Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/12/13/google-and-facebook-use-the-iphones-portrait-mode-for-fun-effects/
Apple isn’t possessive of Portrait mode, the iPhone photography feature for creating shots with blurred backgrounds; it allows third parties to integrate the capability into their iOS apps. Google and Facebook are the latest to do it, each in their own way.
You’re misusing the word ‘Bokeh’. It is not the actual out of focus effect when you have a shallow depth of field it is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced. Different lenses render the out of focus area in different ways and Bokeh is a ‘measure’ of this quality.
Thanks for noting this—it’s been something we need to research further, and I’ve needed an excuse to dive in. A quick lookup of the word in Apple’s dictionary and Google’s dictionary agrees with you, defining bokeh as
the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens.
(Both Apple’s dictionary and Google’s dictionary license their contents from OxfordDictionaries.com from Oxford University Press, which is a good source.)
Similarly, Wikipedia says:
bokeh (/ˈboʊkeɪ/ BOH-kay ;[1]Japanese: [boke]) is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image produced by a lens.[2][3][4] Bokeh has been defined as “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light”.
In general, Wikipedia isn’t itself a source, and one of the references in the definition points to the Dictionary of Photography and Digital Imaging. I don’t have a sense of how canonical that is.
However, Merriam-Webster defines bokeh as:
the blurred quality or effect seen in the out-of-focus portion of a photograph taken with a narrow depth of field
And American Heritage defines it as:
The effect of blurriness in the areas of an image that fall outside a photograph’s depth of field.
These last two are pretty clearly defining bokeh more the way Julio used it, rather than as a measure of the aesthetic quality of the blurriness.
So it may be that bokeh started out as a more strictly used word in the way you suggest but has subsequently become more loosely associated with the overall effect.
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