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Get GREAT PORTRAIT MODE photos with your phone! // Works for iPhone, Pixel, OnePlus, Samsung, etc.
To understand how to get beautiful portrait mode photos with your mobile device, you first need to understand how portrait mode works! In this video, I will give you a bunch of tips and tricks including what conditions, scenes and subjects are the best to get awesome results from the portrait mode. The video is filled of real-world examples of pictures where portrait mode works well and a bunch of photos where the portrait mode completely failed.
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - When should you use your Portrait Mode
01:16 - Tell a story
01:59 - Put focus on your subject
03:00 - Blurry background
03:42 - Better zoom
04:12 - How it actually works
05:51 - What to look for?
07:08 - When it won't work?
07:47 - Taking test photos
10:21 - Editing the blur with Google Photos
11:45 - Final thoughts
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:44 When should you use your Portrait Mode
- 1:16 Tell a story
- 1:59 Put focus on your subject
- 3:00 Blurry background
- 3:42 Better zoom
- 4:12 How it actually works
- 5:51 What to look for?
- 7:08 When it won't work?
- 7:47 Taking test photos
- 10:21 Editing the blur with Google Photos
- 11:45 Final thoughts
hey everyone today i'm going to answer one of my most asked questions which is how to get better pictures using your portrait mode on your phone i'm going to be using my google pixel 4a but this works with whatever smartphone that has a portrait mode on it i'm also going to talk about when to use the mode, this might surprise you, and also how it works to get a better understanding of when it works and when it doesn't for those of you who are new to this channel i'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at dsr i recently published a video about landscape photography using your phone and everything i said in that video is still valid except one thing that i'm going to talk about a little bit later let's start by talking about when you should be using a purchasing mode the most obvious reason is when you take a picture of yourself or of someone and that's why it's called portrait mode but i want you to think a little bit about why you're using this mode when you're taking pictures of people the answer to this question is actually it creates a nice blurry background and by creating a blurry background you're actually putting more focus on your main subject the person inside of the shot this same idea can be applied when taking landscape photos and this is why i use it so much to take landscape photos like i said inside of my landscape photography video it's very important to be telling a story when you're taking a picture most people when seeing a landscape are just going to come inside of the camera here and capture the nice white landscape but this doesn't tell much about the story so this is where i like to go and take some detailed shots of different things around the scene to really tell a more compelling story when you look through the pictures so for example here we could come here and take the branch right in front of here go inside of our portrait mode and focus on the little branch in the front here and take a picture like this by doing this we're gonna get a much more compelling shot that tells something that is different and that people are not used to seeing because they're used to seeing the whole white landscape not these detail shots let's talk about another reason why it's so interesting to be using the portrait mode on your phone for landscape photography and this one is like i said it adds more focus to your subject so for example if i wanted to take the snow on the tree in the background here and i use the default camera setting on the camera here you're actually going to get pretty much everything inside on focus and that means it's pretty hard for your eye to actually see what is your subject and what you're trying to take a picture of now if you go inside of portrait mode here and we place our subject here i'm just going to bring up the shadows we're going to see that i'm actually going to create multiple layers in the picture putting the background completely blurry and also the branches in the front blurry and this is really going to help your eye get to the subject and understand what you're taking a picture of inside of this photo another reason why this is great is that it adds more depth in the picture because there's more blur it's actually making the picture look a lot better a lot more three-dimensional another reason why it's great to be using the portrait mode inside of your phone when taking landscape is it allows to remove distracting backgrounds so for example i wanted to take the little things on the branches here and we used our main camera here uh when taking the shot we're gonna get some natural blur in the background from the lens but we're still gonna see that the background is very distracting inside of this photo so now if we move and we use the portrait mode we're really going to be able to get rid of that distracting background so here when we take the shot once it processes the photo we're going to see it's going to be much better in the end where we get rid of all that very distracting background inside of the photo another reason why i like using my portrait mode is actually to be able to zoom in a little bit more inside of the shot so if you look here at our main camera we're gonna see that it's actually quite wide but not if we zoom inside of the portrait mode we get much more closer to our subject and this is great especially when you're doing some macro shots because you can get closer to your subject without having to bring the camera actually closer and in my experience this gives a little bit better images compared to just zooming in inside of your main camera when taking a shot it wouldn't be one of my videos if i didn't take the time to actually explain how this technology works one of my videos already covers what is the difference of the blur using your phone and the blur using a dslr so i'm going to point to that video if that's what we want to learn in this video we're really going to talk about the detail of how the phone differentiates what is the foreground and what is the background and how it then creates the blur inside of the shot google pixel 4e has a technology that is called dual pixel and if you don't know what is dual pixel and why it's important it's because on the sensor for every single pixel it actually has two different pixels on the sensor capturing the information and this allows to get more information on depth because just like your eyes need to have two eyes and a pair to see depth it's the same thing using a camera if you still don't really understand why this matters we're gonna do a pretty quick example here which should help you quite a lot to understand how it works so if you take a first picture with the foreground here and then just move down a little bit we're gonna see that when we compare these two shots the foreground didn't move much where the part was in focus but the part that is blurry in the background actually moved a lot and this is what we call parallax which means that the part in the front is moving doesn't move at the same speed as a part in the background because it's much further away by using this information they're actually able to understand what is the foreground and what is the background because they only have to compare the same parts in the picture and see how much they moved so the more moved the further it is in the picture and the less it move the closer it is to the sharp part of the picture i hope you understood that this is a complete exaggeration in that in real life you don't get as much parallax in the background because the pixels are so close but this is very important to understand when you can get some better results inside of your portrait mode photos so the thing you want to look for when taking portrait photos is to get a lot of contrast between the foreground and the background and especially in terms of color so for example if you have a foreground and a background that are brown and have the same texture it's gonna be really hard for the software to determine what is the foreground and what is the background because everything is gonna look the same to them even if the thing in the background moves a little bit when they have a case like this this is actually where the ai is going to kick in and try and come and help determining what is the foreground and what is the background so as long as you're taking pictures of things that are very common so let's say a face of a person a pet or thing like that it's just going to be pretty easy for the ai to determine what is the foreground and what is the background and kind of save the picture even if you didn't have that much contrast in the picture now it might not always work because if you're taking pictures of things that are not common the ai might have to be trained on that which means it's not going to be able to come and help you inside of that case another thing you're looking for is to take pictures when you have a lot of light and i know that inside of my landscape photography photo i said that you don't want to have a nice sunny day but actually taking portrait photos in a nice sunny day is actually better because you get more contrast between your foreground and your background and like i said contrast is very important in this case now let's talk about when portrait mode won't work as well the first reason like i just said is when you don't have enough contrast between your foreground and your background subject the second reason is when you don't have enough distance between your foreground subject and your background subject so for example if you're taking a branch in the foreground and you have a lot of branches around it's just going to be really hard for the camera to determine what is the foreground what is the background because there's not enough parallax with your objects moving in the background to really help it tell what is the foreground and what is the background the last thing is like i said if it's not trained on the ai the ai is not going to be able to come and help and tell it what should be the foreground and what should be the background inside of the picture now enough with the theory let's go take some shots in the real world so the first thing you want to go is to go inside of our portrait mode this is pretty obvious and by far the most important thing when taking some photos with your portrait mode is actually to set your focus so on most smartphones is simply going to be tapping the place on your camera where you want to have the focus so here i'm going to put on the branch at the bottom here with the snow on top and this is very important because it's actually really hard for a camera to determine what is the right place to put your focus in your shot especially um that it has to do a lot of processing around what is your main focus point so if you don't tell it what is the focus point it's going to try and guess for you but most of the times it's not going to get it right right away so it's really helpful when you set your focus manually using portrait mode what is very interesting when using portrait mode is you can concentrate on taking some detailed shots that most people won't think taking in the first place so for example here on this tree i'm just going to take a really close up shot of the texture of the tree here and this is not the type of shot that most people would think taking uh when they walk around and see this tree the pirates can take the whole tree and not a detail inside of the tree and this is actually really great during the pandemic because you don't need to go really far to get some completely different shots you can just walk around your home walk around where you live and you can get some completely different shots by taking attention to details that are might be interesting to your eye if it's interesting to your eye it might be interesting to take a picture of it a very important tip i'm going to be giving you is actually to check your photo right away so if you open your photo and you realize that's not the result you wanted you can simply try again by moving a little bit your composition and just by moving a little bit your shot you can actually be getting completely different photos and you might prefer that one in the end so if it doesn't work i would say just try again try again until you get something that actually works because you never really know how the processing is gonna work so don't just think that you take a shot and you're going to check them later pieces might come back and realize it didn't work and that's very frustrating but if you take multiple shots right away and change the composition a little bit you might get a perfect shot in the end one of the biggest advantages of using portrait mode on a phone is actually you can edit your blur afterwards so if we come inside of this shot here and we go inside of edit and then go on the adjust tab we're gonna have options to change the blur so your first option here is actually to change the blur amount so usually it's around eighty percent which is pretty good but if you wanted to have less blur in the background we can actually remove it completely or just add a little bit more if you want to but i'm going to leave it around 85 i think it was pretty good then if you go on def you can actually change the depth of where your focus point was uh but here i think at zero they got it right so we're just gonna leave it there again it's okay but what is even better is if we come here and we have the little circle we can actually click on different parts of the shot in the foreground here you can actually see that the blur is going to change depending on where we click so if by accident we didn't get the focus quite right we can actually just click another part and change the focus to that point and change the blur around which is really cool one thing to remember is if you click on the background let's say here because this was already blurry because of the lens blur you cannot fix it afterwards because that's not artificial blur that they added that's real blur that was created using your lens but as long as you touch parts that are in focus you can change it afterwards once you set the side of your result you click done and here you can have a completely different focus and a different blur that you could edit afterwards which is pretty cool let's wrap up this video because it's actually getting pretty dark before people get mad inside of the comments i want to say right away that no this is not going to be replacing dslr or more or less anytime soon but i think that when you know when it's working or when it doesn't you can actually get really good results with your portrait mode even if you're not taking pictures of people if you enjoyed this video please let me know by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing to my channel i'm going to be posting more videos on mobile photography in the coming months see you in the next one bye bye
Video Links
- 🔗 HIGH-RES PHOTOS
- Best free mobile photo editor
- Landscape photography with your phone
- Google Pixel 4a Review
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
Portrait mode isn't just for taking photos of people—when you understand how it actually works and when to use it, you can get genuinely compelling images across all kinds of subjects and scenes. I'm going to walk you through the entire process using my Google Pixel 4a, though everything I'm covering applies to iPhones, Samsungs, OnePlus devices, and pretty much any phone with portrait mode.
First, let's talk about why you'd want to use portrait mode beyond the obvious. The real power is in creating a blurry background that puts focus on your main subject. When shooting landscapes, this lets me isolate details and tell a more interesting story than just capturing a wide shot everyone else would take. I use it constantly to zoom in slightly without moving the camera closer, to add depth and dimension to images, and to completely remove distracting backgrounds. The blur itself makes photos feel more three-dimensional and professional.
To understand when portrait mode works and when it fails, you need to know how the technology actually detects what's foreground and what's background. Phones like the Pixel use dual pixel sensors—two pixels capturing information from every point on the sensor. By comparing two shots and measuring how much different parts move between them (something called parallax), the phone figures out what's close and what's far. This is why contrast between your subject and background is crucial. High contrast and good lighting help the phone's depth detection work smoothly. When everything is the same color and texture with no distance between objects, portrait mode struggles because there's not enough parallax to work with.
In real-world practice, the biggest thing I've learned is to always set your focus manually by tapping exactly where you want the sharp area. Don't let the phone guess—it often gets it wrong. Take multiple shots with slightly different compositions and check them immediately rather than waiting until later. If you're not happy with the result, just try again.
One of my favorite features is Google Photos' ability to edit the blur after the shot is taken. You can adjust the blur amount, change where the focus point is, and even click different parts of the image to refocus it—as long as you're adjusting the artificial blur your phone added, not trying to fix the real optical blur from the lens itself.
High-res examples from this shoot are available on my website if you want to compare the successes and failures side by side.