Phone cameras get better and better year by year, but no matter how much they improve, they always fall short of professional cameras. This year is different.
Last year, I did a joke comparison between my Canon R5 and iPhone 13 Pro. Those results were quite impressive, so much so that I ended up print the image from that quiz to see how far we can push the iPhone 13 Pro image. While I’m happy with the results, I haven’t tested the images and feel comfortable saying I could shoot with my iPhone instead. Canon R5 offer two options. I expected similar results this year, and in the midst of my image editing, I realized something different.
During these tests, I took raw photos all over Canon R5 and iPhone 14 Pro. I only use the built-in camera app on my iPhone, like last year I had issues with upcoming third-party apps. It’s also the most practical in practice with it being built directly into iOS. I just tested the new “main” camera (24mm/1x) because it get the new 48 mp sensor while the telephoto and wide-angle lenses haven’t received significant enough upgrades to warrant a comparison this year. All photos were taken on a tripod, and I will provide the resulting settings that the iPhone uses automatically. All photos on the Canon R5 were taken in conjunction with a Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L in different settings that you will find throughout the article.
All images are edited with Lightroom Classic only. I feel the truest way to make this comparison is to edit Canon R5 first images, as if I were editing them for my portfolio. Then I will edit the iPhone 14 Pro image to best match the Canon image. Throughout this article, I will present images from “Camera A” and “Camera B”. They will be mixed throughout the test, but I challenge you to look through the images and see if you can guess which image was captured from each camera. The answer will lie behind the article library.
First dawn
Last year, I remember being surprised that the iPhone was able to capture the full spectrum of light at sunrise, and even better this year with the iPhone 14 Pro. This scene doesn’t have any cloud cover, so the light gets harsh quickly, resulting in a scene with huge dynamic range, which persisted in many of these tests.
Camera settings:
- Canon R5: f/11, 1/40 sec, ISO 100
- iPhone 14 Pro: f/1.8, 1/1000 sec, ISO 100
Note the areas in the shadows compared to the snow-capped peaks exposed to direct light. Both cameras were able to capture this amount of dynamic range without much difficulty, a noticeable improvement over last year’s iPhone. This is where things get interesting and what totally blows my mind when it comes to photo editing. Zooming in is always where the iPhone image is split up to instantly tell which camera took each image. Come on.
Zoom in 100% on both images, do you see what I’m seeing? I will let the pictures speak for themselves. If you want to download this raw for yourself, you can find the updated link in the video above.
Blue hour
Low light is where all the little sensors get stuck, and the phone sensor is the smallest of them all. Any review you read will repeatedly mention that low-light performance is directly correlated with the size of the sensor. This is the hardest test this year against the iPhone 14 Pro.
Camera settings:
- Canon R5: f/8, 1/4 sec, ISO 100
- iPhone 14 Pro: f/1.8, 1/115 sec, ISO 125
However, the results, especially at the smaller resolutions, are nothing short of amazing. I tried to match the iPhone image with R5, but not necessarily because the data is not there to do so. This is in large part because this is the image I have edited the most. Artistically speaking, this is by far the best shot during the comparison, so I pushed the Canon R5 image as far away as I could. Trying to get the same highlights, details, and color science between the two cameras is a challenge, so you can definitely see a bit of that in play here.
Zoom in at 100%, you’ll notice a slight difference in quality between both cameras. After taking these images and learning the strengths and weaknesses of the iPhone 14 Pro, the shadow recovery in low-light scenes like this will suffer from a loss in quality. That said, I’m still very impressed with the final image. I’m also curious how this scene would play out if I used an app like Halide to set the ISO and shutter speed. If you are interested in other such tests, let me know in the comments.
Here’s how imaging begins, straight from the iPhone. Keep in mind that almost every raw photo from an iPhone looks like a black hole in scenes like this. This will provide some context on how much the image is pushed in the edit.
Second dawn
Another blue sky sunrise scene with great dynamic range, in fact many photographers around me took photos that were out of sync, but I was still able to capture everything in one exposure using both camera.
Camera settings:
- Canon R5: f/8, 1/30 sec, ISO 100
- iPhone 14 Pro: f/1.8, 1/580 sec, ISO 80
As someone who rarely shoots sunrises or sunsets against a blue sky, I decided to tweak this image a little differently from my usual style. Many of you reading this can very easily take a photo like this and try to make it look “movie”, or you can increase the contrast high to create a High precision images, or you can even replace the sky if your heart desires. So I tried with a different editing style to see how the iPhone 14 Pro handled such an edit.
Zoom in at 100%, and you’ll see a slight loss of detail in the shadows, like our blue hour shot. I noticed that shadow detail was a bit lost, while any areas with enough light hitting them retained slightly better information.
Details
In this final image, we check more realistic times for those of you out there who don’t wake up for the sunrise or are outdoors to watch the sunset. This process was done a few hours before sunset, giving us long shadows, lots of contrast, and most of all, a test of how much detail the iPhone 14 Pro can capture in a busy scene. .
Camera settings:
- Canon R5: f/5.6, 1/40 sec, ISO 100
- iPhone 14 Pro: f/1.8, 1/640 sec, ISO 100
Here is another completely impressive image of the iPhone 14 Pro. A scene with plenty of light to work with gives us a great deal of detail in both images. I would be very surprised if you could tell the difference between these two images without cropping.
Zooming in 100% left me speechless. Not only is the image fully packed with detail, the ability to keep highlights and shadows is all there. This is not something I could have shown you last year, as zooming in will lose too much detail in a scene like this. It was this shot that made me really leave Lightroom for a walk and feel impressed with the results.
Conclusion and Library
On that hike, I had these fleeting thoughts: “Am I seeing this correct?” “Did I accidentally edit two Canon R5 Picture? “This feels wrong.” I’m not underestimating the hype when I say I can find myself taking pictures with an iPhone 14 Pro that’s in my portfolio or for sale on my print site. This is not a camera replacement. Obviously there are a lot of limitations. However, if I pack up and go hiking, and something magical happens without my camera by my side and I take some photos with my iPhone 14 Pro, I’ll be very pleased with the results. suitable circumstances.
Another discovery in this year’s test was that using the ApplePro Raw profile in Lightroom didn’t give me the best results. By chance, I discovered that I had an easier time matching iPhone images to Canon using the embedded Apple Profile. Above you’ll see side-by-side of the same image that I couldn’t get the highlights to look right with ApplePro Raw. I’d love to know your experience below if you have any edits to these images. If you’d like to see more pixel peeping, my thoughts, and a little more editing to these images, be sure to check out the video included in the article.
Below is a gallery of all the images from this comparison so you can zoom in on them a little more. Also included are some photos straight from the camera from the iPhone 14 Pro, which are humorously ugly compared to their raw counterparts. I’d love to know what you think in the comments, as this has been an eye-opening experience for me.
iPhone is: ABAB
