Opinions: Fake Background Blur

[Stephen Coates]

A few years ago it became quite popular for smartphone cameras to include the option to fake some background blur. I'm just wondering, what are your opinions on this? I find I can usually spot it a mile off, but sometimes they do a good job. Its usually most obvious when they have very wide angle shots with far more blur than you would ever get on a full frame SLR. Sometimes it is blindingly obvious because it guesses the distances wrong, or can't tell the difference between the subject and the background; e.g. a person's face is in focus, but their hair and ears have the same amount of blur as the background many yards away.

Do people really think this looks good? Or is it just that most people can't tell the difference?

This fake background blur seems to be coming to video as well, where it tends to be far worse than on stills.

Will this just be another trend like HDR photography was in the early 2010s?

Anyway, I don't really use smartphones myself. I've just purchased a new second hand smartphone which apparently has this fake bokeh capability along with some "AI" stuff, so I'll be able to try it out for myself soon. I'm not expecting it to compete with my DSLR anytime soon.

 

[NorBro]

There was a time, I think like 2014-2018, when that fake blur was really popular, especially in video meeting applications (Zoom, Teams, Meet, etc).

Sometimes you saw it in other places but it mostly came and went as mirrorless' took over YouTube after the younger generation grew up and everyone became a content creator.

iPhone 16 Pro's AI cinematic mode at f/2 is magical.

It's here to stay forever and I don't think it's going to compete with a mirrorless because it's already won; hundreds of millions of people use the phones every day and have beautiful shallow DOF in their videos, most unable to tell the difference between their quality and real camera quality.

The ProRes in the phone is really good too but it's not offered in the cinematic mode yet.