Every year when Apple launches a new iPhone, it proudly boasts of just how powerful an ISP it ships with. Yet, the company never added its single-camera Portrait mode solution as seen on the iPhone XR to its older yet powerful devices like the iPhone 8, iPhone 7. A new jailbreak tweak named PortraitXI from developer Foxfortmobile aims to do just that.

PortraitXI is compatible with all jailbroken iPhones running iOS 11 – iOS 12.2 featuring an A9 chip with at least 2GB RAM. This means that all iPhones starting from the iPhone 6s and higher are supported by this jailbreak tweak.

Unlike the Portrait effect on the iPhone XR which only works on humans, the depth effect of PortraitXI works on objects and pets as well. The developer does warn that the depth effect works best on humans. One can also tweak the portrait lighting effect after taking a portrait photo.

PortraitXI is also useful for users who own an iPhone with a dual-camera setup. This is because while Apple forces one to use the telephoto sensor to take Portrait photos, PortraitXI allows users to take portrait photos from the primary wide-angle shooter. The resulting photos might not have the same focal length as a typical portrait photo but the overall image quality would be noticeably better.

Another advantage of PortraitXI is that it supports Portrait mode for the front selfie camera as well. While the likes of the iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 8 Plus feature Portrait mode, the feature is only present for the rear camera.

The only catch with PortraitXI is that it does not offer a live preview of the depth effect as you would get on iPhones that natively support the feature.

You can find some sample portrait images taken from PortraitXI in this Imgur album.

PortraitXI is a paid jailbreak tweak ($4.99) that is available on the Packix repo.

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