iPhone 17 Pro Max mockup in your browser

Why capture on the big phone first

Of the iPhones drawn here, the Pro Max gives you the most pixels to work with: 1320 × 2868 at 3x. An image of that size fills the glass edge to edge with no resampling, and shrinking it for a smaller phone later costs nothing, whereas stretching a small capture upward only smears it. Apple reasons the same way in App Store Connect, where you supply the largest required size and it derives the smaller ones, so plenty of teams shoot on this model first.

Around that glass we paint a black border of 3 pt and a metal edge of 2.2 pt. The body works out to 450.4 × 966.4 pt, and 455.2 × 966.4 pt once the side keys are counted. Export at 3x and you receive 1366 × 2899 px with nothing added around it. The edge is a simplified drawing with one soft highlight, deliberately not a copy of any official render, so it stays calm against a flat color or a gradient.

Keeping the height believable

Height is what sells a Pro Max, and it lives in the bars. The top safe area reserves 62 pt, the bottom reserves 34 pt, and the status strip occupies 54 pt. If your source image keeps those bands, viewers read a large phone. Crop them away and the frame starts to look like a shorter model.

Leave breathing room too. Eight to twelve percent of padding gives the shadow space and allows a tilt of a few degrees, which is plenty for a hero image. For a slide, a vertical clip or a thumbnail, export once at the final scale and place that file, rather than enlarging a small export afterwards.

Matching the finish to the backdrop

This model offers graphite, silver, sand, ember and deep blue. A dark body vanishes on a dark page, so set graphite against something light or saturated, and silver against a deep gradient. Each finish is a metal-style gradient with a bright rim line, as if soft light skimmed a real frame, yet every color in it is ours.