iPhone 17 Pro - Pro Photographer First Impressions!

All right, today we have the new Cosmic Pumpkin Spice Orange iPhone 17 Pro, and this is my first impressions. The phone now has three 48 megapixel cameras, so let's see what we can get. Shooting with Clarissa. It's the weirdest way to transition to the start of this video, but let's get you in here, right in the sun, where it's boosted. I'm gonna put on some screen recording so we can see where we're at, because this phone has an entirely new camera UI. Maybe about right here. They've given us five camera options now, even though there's only three. Should we start with the ultra-wide? All right, here we go. Ooh, the wind flow. The hair flow, wind flow's not a word. The wind flow, the hair flow. We're gonna go one-time camera here. Love it. Maybe just step your foot out to where that crack is there. Can you believe I can see all the way to your head from there? Check out that crack. That's dope. Love it. Stay away, bee wasp. Yeah, I know, I know, I saw. So last year in the 16 Pro, we got an updated 48-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and in this 17 Pro, I'm pretty sure it's unchanged. So this also goes for the main camera, which is still that same 48-megapixel 1X camera, which is fine because I think it has a great sensor. Of course, the biggest update is to the telephoto camera, which is now 48 megapixels. It's a 4X, which is 100 millimeters. And the other big change is the new front selfie camera with that square sensor. We'll get to that later because there's a lot to show there. When it comes down to the design, it's definitely the biggest change since the iPhone 11. I hate it and I kind of love it, but it's got an aluminum frame now instead of titanium, which is gonna help with heat dissipation. It's also a unibody design, which should make it stronger, but we'll see with these torture tests on YouTube if that's true. And the last biggest change is that the screen can hit 3,000 nits, which is amazing. I'm gonna bring the exposure down to negative one because I feel like it's a little spicy. People always ask me, like, what's the trick to get better iPhone photos? Bring the exposure down. Tilt your head off and look down towards me a little more. Yeah, yep. And I'm gonna get full body. That's cool. Love that. Do you wanna look straight ahead though? Yeah. I'm gonna get more of a headshot here. Love that. Straight into camera now. Ooh, the hair flow, the wind flow. That's the 4X camera. So that's one of the big changes this year from the 16 Pro is that we went from a 5X camera to a 4X camera, but it's 48 megapixels, so we can now crop to eight times. It's like a sensor crop. All right, 8X camera. Nice. Yep. The natural shallow depth of field from this AX is nice. These look like portrait mode shots without being in portrait mode. Sick, good job. Those are all really cool. We should do a couple portrait mode shots even though I'll have a separate portrait mode video after, but close your eyes. Yep, that's nice. Love it. Those are awesome. So I did take a couple of portrait mode shots with the new 4X camera and it looks really great. Nice and sharp. It's doing a really good job with the haircut out, but I'll have a whole portrait mode video coming soon, so stay tuned for that. Now, if you wanna get the best image quality out of this phone, I've said this a million times, you gotta shoot Apple ProRAW. You're gonna be able to take advantage of that entire sensor when you're shooting the 1X, the 4X, and the ultrawide camera. You're gonna get 48 megapixels. It's taking all the tone mapping off so you get really nice RAW files to work with. And I've said this before ever since the iPhone 14 Pro, I think, you get a really nice image, 48 megapixels, nice and sharp, tons of detail. And of course, if we zoom in here on the new 4X camera with that new 48 megapixel sensor, you can see all the detail, how great the skin tones and texture looks. Now with iOS 26, this is an exclusive to the iPhone 17 Pro, but the UI is completely different for the camera now. Now at the bottom, you gotta swipe through the different modes. It's kind of annoying. And I'm not a huge fan of this layout, but it is how it is now, and this is what we're gonna have to deal with. But you can cycle through all your different settings now in this new menu. That part of it's kind of cool. It still has the camera control button so you can access all your stuff with a press or a double click and cycle through all your different settings. And that's a quick rundown on the new UI. All right, shout out to today's sponsor, and that's iBlazin, and this is their new Ares flip case. And this is for the iPhone 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max. And this is like strapping armor to your phone because it has full protection. It even has a tempered glass screen protector built into it. And it comes in a bunch of different color ways. I went with black because I feel like it looks the best with the cosmic orange. Plus Apple didn't make a black iPhone 17 Pro this year, so if you want black, you gotta get a black case. But first up, let's take a look at this kickstand. It's a zinc alloy, super solid. It works with both landscape and portrait. It's perfect for video calls, watching content, or just popping it up on your desk. Now, obviously, protection matters. It's drop tested up to 20 feet. It's got raised edges, so you're not gonna have to worry about damaging your screen if it hits face down on the ground. And if you're the type of person that doesn't baby your phone, this is kind of the perfect case. You can throw it around. It's gonna be protected. And as I mentioned, it's got that 9H tempered glass screen protector on the front, so it's got you covered. This also has built-in magnets for MagSafe. They're super strong. And the cool thing is this works with Apple's new Qi 2.2, so you can actually get up to 25 watts of wireless charging through the case. And these magnets are super strong. Like, if you're stuck on a power bank like that, locks into place, not coming off. And it has kind of a grippy texture to the back, so anything that's MagSafe will stick nicely. If you want a super rugged case, make sure to check out the link in the description. Thanks to iBlazin' for sponsoring this video. Let's get back to it. All right, so this year, one of the biggest changes they made was to the selfie camera. So the front-facing camera is now 18 megapixels, but what makes it unique is that it's a square sensor. So now you can actually hold the phone this way. You can get a vertical shot, or you could also get a horizontal shot because they just crop it in-camera. Oh, did you see that? How it automatically went wider when we were both in the frame? You didn't do anything? No. What? Now, if we had three people in frame, like this, it's not on auto-rotate. It was on auto-zoom. There we go. So let's try that again. Okay, so it's just me. Okay, so it's just you. And then I'll get in it. Watch, it goes a little wider. When it lost you, there we go. So now it can get all of us in the frame. You needed your fat face to take most of the frame off. Anyway, that's pretty cool. So if you want to take some selfies there with it, you can do that. Do you see how it goes wider too? So you can do wider, and then if you hit the other one, it'll go horizontal. And then you don't have to change the phone orientation. So the thought process behind it is that your gaze doesn't look off this way. You're kind of looking right at the front of the screen. So, you know, if you've ever had to look at the camera and you're holding it horizontal, your eyes are always kind of looking off a bit. No, that's good. As long as you got some good ones in there. Because this is something we don't really focus on. I don't really spend much time on the selfie camera because it never changes. And the cool thing is you can also record video horizontal as well. So we're recording video right now with the front facing camera. This is actually an Apple log. Oh, and it has a crazy auto-focus, like really good minimum focus distance, which is, I don't know, it's kind of useful for some people. Like if you're trying to pick a bug out of your eyebrow, so you can record horizontal 4K and then you can go like that and still film a 4K vertical without having to rotate the phone. So one of the biggest features they added this year was ProRes RAW. Now this won't matter to most people, but this is really cool for people that want to shoot some high quality video. You also have to use an external drive like this Lexar one I'm using here. And you can only do it with the Final Cut camera app or the Blackmagic camera app. ♪ Try to take it, I'm getting it back. ♪ ♪ And if they hit me, they gotta get taxed. ♪ ♪ I make it hit after hit after hit. ♪ ♪ And I promise you, boy, every one of them slap. ♪ ♪ Hop on a verse and I body it quick. ♪ ♪ They never work and it's why we don't mix. ♪ ♪ I don't got time for the fake. ♪ ♪ And I swear that I'll always say real. ♪ ♪ Something they never did. ♪ All right, so I have some ProRes RAW loaded into DaVinci Resolve. And this is actually the first time I've even been able to use ProRes RAW inside of Resolve because it just got an update. And I don't know if that has anything to do with the iPhone 17 Pro, but I will do a full rundown, a full video on ProRes RAW later. This is just a quick show you how it works. Now, one thing you need to know is it has no stabilization. It turns off all stabilization. So everything kind of has like a shaky look to it. I had to do a little bit of stabilization and post on some of the shots, but this is just all handheld. And so if you've never used RAW footage before, this is kind of just a quick rundown. We're going to go to the color tab here. And when you bring in most RAW clips here, you get this panel here and you can see here, we can go to clip. And then from here, you can actually change the ISO. So just like you could on any RAW footage from any camera, I'm going to leave it at 50 because that's what I shot it at. So down here, this is really cool. You kind of have a color transform. So you have the new Apple Log 2, you could do Blackmagic Design, you could do Fuji, Nikon, Panasonic, S-Log. I actually really like how the Blackmagic Design looks. We're going to go Gen 5. You can see it kind of darkens it up a little bit. The other cool thing is you can play with your white balance here after the fact. So if we want to change that before we make any adjustments, we can do that. Now I'm going to make a new node here. So we're not going to get too crazy here. I'll make a video about ProRes RAW on the new iPhone 17 Pro in a few days. I'm just going to throw a quick LUT on it. We're going to go down to the Blackmagic LUTs and I'm going to go Gen 5, film the video and boom. Right out the gate, that looks really good. And what most people would say is cinematic. Now the shadows are pretty much gone. You can see here, there's no shadow detail, but the cool thing about RAW is you have tons of shadow detail. So we can pull the shadows back up. You can see all those tires come back up. And what's crazy is there's hardly even any noise. Like most RAW, you would see tons of noise. There's a little bit of noise, like a little bit of color noise there, but it's not that bad and that's really good. Now, obviously we were only shooting at 50 ISO. So that could also be one of the reasons why there's not a lot of noise. Now we don't want to bring back that much shadow. We just want to, I just wanted to show that you could do that. I would leave it around here. So you have a little bit of shadow detail, but it's still nice and falling off into darkness. Now, if we look at the highlights, I wasn't really blown out too much on her face. It's actually doing a really good job. Nothing is blown out here. We could bump the entire exposure up if we wanted to, and I could bring down the gamma just a little bit. And then again, we can play with the highlights and shadows here. I'm not going to do too much, but if I bring those highlights down, all that skin texture detail is still in there. And this looks incredible. Now I will say, I don't know if this looks that much better than what you would get from just shooting Apple log, but it's pretty cool that we have raw capabilities in this. And again, it's kind of shaky because you don't have any stabilization. So you're going to want to rig this up or put it on a gimbal. Now, another issue I had with the Final Cut camera app, as well as the Blackmagic app, is the autofocus didn't work too well. Now, sometimes it didn't even work at all. And I don't know if it's just a bug or a glitch right now. I'm not going to say that it's an issue and that you won't have autofocus in ProRes RAW, but right now it is a problem. And I haven't seen anyone mention that. One thing I am noticing though is it's not overheating and the screen is still staying at full brightness. Oh, you got a car behind you. So last year in the iPhone 16 Pro, they added these new photographic styles, which is kind of like film presets like you get in a Fuji. And so they added one new one this year called Bright. And we'll take a look at that. I'll show you what photographic styles is anyway. If you don't know, you can kind of change the tone and the tint of things. There's 16 styles now. I included standard. So there's 15 including standard. So typically I shoot in standard just because we don't want to change it up too much. We just want to keep it standard straight out of camera, but let's try this new Bright profile. Doesn't look much different than standard to be honest, but the cool thing is you can adjust how much tint you have, the undertones, the highlights, the exposure. So you can just adjust this here and get kind of a different look. So I'm going to kind of put it back in the middle here. Love it. Still, I think my favorite profile is probably Amber. Nice. I know that under Amber, this is kind of my favorite profile because it kind of warms things up a bit. Love it. Looking at that direction. Sick. Yeah, this is my favorite color profile, Amber. I love the tones. It just kind of warms it up a bit. All right, so we've been shooting with this for a while now and I got some thoughts. The main one would be, I wish that the ultra wide camera got a new sensor. I feel like obviously going to 48 megapixels last year on the 16 Pro was nice, but they didn't seem to change it on this. And I find that either the lens is not able to resolve 48 megapixels or what, but if you compare it to like a 12 megapixel image, there's not that much difference. But it is nice to see that they updated the telephoto camera. So now it's got a nice 48 megapixel sensor in it. And I'm okay with the 4X zoom. Sometimes 5X is more than I need. And then now you have the choice of going four or eight, which is really good. But yeah, outside of that, the screen's nice and bright. We love the orange colorway. Now, obviously they added the vapor chamber cooling to this, which helps with the heating, the overheating. And so while I was screen recording with the camera open and the screen set to max brightness, I did notice that it would dim down a couple of times. Now I have it set to auto brightness and that's the only way that you're going to get the max nits out of it when you're in the sun. So that could be why the screen was dimming, but yeah, it would be nice if that didn't happen. Outside of that, obviously the phone performed awesome. We got some great shots and yeah, that's it for this video. Stay tuned for more. We've got the portrait mode video coming up and I'm going to do a whole video on ProRes RAW as well. So make sure to get subscribed. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you dislike this video, give it a thumbs down twice. Don't forget to hit that notification bell. See you guys in the next one. Oh, and thanks to Clarissa.