[heliographe]

> but apparently recent iPhones capture them for standard photos as well.

Yes, they will capture them from the main photo mode if there’s a subject (human or pet) in the scene.

> I made an app that used the depth maps and portrait effects mattes from Portraits for some creative filters. It was pretty fun, but it's no longer available

What was your app called? Is there any video of it available anywhere? Would be curious to see it!

I also made a little tool, Matte Viewer, as part of my photo tool series - but it’s just for viewing/exporting them, no effects bundled:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/matte-viewer/id6476831058

[Uncorrelated]

I'm sorry for neglecting to respond until now. The app was called Portrait Effects Studio and later Portrait Effects Playground; I took it down because it didn't meet my quality standards. I don't have any public videos anymore, but it supported background replacement and filters like duotone, outline, difference-of-Gaussians, etc., all applied based on depth or the portrait effects matte. I can send you a TestFlight link if you're curious.

I looked at your apps, and it turns out I'm already familiar with some, like 65x24. I had to laugh -- internally, anyway -- at the unfortunate one-star review you received on Matte Viewer from a user that didn't appear to understand the purpose of the app.

One that really surprised me was Trichromy, because I independently came up with and prototyped the same concept! And, even more surprisingly, there's at least one other such app on the App Store. And I thought I was so creative coming up with the idea. I tried Trichromy; it's quite elegant, and fast.

Actually, I feel we have a similar spirit in terms of our approach to creative photography, though your development skills apparently surpass mine. I'm impressed by the polish on your websites, too. Cheers.

[lxgr]

> Yes, they will capture them from the main photo mode if there’s a subject (human or pet) in the scene.

One of the example pictures on TFA is a plant. Given that, are you sure iOS is still only taking depth maps for photos that get the "portrait" icon in the gallery? (Or have they maybe expanded the types of possible portrait subjects?)

[heliographe]

It will capture the depth map and generate the semantic mattes (except in some edge cases) no matter the subject if you explicitly set the camera in Portrait mode, which is how I would guess the plant photo from the article was captured.

My previous comment was about the default Photo mode.

If you have a recent iPhone (iPhone 15 or above iirc) try it yourself - taking a photo of a regular object in the standard Photo mode won’t yield a depth map, but one of a person or pet will. Any photo taken from the Portrait mode will yield a depth map.

You can find out more about this feature by googling “iPhone auto portrait mode”.

Apple’s documentation is less helpful with the terminology; they call it “Apply the portrait effect to photos taken in Photo mode”

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/edit-portrait-mode-ph...

[wodenokoto]

Seems crazy to run an object recognition algorithm in order to decide if depths should be recorded.

I’d thought that would be heavier than just record the depths.

[brookst]

Probably a pretty light classifier on the NPU. Doesn’t even have to care about what particular object it is, just if it matches training data for “capture depth map”.

[tough]

there was recently a 64 gates NN implementation in C shared on HN that was interesting for stuff like this

[lxgr]

> [...] if you explicitly set the camera in Portrait mode, which is how I would guess the plant photo from the article was captured.

Ah, that makes sense, thank you!