Perfect your portraits

July 2024

MacFormat UK

Discover how to shoot better people pictures in a range locations

Your iPhone’s Photos library will be crammed full of shots featuring people pictures. To make sure that you’re capturing friends and family looking their best, it’s worth tinkering with your iPhone camera’s settings and finding the appropriate shooting modes to suit your subjects.

1 Formats

To save storage space, your iPhone can capture photos in HEIF (High Efficiency) format. This format captures shots that don’t take up much storage space, but it lacks some of the tonal and colour information in larger JPEG files. If you want to store even more information about a scene (for more choice at the editing stage), shoot in ProRAW format. This stores images as .DNG (Digital Negative) format files that you can edit in Apple Photos, as well as in third-party apps such as Adobe’s Photoshop. To choose a format for your photos, go to Settings > Camera > Formats. In Camera Capture, you can choose High Efficiency (to capture HEIFs) or Most Compatible for JPEGs.

Alternatively, toggle on ProRAW & Resolution Control. Choose a Pro Default such as ProRAW 12MP, or for maximum size, choose ProRAW Max (up to 48MP). Be aware that if you go for the highest-quality ProRAW Max image, it will take up around 79MB of storage space compared with 3.3MB for a HEIF format file. If in doubt, set the Camera > Format to Most Compatible and you’ll capture JPEGs at a more manageable 10.8MB.

How to Master Portrait mode >