Do those photo editing packages have buttons for things like portrait-mode to automatically black out the background?

There are equivalents - mostly plugins, but you can do it natively in later versions of Photoshop - but they're not used much. Why not? Because you can do that properly when you shoot the image instead of faking it later.

> Because you can do that properly when you shoot the image instead of faking it later.

Are you saying you can carry a black sheet with you everywhere or that the DSLR can replace the background dynamically when you shoot?

It's not at all difficult to drop a background out to black if that's what you want to do. But that's not what "portrait mode" means to most people - that would be more about shallow depth of field and lighting emphasis - and you mentioned nothing about background swaps in your original comment. (By the way, background swaps were something I could do with film and proper shooting. Masks are easy to make if you're shooting with them in mind, whether they're layer masks in software or litho masks in the darkroom. We weren't exactly snapping with our Brownies and sending things to the drugstore back in the old days either, you know.)

I was specifically talking about computational effects like the one Apple calls portrait mode that can black out the background. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about that.

My whole point in this thread was that nobody in the big body camera world seems to be doing much with computation or multiple sensors. I think it's astonishing what Apple, Google, and Sony have done with small lenses and sensors and would be interested to see what they could do with big lenses and sensors.