With the announcement of the iPhone 14, Apple hurled all sorts of terms into the world that you might not immediately know what to make of. One of those terms is the Photonic Engine. Basically, this is a continuation of Deep Fusion technology. But even then, you just have to know what that means.
Deep Fusion is a technology available since the iPhone 11. With this technology, Apple lets you take beautiful photos in the dark with your iPhone. The smartphone preserves some details in photos by shooting and merging thirteen images. The neural engine then turns them into a beautiful picture.
iPhone 14 with Photonic Engine
The Photonic Engine does basically the same thing, but better. The iPhone starts the aforementioned process earlier and now uses uncompressed images to do so. This should make details, colors and exposure come out much better when there is low light in your environment.
The Photonic Engine is doing its job (Image: Apple)
So does the iPhone 14 have some kind of enhanced HDR technology? Yes and no. The process Apple uses to take its photos is incredibly similar to the way photographers take high dynamic range photos. The difference between the two things is that the iPhone maker is thus paying attention to more than color and contrast alone.
Turning off Photonic Engine?
In addition, you also can’t simply say that this is some kind of evening mode for digital still cameras. Because again: Photonic Engine simply does too much for that. With a traditional night mode, you make images look brighter in the evening and night. Nothing more, nothing less.
Can you turn off the Photonic Engine on the iPhone 14? Well, you can’t even manually activate the mode yourself, let alone disable it. The iPhone’s camera decides for itself when it activates the mode. Apple wants the iPhone to be accessible; but because of that, sometimes the system has to make choices for you.
