Huawei P20 Pro. Photo Camera Review. Part II

Posted on Sep 14th, 2018

Huawei P20 Pro has two mode that we can use to shot portraits: the Portrait mode and the Aperture mode. Let’s see them in this article.

Portrait mode on the Huawei P20 Pro

The portrait mode is certainly a point at which many producers are challenging. By now all the high-end and mid-range smartphones have this mode that allows obtaining a simulation of the depth of field (DOF) blurring the area around the focus point you’ve selected.

Usually, the shallow depth of field is noticed in cameras with a larger sensor and setting an open aperture. On the smartphone, because of the small sensors, is very difficult to obtain a natural DOF. For this reason in the last year, we got some techniques to get an “artificial” DOF.

One of the major difficulties in this mode is to get a convincing detachment between the sharp area and the blurry area around the subject.

On this point the Huawei P20 Pro manages to bring out an excellent result thanks to the combined work of the two main sensors: the second monochromatic sensor helps the main sensor to get a good break between the planes.

It should also be noted that with the portrait mode on the Huawei P20 Pro you can choose the focal length you want to use: we can then shoot with the wide-angle focal and with the 3x lens that corresponds to a medium telephoto lens, in my opinion, the best chose when you have to deal with portrait photography. 

Aperture mode on the Huawei P20 Pro

In the first moment you start to use the Aperture Mode, it seems quite similar to the portrait mode I’ve covered above.
In reality, there is a small but important (and welcome) difference that will make the most demanding users happy: in the portrait mode, we can not choose the “amount” of the blur behind our subject.

In practice, in Portrait Mode, it is as if we were with a fixed aperture lens.

In the Aperture mode, we can choose the amount of the “virtual aperture“: in this way, we can dose the blur effect and get more personalized results.

Interesting as we can go to simulate the effect of the blur of an extremely rare and expensive lens like the Leica Noctilux f / 0.95 or to close the virtual aperture to get a greater sharpness around our subject.

I want to remind you that with the Aperture Mode you can further edit the amount of blur/bokeh after you shot the photo in the gallery. This is very similar of what you can do with the new iPhone Xs. 

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