Like clockwork, last month welcomed the start of fall, a season of changing colors, coziness, and all-new iPhones. Since debuting the iPhone in 2007 , Apple has released a refreshed model each year, often in September, and last month saw the introduction of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro that marked the eighteenth-generation of the Cupertino-based brand’s best-selling product – in fact, as reported by Forbes , the iPhone is the world’s best selling smartphone. Apple’s success with the iPhone is in part down to the way it has consistently evolved its product through design, software and hardware updates.
One of these, Photographic Styles , is an entirely new feature that just launched with the iPhone 16 series. It’s clear that Apple is doubling down on photography on iPhone, but what exactly are Photographic Styles and why is Apple so excited about them? And..
. aren’t they just filters? The short answer to that last question is no. A longer one would be to say that, before now, it simply wouldn’t have been possible for a phone to run a something like Photographic Styles as the technology needed for such a complex computational model wasn’t ready.
It is now, though, so we asked Pamela Chen , Apple’s Chief Aesthetics Scientist for Camera and Photos, to explain the distinction between filters and Photographic Styles. She told us there are three key distinctions between the two, “The first is that [Photographic Styles] are semantically adaptive,” meaning tha.
