Portrait mode photos can be shown in a side view, revealing contour map-like slices that represent depth. Sliders let me adjust which parts of the background and foreground get blurred.

In both flavors of Night Portrait mode, a tripod or flat surface is handy, and sometimes a necessity. In our test night portraits, Auto mode had a hard time capturing details in the background.

It’s possible that the iPhone 12, with those rumored camera upgrades, might finally bring an official Portrait mode to video. For now, at least, Focos Live gets the job done.

The key to using Portrait Mode effectively is to have a singular subject in the foreground — ideally in high-to-medium light — and something somewhat interesting going on in the background.

Starting with the iPhone 7 Plus and 8 Plus, newer iPhones feature a Portrait Mode that automatically focuses on foreground features, and blurs the background, creating studio-quality images.

Portrait mode works best when the camera and the phone's software can easily differentiate between the foreground and the background. When those two things are too close together, or too similar ...

Depth editing with Google Photos To adjust the background blur, open a portrait mode photo in Google Photos and tap the edit button. You'll see a belt of filters (including the new Color Pop ...

The company has opened up the source code for DeepLab-v3+, an AI-based image segmentation technology similar to that which helps Pixel 2 phones separate the foreground and background.

You can get a reasonable portrait shot from that, though it'll have uniform blur and may have confused foreground objects with part of the subject itself. Finally, the Pixel 2 uses its dual-pixel ...

To further tweak the foreground from the background in Edit mode, tap the Portrait Lighting button (the hexagon icon in the upper left). Again, move the slider bar at the bottom.