What is the Apple Photonic Engine?

The Photonic Engine is an image processing system that launched on the iPhone 14 series to significantly improve low-light iPhone photography. With the Photonic Engine, Apple seeks to deliver brighter colors and detailed textures in situations without much light.

To improve the low light performance of the iPhone camera, the Deep Fusion algorithm gets to work earlier in the image capture process. With Deep Fusion, Apple's Photonic Engine performs computational photography using machine learning, hardware, and software to keep the best pixels across several different exposures.

The Photonic Engine works in tandem with other components to collect more light from a scene, such as the upgraded 48 megapixel image sensor making its debut on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.