The variable aperture lens of the shiny new iPhone 18 Pro goes almost one stop wider than the fixed aperture lens in its predecessor: up from f/1.78 in the iPhone 17 Pro to f/1.48 (a smaller number is wider).
In principle, this will allow for slightly shallower depth of field, enabling greater separation between your subject and the background – although it’s a relatively small difference. But there are four ways to achieve shallow depth of field (DOF) with much older iPhones …
Portrait mode
The most obvious method is, of course, to use Portrait mode, which is specifically designed to allow people to be very clearly separated from the background.
This is a completely artificial effect using computational photography (assisted by LiDAR, on models that support it) to identify the subject and to apply an artificial blur to everything else. Early versions were extremely crude, but it’s become remarkably good in the last few years.
