural really does look more natural, in a good way, to my eyes.

Austin Mann:

The upgrade of the Ultra Wide camera to 48MP was by far the feature I was most excited about at the keynote.

[…]

An added bonus is that the iPhone’s Macro mode also uses the Ultra Wide camera, meaning Macro shots are now 48 megapixels as well. The detail is remarkable, and the iPhone 16 Pro might just be my new favorite camera for macro photography.

[…]

I’ve also been surprised at how useful the extra shutter button has been. I find I use a combination of the on-screen shutter button, Action button, Volume button, and Camera Control—depending on the scenario and how I’m holding the iPhone to capture it.

[…]

In our extreme use cases—shooting from a helicopter and bouncing around in a safari vehicle—I occasionally found myself accidentally bumping the Camera Control adjustments (like inadvertently zooming in or changing exposure settings). For these situations, I went to Settings > Camera > Camera Control to explore my options.

[…]

Photographic Styles don’t work in Burst mode, which I learned after shooting a few bursts with Craig.

Previously:

Update (2024-10-01): Sebastiaan de With:

If you want a quick verdict: the iPhone 16 Pro is a tremendous camera because between Camera Control, Zero Shutter Lag and its advanced Photographic Styles, it will capture more moments than any iPhone ever did by a huge margin — and that in itself makes me recommend it over any previous one.

Juli Clover:

Popular camera app Halide was today updated with new features for the Camera Control button available on the new iPhone 16 models. Halide already supported opening the app with Camera Control, but now users can also make adjustments.

Juli Clover:

Photographic Styles aren’t new, but with prior iPhone models, there were only four options: Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. On the iPhone 16 , there are several more pre-set styles to choose from.

Previously:

Update (2024-10-03): Adan:

  • [Camera Control] Gesture controls are very finicky. You’re better off using the on-screen controls.
  • It takes a hard press to capture, which causes shake and can blur the photo.
  • It’s position is just fine in portrait mode, but pretty poor in landscape.

Only thing it’s good for is opening the camera quickly, but Apple could’ve easily integrated that functionality some other way, like double-pressing the Action Button.

Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten (via John Gruber):

For this first podcast of our new Design Tangents series aptly named Nerdy Details we sit down with Johnnie Manzari from the Apple Human Interface team and Rich Dinh, Senior Director of Product Design, to talk about cameras and photography through the lens of the new control on “the world’s most popular camera.” Camera Control represents years of collaboration between Apple‘s design and engineering teams and the unassuming feature packs a punch, elevating the iPhone’s photography capabilities through a combination of hardware and software innovations.

Ryan Jones:

Your Camera Control verdict thus far[…]

Update (2024-10-04): Kurt:

One more note on Camera Control: The stiffness of the button doesn’t just shake the phone, it causes a loud audible click in all Live Photos taken with it. The volume or action buttons did this too, but the Camera Control is so much louder.

This has pushed me to just use it for launching the camera app and that’s all. I’ve always used the on-screen shutter button (on past phones) to reduce phone movement anyway.

Previously:

Swift 6

Holly Borla (Hacker News, Lobsters):

Swift 6 marks the start of the journey to make data-race safety dramatically easier. The usability of data-race safety remains an area of active development, and your feedback will help shape future improvements.

Swift 6 also comes with a new Synchronization library for low-level concurrency APIs, including atomic operations and a new mutex API.

[…]

Swift 6 introduces a number of productivity enhancements, including count(where:) to streamline counting the number of elements in a sequence that satisfy a predicate, pack iteration for writing natural for-loops over the elements in a value parameter pack, access control for imports to keep implementation details from leaking into your public APIs, @attached(body) macros for synthesizing and augmenting function implementations, expression macros as default arguments, and more.

You can find a complete list of language proposals that were accepted through the Swift Evolution process and implemented in Swift 6 on the Swift Evolution dashboard.

[…]

Swift 6 unifies the implementation of Foundation across all platforms. The modern, portable Swift implementation provides consistency across platforms, it’s more robust, and it’s open source. macOS and iOS started using the Swift implementation of Foundation alongside Swift 5.9, and Swift 6 brings these improvements to Linux and Windows.

Rudrank Riyam:

I started documenting my learnings about Swift 6 errors, the reasoning behind them, and how to fix them. The first one is:

Static property ‘shared’ is not concurrency-safe because non-’Sendable’ type may have shared mutable state

Casey Liss:

Swift 6 strict concurrency checking may be the quickest and easiest way for me to feel like a dunce. ☹️

Half of these warnings I’m just like “uhhhhhh… wat”.

I’m sure I’ll get there, but, gracious. 😓 Gotta stop kicking that can though…

Alexander Steiner:

Just wait until you have fixed all errors but the app is crashing at runtime randomly because of missing annotations in first-party frameworks.

Sindre Sorhus:

My advice for updating to Swift 6:

Turn on the switch, fix the easy stuff, turn it off again, and wait until next year. Apple will spend the next year making it easier to adopt complete concurrency.

Simon B. Støvring:

I’m leaning towards this plan too. Properly adopting concurrency in Swift 6 is way too convoluted. I can’t imagine Apple won’t get flooded with feedback from developers, pushing them to simplify it in a future version.

dasdom:

Swift 6 is solving a problem I didn’t encounter in 15 years of iOS development by providing me with lots of problems I didn’t ask for.

Previously:

Google Search Adds Links to Internet Archive

Chris Freeland:

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

[…]

To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

This makes it easier to see previous versions of a page. It would also be useful if Google could search pages that are in the archive but no longer available on the Web. For example, many articles and blog posts that I’ve linked to are on sites that are now defunct. I can find them in the Wayback Machine because I have the URL. But without that key, even if I know some of the text on the page, I can’t really search for it in the archive.

Ben Schoon (via Hacker News):

Google Search makes it easy to find information, but occasionally you need historical context for a page that may have been recently updated. That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year.

Previously:

Lost Internet Archive Accounts

Matt Sephton:

Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman since 2015.

Somewhat surprisingly, they are not reaching out to affected users but rather waiting for them to create new accounts and silently relinking their old uploads only if the new account has same email as the old account. Otherwise, all profile metadata, favourites, lists, reviews, posts, collections, web archives, and the original username are not being relinked. For me that’s a decade of data…gone.

The main impact of this massive data loss, that happened around mid-July, is that there are now dead links to old profiles and various old pages all across the internet, plus the additional impact of lost data that is not being recovered. It’s a real blow to the broader preservation effort to know that the one place where data is supposed to be safe forever has had a massive data loss and the organisation responsible are not taking proactive steps to address the issue fully.

See also: Reddit.