The iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max have great cameras, some of the best you can buy in a phone. They also have a special new feature that Apple has never offered before: a macro mode that lets you take extreme close-ups just two centimeters away! – complex things that you can barely see with the naked eye. Your pet’s incredibly fine furleaf veins and all the sub-pixels on your computer monitor screen are now at hand.
But Apple doesn’t give you a macro mode button by itself — it’s automatic. When you bring the phone within 10cm of an object it automatically switches to the ultra-wide lens, which some users found jarring enough that Apple now lets you turn off auto macro switching in iOS 15.1.
But if you do that and then manually switch to the ultra-wide lens, you won’t be that close by default. Here is a full resolution example:
So how do you actually use macro mode?
How to use macro mode of iPhone 13 Pro?
Again, automatic. You don’t need to look for a button, you just need to get close. Open the Camera app and get very, very close to what you want to photograph – so close that it blurs. Then slowly pull back until it looks crunchy. If you want to be extra sure, pull back just enough for the autofocus (yellow square) to kick in.
Stand incredibly still at this distance (two hands are good, supported is better, a tripod is probably best!) and get the shot. If you’re shooting handheld, you may want to take a few more shots so you can pick the clearest – any amount of movement at this distance can cause blur.
This much! Unless of course you have turned off the auto macro mode of the phone.
How to turn off (and on) iPhone 13 Pro auto lens switching
Hate when your iPhone 13 Pro or Pro Max automatically moves away from the (very good) regular lens when you get too close? You can now turn it on or off as of iOS 15.1.
Hungry Settings application, go Camerathen scroll all the way to find Auto Macro. Turn this off to disable swapping.
How to take macro photos manually with iPhone 13 Pro?
Hopefully Apple will add a manual button soon, where you can manually jump to the ultra-wide camera by tapping “0.5” or the zoom lens (if it’s not too dark) by tapping “3”. By the way, you can still take macro photos with Auto Macro off – they just won’t be that close.
Switch to your ultra-wide lens and follow the same instructions as before: approach, retreat, stay still. Autofocus will still engage, but not as close as in auto macro mode.
But you can trick the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max into giving you an almost equally good result if you just zoom in on yourself. Apple tells Boundary that the auto macro mode effectively crops 3 megapixels from the 12 megapixel image and then once again upscaled to 12 megapixels with a bit of additional processing on top. So if you want to simulate the same jump from a 13mm equivalent field of view to a 26mm equivalent field of view, Hold down the 0.5x button and drag the zoom wheel to approximately 0.9x magnification.
Here are three photos of a bamboo coaster I bought in wood-burned letters in Maui, shot as close as I could. The first is an automatic macro shot, the second is a 0.5x shot that I cropped to roughly 0.9x on my Windows PC, and the third is at 0.9x magnification on the iPhone itself. They’re almost the same, right? I think the automacro looks sharpest when Apple’s rendering is on top, but none of them are great and they’re all good.
So now you know. If you take particularly epic macro shots with a phone, reach me on twitter?
