hey everyone today i'm going to answer one of my most asked questions which is how to get
better pictures using your portrait mode on your phone i'm going to be using my google pixel 4a
but this works with whatever smartphone that has a portrait mode on it i'm also going to talk about
when to use the mode, this might surprise you, and also how it works to get a better understanding
of when it works and when it doesn't for those of you who are new to this channel
i'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at dsr
i recently published a video about landscape photography using your phone and everything i
said in that video is still valid except one thing that i'm going to talk about a little bit later
let's start by talking about when you should be using a purchasing mode the most obvious reason
is when you take a picture of yourself or of someone and that's why it's called portrait mode
but i want you to think a little bit about why you're using this mode when you're taking pictures
of people the answer to this question is actually it creates a nice blurry background and by
creating a blurry background you're actually putting more focus on your main subject the
person inside of the shot this same idea can be applied when taking landscape photos and this is
why i use it so much to take landscape photos like i said inside of my landscape photography video
it's very important to be telling a story when you're taking a picture most people when seeing
a landscape are just going to come inside of the camera here and capture the nice white landscape
but this doesn't tell much about the story so this is where i like to go and take some detailed shots
of different things around the scene to really tell a more compelling story when you look through
the pictures so for example here we could come here and take the branch right in front of here
go inside of our portrait mode and focus on the little branch in the front here and take a picture
like this by doing this we're gonna get a much more compelling shot that tells something that is
different and that people are not used to seeing because they're used to seeing the whole white
landscape not these detail shots let's talk about another reason why it's so interesting to be using
the portrait mode on your phone for landscape photography and this one is like i said
it adds more focus to your subject so for example if i wanted to take the snow on the tree in the
background here and i use the default camera setting on the camera here you're actually going
to get pretty much everything inside on focus and that means it's pretty hard for your eye to
actually see what is your subject and what you're trying to take a picture of now if you go inside
of portrait mode here and we place our subject here i'm just going to bring up the shadows
we're going to see that i'm actually going to create multiple layers in the picture putting
the background completely blurry and also the branches in the front blurry and this is really
going to help your eye get to the subject and understand what you're taking a picture of inside
of this photo another reason why this is great is that it adds more depth in the picture because
there's more blur it's actually making the picture look a lot better a lot more three-dimensional
another reason why it's great to be using the portrait mode inside of your phone when taking
landscape is it allows to remove distracting backgrounds so for example i wanted to take
the little things on the branches here and we used our main camera here uh when taking the
shot we're gonna get some natural blur in the background from the lens but we're still gonna
see that the background is very distracting inside of this photo so now if we move and
we use the portrait mode we're really going to be able to get rid of that distracting background so
here when we take the shot once it processes the photo we're going to see it's going to be much
better in the end where we get rid of all that very distracting background inside of the photo
another reason why i like using my portrait mode is actually to be able to zoom in a little
bit more inside of the shot so if you look here at our main camera we're gonna see that
it's actually quite wide but not if we zoom inside of the portrait mode
we get much more closer to our subject and this is great especially when you're doing some macro
shots because you can get closer to your subject without having to bring the camera actually closer
and in my experience this gives a little bit better images compared to just zooming in inside
of your main camera when taking a shot it wouldn't be one of my videos if i didn't take the time
to actually explain how this technology works one of my videos already covers what is the difference
of the blur using your phone and the blur using a dslr so i'm going to point to that video if
that's what we want to learn in this video we're really going to talk about the detail of how
the phone differentiates what is the foreground and what is the background and how it then creates
the blur inside of the shot google pixel 4e has a technology that is called dual pixel and
if you don't know what is dual pixel and why it's important it's because on the sensor for
every single pixel it actually has two different pixels on the sensor capturing the information
and this allows to get more information on depth because just like your eyes need to have two
eyes and a pair to see depth it's the same thing using a camera if you still don't really
understand why this matters we're gonna do a pretty quick example here which should help
you quite a lot to understand how it works so if you take a first picture with the foreground here
and then just move down a little bit we're gonna see that when we compare these two shots
the foreground didn't move much where the part was in focus but the part that is blurry in the
background actually moved a lot and this is what we call parallax which means that the part in the
front is moving doesn't move at the same speed as a part in the background because it's much further
away by using this information they're actually able to understand what is the foreground and
what is the background because they only have to compare the same parts in the picture and see how
much they moved so the more moved the further it is in the picture and the less it move the closer
it is to the sharp part of the picture i hope you understood that this is a complete exaggeration in
that in real life you don't get as much parallax in the background because the pixels are so close
but this is very important to understand when you can get some better results inside of your
portrait mode photos so the thing you want to look for when taking portrait photos is to get a lot of
contrast between the foreground and the background and especially in terms of color so for example if
you have a foreground and a background that are brown and have the same texture it's gonna be
really hard for the software to determine what is the foreground and what is the background because
everything is gonna look the same to them even if the thing in the background moves a little bit
when they have a case like this this is actually where the ai is going to kick in and try and come
and help determining what is the foreground and what is the background so as long as you're taking
pictures of things that are very common so let's say a face of a person a pet or thing like that
it's just going to be pretty easy for the ai to determine what is the foreground and what is the
background and kind of save the picture even if you didn't have that much contrast in the picture
now it might not always work because if you're taking pictures of things that are not common the
ai might have to be trained on that which means it's not going to be able to come and help you
inside of that case another thing you're looking for is to take pictures when you have a lot of
light and i know that inside of my landscape photography photo i said that you don't want
to have a nice sunny day but actually taking portrait photos in a nice sunny day is actually
better because you get more contrast between your foreground and your background and like i said
contrast is very important in this case now let's talk about when portrait mode won't work as well
the first reason like i just said is when you don't have enough contrast between your foreground
and your background subject the second reason is when you don't have enough distance between your
foreground subject and your background subject so for example if you're taking a branch in the
foreground and you have a lot of branches around it's just going to be really hard for the camera
to determine what is the foreground what is the background because there's not enough parallax
with your objects moving in the background to really help it tell what is the foreground and
what is the background the last thing is like i said if it's not trained on the ai the ai is not
going to be able to come and help and tell it what should be the foreground and what should be the
background inside of the picture now enough with the theory let's go take some shots in the real
world so the first thing you want to go is to go inside of our portrait mode this is pretty obvious
and by far the most important thing when taking some photos with your portrait mode is actually
to set your focus so on most smartphones is simply going to be tapping the place on your camera where
you want to have the focus so here i'm going to put on the branch at the bottom here with the snow
on top and this is very important because it's actually really hard for a camera to determine
what is the right place to put your focus in your shot especially um that it has to do a lot of
processing around what is your main focus point so if you don't tell it what is the focus point
it's going to try and guess for you but most of the times it's not going to get it right
right away so it's really helpful when you set your focus manually using portrait mode
what is very interesting when using portrait mode is you can concentrate on taking some detailed
shots that most people won't think taking in the first place so for example here on this tree i'm
just going to take a really close up shot of the texture of the tree here and this is not the type
of shot that most people would think taking uh when they walk around and see this tree the
pirates can take the whole tree and not a detail inside of the tree and this is actually really
great during the pandemic because you don't need to go really far to get some completely
different shots you can just walk around your home walk around where you live and you can get some
completely different shots by taking attention to details that are might be interesting to your eye
if it's interesting to your eye it might be interesting to take a picture of it
a very important tip i'm going to be giving you is actually to check your photo right away
so if you open your photo and you realize that's not the result you wanted you can
simply try again by moving a little bit your composition and just by moving a little bit
your shot you can actually be getting completely different photos and you might prefer that one
in the end so if it doesn't work i would say just try again try again until you get
something that actually works because you never really know how the processing is gonna work so
don't just think that you take a shot and you're going to check them later pieces might come back
and realize it didn't work and that's very frustrating but if you take multiple shots
right away and change the composition a little bit you might get a perfect shot in the end
one of the biggest advantages of using portrait mode on a phone is actually you can edit your blur
afterwards so if we come inside of this shot here and we go inside of edit and then go on the adjust
tab we're gonna have options to change the blur so your first option here is actually to change the
blur amount so usually it's around eighty percent which is pretty good but if you wanted to have
less blur in the background we can actually remove it completely or just add a little bit more if
you want to but i'm going to leave it around 85 i think it was pretty good then if you go on def you
can actually change the depth of where your focus point was uh but here i think at zero they got it
right so we're just gonna leave it there again it's okay but what is even better is if we come
here and we have the little circle we can actually click on different parts of the shot in the
foreground here you can actually see that the blur is going to change depending on where we click so
if by accident we didn't get the focus quite right we can actually just click another part and change
the focus to that point and change the blur around which is really cool one thing to remember is if
you click on the background let's say here because this was already blurry because of the lens blur
you cannot fix it afterwards because that's not artificial blur that they added that's real blur
that was created using your lens but as long as you touch parts that are in focus you can change
it afterwards once you set the side of your result you click done and here you can have a completely
different focus and a different blur that you could edit afterwards which is pretty cool
let's wrap up this video because it's actually getting pretty dark
before people get mad inside of the comments i want to say right away that no this is not going
to be replacing dslr or more or less anytime soon but i think that when you know when it's
working or when it doesn't you can actually get really good results with your portrait mode
even if you're not taking pictures of people if you enjoyed this video please let me know
by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing to my channel i'm going
to be posting more videos on mobile photography in the coming months see you in the next one bye bye