The iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max have excellent cameras, some of the best you can buy in a phone. They also have an exclusive new feature that Apple has never offered before:a macro mode that allows you to shoot extreme close-ups, just two centimeters away! – complex things that you can barely see with the naked eye. Your pet's impossibly fine fur, leaf veins and computer screen sub-pixels are now at your fingertips.
But Apple doesn't offer you a button macro mode itself – it is automatic. When you place the phone within 10cm of an object, it automatically switches to the ultra-wide lens, which some users found shocking enough that Apple now lets you turn off automatic macro switching in iOS 15.1.
But if you do that and then manually switch to the ultra-wide lens, you won't get as close by default. Here is a full resolution example:
Photo by Sean Hollister / I/O Means
Photo by Sean Hollister / I/O Means
So how do you actually use macro mode?
Again, this is automatic. You don't have to look for a pimple, you just need to get close to it. Open the Camera app and get very, very close to the thing you want to photograph, so close that it becomes blurry. Then back slowly until crispy. If you want to be safer, shoot just far enough for the autofocus (yellow square) to fire.
Stand incredibly still at this distance (two hands is fine, bracing is better, tripod is probably best!) and take the shot. If you're shooting handheld, you might want to take a few more so you can choose the clearest – at that distance any amount of movement can cause blur.
That's it! Unless you have disabled the phone's automatic macro mode, of course.
Hate how your iPhone 13 Pro or Pro Max automatically moves away from the normal (very good) lens when you get too close? You can now turn it on and off from iOS 15.1.
Open the Settings app, go to Camera , then scroll to the bottom find Auto Macro . Disable it to disable swap.
Hopefully Apple will add a manual button soon, similar to how you can manually switch to the ultra-wide camera by pressing "0.5" or the zoom lens by pressing "3" (unless it's too dark). Meanwhile, you can still take macro shots with Auto Macro turned off – they just won't get as close.
Switch to your ultra-wide lens and follow the same instructions as before:approach, retreat, stand still. Autofocus will still fire, but not as close as with auto macro mode.
But you can also trick the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max into giving you almost as good a result if you zoom in yourself. Apple tells Means I/O that its auto-macro mode effectively crops the 3-megapixel value from the 12-megapixel image, which is then upsampled back to 12-megapixel, with a bit of extra processing on top. So if you want to emulate the same jump from a 13mm equivalent field of view to a 26mm equivalent field of view, simply hold the 0.5x button and drag the zoom wheel up to magnification of approximately 0.9x.
Here are three photos of a bamboo coaster I picked up in Maui with wood-fired letters, taken as close as possible. The first is an automatic macro photo, the second a 0.5x photo that I cropped to around 0.9x on my Windows PC, and the third photo at 0.9x magnification on the iPhone itself. They're almost the same, right? I think the auto-macro looks the sharpest with Apple's processing, but none of them are great and all of them are fine.
So now you know. If you take particularly epic macro photos with a phone, hit me up on Twitter?
