I just randomly tested Google’s Portrait Mode on one of my trees yesterday…and it blew my mind!!! Has anyone else played around with this? I’m curios, those with iPhones, how does their picture taking algorithm fair?
I posted both versions of the picture for comparison…the noise of colours and vegetations is pretty heavy in the 2nd pic, without the portrait blur effect.
With portrait mode:
Without portrait mode:
Thanks! non are my merits. I just tipped the angle and wired it a bit 
Your’s is a larch right? Did you take the pic on a Pixel?
IPhone 7. Yes a small larch that I believe was a cast off at a club meeting. I have no idea what to do with it. I liked the top angling off, but this summer, the thing took off and is still growing. Time to make a decision!
What is this Google Portrait Mode? Is an app that adjusts old photos to blur the background and making the center come into sharpness?
The apple one does okay but also routinely makes mistakes with trees I found. Sometimes areas between branches don’t blur if the background is also brown/green. I keep trying but end up deleting the photos most of the time.
It’s a setting on the Android camera.
Michael - Portrait mode attempts to force the background in the picture to a fuzzy out of focus effect to highlight the subject. When it works, it is pretty dramatic.
On old cameras, it was called a bokeh effect.
And on cameras where you can adjust the aperture (F-stop) a wide aperture/low F-stop allows the short depth of field so only the tree is in focus. That is hard to simulate on the types of cameras in our phones.
There are 2 ways to use portrait mode:
Jumping on this old conversation. I love the portrait mode for taking pictures. iPhone’s have lighting effects you can add to portrait mode. “Stage Lighting” is good because it turns the background black, so you can set your tree anywhere and still get a quality image. Here is an example boxwood (after initial cleaning, no styling) with and without stage lighting.
What did you make of the Photographing Trees video?
https://live.bonsaimirai.com/library/video/photographing-trees-pt-1
I found it interesting. Especially with the similar comments on portrait mode. Though I must admit I do keep forgetting to try portrait mode when taking pictures…
My iPhone SE is looking for a face in the picture in order to use Portrait mode. I have tried tapping on the tree in the center of the image to cause it to focus there and it still does not work as shown above. Does anyone have a suggestion of how to override this?
Sorry for the late reply. Is the SE an older model of iPhone? It may be that portrait mode only works for faces on some phones. As a software engineer, I can guess (because I don’t follow Apple technology closely) that in early software, the ability to recognize faces could be done in any image, but the later phones have the ability to compute distance in an image (which can be done using image processing or by a depth/distance sensor like the iPhone 12 has). Computing distance could easily be a capability earlier phones do not have. Without it, you can’t do portrait mode for arbitrary objects, because the phone wouldn’t know what part to keep in focus.
That video is one of the things that prompted me to weigh in on this thread. I liked a lot of the discussion in there, but lots of the pictures had backgrounds that distracted me a lot from the tree. Like this one:
Josh even shows the effect of portrait mode on that tree, but even with it, the background is still distracting. It’s certainly better. The “stage lighting” I showed an example of does away with the background altogether, which is good. I don’t always like stage lighting though because it often is not possible to get the foliage and the pot equally well lit. One or the other gets thrown into shadow.
I just felt like mentioning it in case it was an option that might work for others who may not have discovered it yet.
Hi Doug,
I purposely took a photo that had a lot in the background to show the impact of exposing for your subject and using shallow depth of field / portrait mode on your phone.
The photo you posted was the “before”. This was the “after”.
Just wanted to make sure that was clear. We’ll hopefully dig deeper into photography and bonsai in future feature content.
Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t trying to criticize or complain about your post. I also noted the portrait mode pic in my post. I was just adding the additional “stage lighting” option in case people hadn’t seen it.
Cheers! Love what you all do at Mirai!
-Doug
All good and thank you for continuing the discussion on tree photography. For information alone, the stage lighting setting does seem to be helpful. If you can’t teach your tree to perform on stage or sing opera, I don’t know if I can appreciate it, otherwise. haha
I have found that Portrait mode does not do well on trees that have negative space to them and it seems to be hilariously exacerbated with the stage lighting.
Example
Non-portrait mode for reference
This is on an iphone 11 pro. I believe the newer ones (12 and up) have some sort of LiDAR sensor on them to help get more accurate depth of field calculations. Not sure how effective it is though.
