Apple puts the pressure on your selfies in new iPhone X ad
Commentary: In a new commercial, Apple suggests you'll create perfect portraits with its new phone. But will you?
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
Perfect? Or can you still criticize it?
You have no excuse now.
Your photo app was once full of questionable photography that even Instagram filters couldn't save.
But now you've bought an iPhone X, and every portrait -- or, more importantly, selfie -- should be studio quality.
At least, that's what Apple suggests in an ad released on Friday.
Here we have ordinary people being photographed by ordinary people. With extraordinary results.
The iPhone X's "radically new cameras," together with Portrait Lighting mode -- which even allows you to choose the look you want -- mean that your photo app will be less of an album and more of a professional portfolio.
Portrait Lighting mode can feel depth information that's being transmitted by the phone's cameras. So it dynamically adjusts the lighting conditions to create something that -- at least in this ad -- looks dramatically professional.
Yours will be "studio quality portraits. Without the studio," says Apple in this ad.
My colleague James Martin, a photographer of boundless talent, tested the X and agreed that your selfies will never be the same again.
Indeed, a T-Mobile store salesman told me that selfies and animoji are the only two reasons to buy an iPhone X. (Currently, Apple hasn't released sales figures for the phone.)
The pressure now, though, is on you.
You have, apparently, everything you need to create visual perfection -- which you can upload to your Tinder profile, as well as to your 13 social media accounts.
But will this spawn a new level of amateur photo critic who will still accuse you of abject composition or, worse, a lock or two distressingly out of place?
The quest for perfection is so very hard. Just ask my hairdresser.
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