The ultra wide-angle of the iPhone 11 can save a poorly framed photo | iGeneration

It was a rumor, but Apple didn't mention it during its keynote on Tuesday and it was thought that the feature had simply disappeared. This is not the case in the end and as expected, the iPhone 11 will benefit from a cropping function that uses ultra wide-angle data, in addition to the main camera.

As a reminder, all iPhone 11s have an ultra wide-angle (0.5x) in addition to their main camera, a "simple" wide-angle (1x). The iOS 13 Camera has been changed to reflect this addition: when you take a photo with the wide angle in 1x mode, you will see on the sides what the ultra wide angle captures. Enough to realize that someone is missing in a group photo and switch to 0.5x mode to include everyone.

This help is invaluable, but if you don't realize that this person is missing when you take the photo, it's too late. Unless you have activated an additional option of iOS 13, which allows you to systematically take two photos: one with the classic wide-angle and a second with the ultra wide-angle.

As Jason Snell for Macworld points out, this little option in the camera settings allows you to keep a spare wheel for all your images. The two images taken at a different angle are kept for some time – we don't know exactly how long – and if you don't do anything about it, the Photos app will end up throwing away the ultra wide-angle image so as not to clutter up your space. storage for no reason.

But if, after taking the photo, you want to crop it, iOS 13 will allow you to enlarge it to catch up. The interface described by the journalist is as simple and obvious as one could imagine: when cropping, the Photos app indicates the larger image around the one you took by displaying it in gray. You can then drag the white bars outwards to increase the size of the image and reinstate what was missing.

Once activated, this option will catch up for photos, but also for videos. In this case, the iPhone 11 will record two video streams of the same quality at the same time, a rather incredible feat that Apple had unveiled during the keynote about a third-party app¹. We didn't know that the basic Camera could also do this, and that cropping videos in the Photos app will also enlarge the frame.

It is in any case a very smart way to exploit this new ultra-wide-angle camera, even if you do not use it directly in the camera yourself. And this function probably explains why Apple did not opt ​​for a telephoto lens with a higher zoom level on its new iPhones.