The iPhone’s Portrait mode is no longer a cool but clunky gimmick. Now it’s an essential, automatic, and surprisingly flexible tool.

You know how with the iPhone 14's portrait mode, you have to choose whether to use it, then you have to position your subject at the right distance from the phone's camera, and then you have to try to get the phone to focus on that subject? Well, all that is gone. Portrait mode has come of age now, and it's so easy to use now that you'll probably never have to turn it on again. You just shoot and then choose what you shot later.

“I’m an amateur photographer, but I’ve won a few contests and I’m also a professor of media anthropology. I use a DSLR and a mirrorless full-frame camera when I’m doing serious photography, but I also use my phone a lot because I always have it with me,” Gareth Barkin, dean of operations and technology at the University of Puget Sound and an avid amateur photographer, told Lifewire via email. “You can choose your subject after you pick up the phone, you can adjust the depth of field in two different ways, [and it] also saves an unaltered original, so /[…] there’s no real reason not to use it all the time.”

Portrait mode is the mode that mimics the blurred backgrounds you get in photos taken with regular cameras. Those cameras have large sensors, much larger than the image sensors in phones, and this means that when the lens is set up correctly, your subject will be sharp and the background will be blurred.