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This is Big: Halide for iPad
Meet Halide for iPad. An all-new app for the big screen. An interface made from scratch for iPad, and tons of little details you’re going to love.
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The M1 iPad Pro Cameras
It's a bit of a tradition here at Lux to take a deep dive into the latest iPhone camera hardware.
Let's take look at what's new with the M1 iPad Pro cameras. In taking a quick look at what's new, we'll share a discovery: your iPad has a superpower that not even Apple has told you about.
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Our Deep Dives into iPhone 12:
The iPhone 12 Pro Max: Real Pro Photography
At Halide HQ, we’ve been busily working away on a very deep, technical analysis of what’s new in iPhone 12 cameras this year. All four of ’em. On Friday, we got our hands on the final iPhones in this year’s line-up, the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
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The M1 iPad Pro Cameras
It's a bit of a tradition here at Lux to take a deep dive into the latest iPhone camera hardware.
Let's take look at what's new with the M1 iPad Pro cameras. In taking a quick look at what's new, we'll share a discovery: your iPad has a superpower that not even Apple has told you about.
The iPhone 12 Pro Max: Real Pro Photography
At Halide HQ, we’ve been busily working away on a very deep, technical analysis of what’s new in iPhone 12 cameras this year. All four of ’em. On Friday, we got our hands on the final iPhones in this year’s line-up, the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
iPhone 12 Pro Max Preview: The Camera Hardware Changes
It’s that time again. Every year, we take a deep dive into what is new in the iPhone camera. This year is special: Apple is introducing several new cameras in the iPhone 12 and a whole new sensor in the iPhone 12 Pro Max
In this post, we’ll take a quick look at what is new in the flagship of iPhone photography: the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
Pro. Camera. Action. Introducing Halide Mark II
After eighteen months of work, today we’re excited to announce a new photography app. It takes everything we’ve learned since launching the acclaimed manual photography app, Halide, and combines it with the technology developed for Spectre, Apple’s 2019’s iPhone App of the Year.
We call this new app Halide Mark II.
Halide 1.16: Better RAW, Three Ways
2020 is shaping up to be an eventful year, and we’ve been hard at work in 2020 on new features for Halide, Spectre, and beyond. Today we’re breaking our silence with our latest update: here’s Halide 1.16, a ‘groundwork’ update with several features that improve everything about RAW — it improves how Halide displays your RAW captures, how it saves RAW (and regular compressed) files, improves Halide’s file output, and makes your life a bit better. On top of that, we’ve improved Halide’s performance even more. Let’s start with a feature that merits its own description: Rescue. Rescue There’s no worse of feeling than going into your camera roll after a day of shooting, only to discover that perfect shot is disappeared. This is extremely rare, but not impossible: You taking a photo at 5% battery, and suddenly the phone shuts down. You get a phone call in the middle of a shoot Or, a bug in iOS or (believe it or not) Halide causes an issue Even it’s a one in a million chance, we cannot accept even the slightest chance of losing a photo. We treat data loss as a critical problem, and that’s why we built Rescue. In the past, when you took..
Spectre is Apple’s iPhone App of the Year
Well, this was a surprise. We were thrilled and honored to be contacted by Apple a few weeks ago, asking us to attend a special event in New York City with several other great developers to celebrate their picks for the Apps of the Year. The big bombshell was dropped when we were told that Spectre was chosen as the iPhone App of the Year. At the event, we were honored to shake the hands of some of the people at Apple that helped us achieve a personal dream: to make photography apps with an incredible level of polish and cutting edge technology. Thanks to the App Store, me and Ben have become a full-time two man company creating Halide and Spectre, something we could only dream about when we first launched Halide in 2017. Spectre is young — we launched the app in February, and were overwhelmed with the positive response. It was the top paid app in the United States for almost a full week. We’re honored and humbled with this incredible award from Apple. We’re not done with Spectre. We think there’s lots of exciting opportunities for computational photography left for us to explore. We have huge plans in..
Inside the iPhone 11 Camera, Part 1: A Completely New Camera
Last month, we took a look at what is new in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro’s camera hardware. You might’ve noticed two things from Apple’s iPhone announcement event and our blog post: the hardware changes seem fairly modest, with more attention directed at this generation’s software based processing. It’s true: The great advances in camera quality for these new iPhones are mostly to blame on advanced (and improved) software processing. I’ve taken some time to analyze the iPhone 11’s new image capture pipeline, and it looks like one of the greatest changes in iPhone cameras yet. What is a photo? That sounds like we’re off to a rather philosophical start, or delivering the punchline of an iPad photography commercial, but to highlight what makes the iPhone 11 camera unique we have to understand our expectations of photography. For a while now, you haven’t been the one taking your photos. That’s not a slight at you, dear reader: When your finger touches the shutter button, to reduce perceived latency, the iPhone grabs a photo it has already taken before you even touched the screen. This is done by starting a sort of rolling buffer of shots as soon as you open the Camera app...
Halide 1.14: Time to Get Switchy
Welcome to Halide 1.14, our first big update after a busy summer. We’ve spent the last few months preparing for iOS 13 and new hardware, and we’re very excited to walk you through what’s new. iPhone 11 and 11 Pro Support We released a small lightning update on iPhone 11 launch day with basic support for the new cameras. Now we’re ready to release our big update. We engineered new features that take advantage of the powerful new hardware in the latest and greatest iPhones, starting with… The Tactile Lens Switcher In the past we’ve had a simple button that swaps between your wide angle and telephoto cameras. It served us well, but it was time to revisit it for the three cameras on the iPhone 11 Pro. At a glance, our lens switcher looks the same as before; we kept it in the same spot so it doesn’t interfere with your viewfinder and is within easy reach. Keeping the viewfinder clear of any obstructions is one of our highest priorities. It works similarly, too, at first glance: just keep tapping to cycle between 1x, 2x, and 0.5x sizes. Unfortunately, switching cameras has a bit of a delay. If you’re composing..
iPhone 11 Pro Preview: The Camera Hardware Changes
Last year, before the iPhone XS hit the store shelves, we took a look at the changes in camera hardware on the iPhone XS compared to the iPhone X. We can do this thanks to Halide’s Technical Readout feature. Much like last year, some kind individuals have shared a few technical readouts with us from iPhone 11 Pro (and iPhone 11) units in the wild. A few words before we dig in: Why just the iPhone 11 Pro? The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro use the same kind of camera system apart from a key difference: the Pro gains a telephoto camera. All camera, sensor and performance specifications appear identical across the board, so there’s no need for us to compare the iPhone 11 to the iPhone XS. Performance-wise, though, the iPhone 11 looks to be a much better camera than the iPhone XS. These are just the hardware specs Every year, cameras including those in your iPhone become far more powerful thanks to both hardware changes and accompanying software processing. Incremental hardware improvements enable cool new features, but the real magic is increasingly in the software. We’ll follow up with a look at the work that is being done to..
Halide: Our Contest Results
We’ve had an incredible amount of submissions to our contest! While we already got a steady stream of excellent photos tagged with #ShotWithHalide on Instagram and Twitter, the absolute deluge of stellar shots we got during the contest period was overwhelming! It took us a bit of extra time to look through and select the winners, so pardon the delay. With that said, let’s get to our winners! First place The grand winner of the contest is Travis Ross. This photo captures everything that makes a great photo: emotion, movement, composition. In this absolute chaos, Travis used Halide to snap a photo worth framing. That won him a fantastic Leica Q2 camera. It should be able to cover any cases in which an iPhone and Halide just doesn’t quite cut it! Second place Our second place winner, Tomás Francisco Lemos, has this spectacular Spectre shot taking second place: Winning a Polaroid Classics OneStep+, to take even more great photos — but now developed as Polaroids! Third place Coming in in third place, Jordan Duke’s Halide capture struck us with the power of, well, a lightning strike: Jordan will get Studio Neat goodies including a Glif tripod mount for iPhone, a notebook and a wireless charging base. Score! The rest..
Halide: Year Two
Time flies: today marks the two year anniversary of Halide. It’s kind of wild to think that just two years ago, we were sitting behind our laptops ready to launch our camera app without knowing if it would be well-received. We knew that it was something that worked well for us, and if others found it pleasant to use, we’d consider it a success. Now, Halide is by far one of the most popular camera apps for iPhone. Tons of people use it to take photos every day. It has a sister app: Spectre. And we are now lucky enough to work on Halide and Spectre full-time and have huge plans for their future. So here we are, two years later! We did an update a year ago — so we thought we’d give a update on our last year. The Timeline We’re less than a week away from WWDC, and last year was no different. After the announcement of iOS 12, we spent Summer of 2018 working hard to prepare for the new OS. We released four small updates focused on fixing bugs and cleaning up code. We also started work on our second app, Spectre. We’re a two-person company, and we were both..
A Spectre Retrospective: Part 3 — Engineering
This is the final part of our Spectre retrospective. In this post, I’ll talk about the technology behind a computational long exposure, a few UI innovations, and our plans to share code between apps. The Computational Long Exposure We started building Spectre, among other things, to get around hardware limitations. Most iPhones can expose an image for a maximum of 1/3rd of a second, and only the latest iPhones (XS and XR) support a maximum exposure time of one second. That’s a far cry from the several seconds you need for an interesting long exposure. Why does Apple cap the hardware at one second? While it has never publicly commented on this, the longer a sensor is active, the more heat it generates. A large DSLR has plenty of space to dissipate heat while the compact, airtight body of an iPhone is another story. Heat increases sensor noise, and more importantly, it can damage components in your iPhone. It’s true other smartphones support several second exposures. They use a different set of components in a different configuration that dissipates heat in a different way. (It’s also possible those phone markers are A-OK with the stress on the components.) Every design is about tradeoffs...
A Spectre Retrospective – Part 2: Design
One month ago we launched Spectre, our new long-exposure photography app. It was very well-received — I was so grateful to see not just enthusiastic responses about the capabilities of the app and the stunning shots people have taken with it, but also many delighted comments at the work we put into making its design special. Spectre — if you’re not familiar — is an app that lets you take long exposures: photos that previously required a bulky setup of a big camera, a tripod, filters, and more. Spectre gets around all this with computational photography. It takes hundreds of photos and combines them in real time. It uses computer vision to correct for handheld shots, so there’s usually no need for a tripod. Coming from traditional long exposure photography, the Spectre experience is game-changing. Just hold the phone steady and tap: This isn’t the first camera app I’ve designed: I previously wrote about the design of Halide, an our first app, which gives people more control over their iPhone camera. But Spectre is an entirely different beast, with its own serious design challenge: hiding the complexity behind all that technology. We really wanted to enable users to just take photos without fiddling..
A Spectre Retrospective — Part 1: Build a Feature or An App?
This is the first in a three part series about launching Spectre. In Part 1, we’ll debate adding a feature to an existing app vs an launching an entirely new one. In part 2, Sebastiaan will dive into the design process of the app. In part 3, I’ll discuss the technical challenges we faced building Spectre. Early Origins In May of 2017, we launched Halide, our camera app for advanced photographers. From the day we launched, we’d get requests for longer exposures. Background for Non-Photographers: Normally you capture a photo in a fraction of a second. However, there are practical or artistic reasons to capture photos over seconds or even minutes. Long exposures can remove crowds from a busy location, make water look beautiful, and more. Halide lets you to choose any exposure length your iPhone hardware supports. Most iPhones allow a maximum of one-third of a second, but the latest iPhones allow up to one second. That’s far from the several seconds required for the effect you see above. We could get past this one second limit by combining multiple exposures in software, but we knew this was a non-trivial feature. We decided to put it on the back-burner and focus on..
Beyond Spectre 1.0
Last month we launched Spectre, our first foray into computational photography. We’re incredibly humbled by the response and amazed by your images. Here are a few favorites we found tagged with #SpectreShot on Twitter and Instagram. Now that that things have settled, we’d like to recap how things went, what we’ve been up to, and highlight the big updates in Spectre 1.1. The Launch To say our launch was a success would be an understatement. On day 1, Spectre instantly rose to the first place in the App Store. We had features on The Verge, The Daily Mail, Lonely Planet, Macstories, CNet, Macrumors, 9to5Mac, Uncrate and more. It was a bit too much success: We rose up the charts so fast that one of Apple’s fraud detection systems kicked in. For a half a day, we were missing from the charts. Yikes! We were panicking and got in touch with Apple. Fortunately, after Apple’s fine people verified we weren’t gaming the system, we were back at #1, where we stuck it out for almost a whole week. In our first day, we went from less than a hundred beta testers to tens of thousands of paying customers. Overall, things went great. But the reviews were polarizing. Note: We’re focusing on US and UK ratings, since..
Introducing Spectre
We’re excited to announce Spectre, our second app for iPhone. Spectre is a computational shutter for iPhone that allows everyone to take brilliant long exposures. A regular photo captures only a fraction of a second. Taking a photo over several seconds — a long exposure—unlocks all sorts of practical and artistic effects. Make a bridge at rush hour look perfectly empty: You no longer have to get up at the crack of dawn to photograph busy tourist spots: Walk past colored lights to create a beautiful flow of color: And much more: play with light sticks and fireworks to create magical images. Turn highways into rivers of light, and water into a dreamlike painting. The only problem is that long exposures are kind of rocket science. You have to stabilize your camera with a tripod, take several shots to confirm a composition, guess the correct exposure over a long period of time, and hope for the best. Spectre solves all of that, with the help of machine learning and computer vision. The Computational Shutter A traditional shutter takes a single photo over a long period of time, collecting light to create a singular final image. Spectre reimagines long exposures: its intelligent shutter..
Halide 1.12: Smarter Than Ever
Today we’re releasing Halide 1.12, which features two great enhancements. An RGB Histogram to Shoot Perfect Roses Ever taken a photo of roses that look muddled and washed out? That’s because the photo is technically well-exposed, but one of the color channels is clipping. Take this photo: Histograms can be very helpful to show us if we’re exposing correctly. Put simply, a histogram makes a graph of where most of the color values in your image are. This is a regular brightness histogram. It tells us that everything is OK: the left and right bars are small, which means there is no highlight or shadow information being lost. But if we tap the histogram in Halide 1.12, we switch to our new RGB histogram, which reveals we’re losing red data: Note the bar on the far right side of the image (which is where all the highlights are). That means we’re losing some color data, which is exactly what we need to faithfully photograph the beauty of vivid red roses. Armed with this knowledge, we can now under-expose our photo… With all the important reds preserved, we edit: The difference is staggering. To help you take even better photos, we found this..
Happy Halide-Days
2018 has been an amazing year for us. In fact, it has been our best year yet. We have a lot to be grateful for, and we’re humbled by our enthusiastic and creative userbase. We’d like to close it out by giving something back. From today through December 26th, 10% of all our sales go to charity. We’ve selected three charities that mean a lot to us: we’ll split our donation between App Camp for Girls, the American Red Cross and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). There are no special links or anything complicated. Just buy or gift a copy of Halide, and a portion goes to charity. Halide will also on sale for the duration of this period. Thank you for your support, and here’s to an amazing 2019! – Ben & Sebastiaan
iPhone XR: A Deep Dive Into Depth
With the introduction of iPhone XR, every phone in Apple’s lineup now supports depth capture. But the XR is unique: it’s the first iPhone to do it with a single lens. As we were starting to test and optimize Halide for it, we found both advantages and disadvantages. In this post we’ll take a look at three different ways iPhones generate depth data, what makes the iPhone XR so special, and show off Halide’s new 1.11 update, which enables you to do things with the iPhone XR that the regular camera app won’t. Depth Capture Method 1: Dual Camera Disparity Humans perceive depth with the help of two eyes. Our eyes may only a few inches apart, but our brains detect subtle differences between image. The greater difference, or disparity, the closer an object. The iPhone 7 Plus introduced a dual-camera system, which enables a similar way to construct depth. By taking two photos at the same time, each from a slightly different position, we can construct a disparity map. There’s a lot of guesswork involved when matches images. Add video noise and things get even rougher. A great deal of effort goes into filtering the data, additional post processing that guesses how to..
Halide 1.10: The Smartest RAW
Last week we dove into the differences between the iPhone X and XS cameras. We were surprised to find how differently the iPhone XS camera operates, and that the iPhone X delivered better RAW photos than the iPhone XS by default. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s an interesting deep dive into the latest cameras from Cupertino: Today, we’ve launched another update to Halide that brings a feature for iPhone XS that doesn’t just alleviate the problem, but brings the best RAW quality and sharpness we’ve ever seen on any iPhone. In this post we’ll talk about what we’re doing. A Brief Review of Exposure On an iPhone, the brightness of a photo is decided by two ‘knobs’: the shutter speed and ISO. As you fiddle with one of these knobs, the image gets brighter or darker. You can turn one knob up and another down to to keep the same brightness, but it creates a very different look. Slow down the shutter speed and you end up with motion blur: Turn up the ISO and you end up with noisier images. Apple knows that most people shoot photos with their phone in their hand, so they’ve always kept the..
iPhone XS: Why It’s A Whole New Camera
Last week we detailed the camera hardware changes of the iPhone XS vs. the iPhone X, and I wondered why Apple’s keynote focused on changes in camera software rather than the new hardware. After testing the iPhone XS cameras for the last week, I get it. The iPhone XS doesn’t just have a bigger sensor: It has a whole new camera — and the biggest change is its reliance on computational photography. It’s A Smart Thing Apple is smart. They see diminishing returns cramming more and more electronics in a fingernail-sized sensor. Photographic technology is the science of capturing light, which is limited by optics and physics. The only way to circumvent the laws of physics is with something known as ‘computational photography’. With the powerful chips in modern iPhones, Apple can take a whole bunch of photos—some of them before you even pressed the shutter—and merge them into one perfect shot. An iPhone XS will over- and underexpose the shot, get fast shots to freeze motion and retain sharpness across the frame and grab every best part of all these frames to create one image. That’s what you get out of the iPhone XS camera, and that’s what makes it..
iPhone XS vs. iPhone X — The Camera Hardware Changes
We released Halide 1.9 on Monday, with a powerful new feature called Technical Readout. Reviewers with advance access to the iPhone XS have been kind enough to share these readouts with us, detailing several camera hardware specs. After some analysis, we can now give you an overview of what’s new in the iPhone XS camera hardware and its technical capabilities beyond what Apple stated at their keynote. Note that these are the hardware specs — Apple focused strongly on software enhancements like Smart HDR and the new Portrait mode, which are not covered by the technical specifications. Skip to the end for the comparison table. What’s new? Redesigned wide-angle lens The lens on iPhone XS and XS Max that is used for most shots* has had an overhaul with a new 26mm equivalent focal length. This is a change of 2mm—shaved off the previous iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X which have 28mm wide-angle lenses. Rafael Zeier, a journalist and Halide and iPhone XS user was kind enough to share a comparison: A new sensor While we can’t check the size of the sensor with our Technical Readout, all data points to a new sensor in the iPhone XS. John Gruber confirmed that the new..
Halide 1.9: Bleeding Edge
It’s here: Halide 1.9, our best camera app. This release is the result of months of intense work, focused on bringing Halide to a whole new level of bleeding edge technology. From a comprehensive redesign of our render pipeline to integration with all the latest technologies, this our highest-tech release yet. iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR Support Halide 1.9 takes full advantage of the iPhone XS Max’ extra screen real estate, powerful new cameras, and the new wide-gamut screens of all new iPhones. Halide feels like it’s made for the XS Max with a tweaked landscape UI, extra-large last shot thumbnail and its entire user interface easily reachable with just one hand. With the biggest screen yet, we felt ergonomics were more important than ever, and we ensured Halide is a joy to use on this behemoth. Oh, and if you’re curious about all that exciting new camera tech packed in your brand new iPhone XS or XR, we have something for you… More on that in a second. iOS 12 Support Not lucky enough to have a new iPhone yet? Don’t fret: we’re on the front lines with supporting all the great new iOS 12 features. Portrait Matte iPhone..
Halide: One Year Later
Leading up to Halide’s launch one year ago, Sebastiaan and I had no idea what to expect. We’d spent ten months of nights and weekends on this thing, and you still couldn’t take a photo with the volume buttons— table stakes for a camera app. But we’d set a deadline for ourselves. It was time to ship and test our theories. Eek. We set out to build Halide after trying every major camera app and being left unsatisfied. We wanted an app for thoughtful, deliberate photography, not selfies. We wanted a tactile experience that felt like a high-end physical camera. We wanted the professional tools you’d find on a DSLR. We hoped others shared our experience. We hoped critics understood what we were going for, and would forgive a few missing features. We hoped the app economy wasn’t dead, and you could still make a few bucks. At the same time, we were launching another camera app in a crowded market. We were asking for an up-front payment when freemium is the norm. This wasn’t the App Store of 2008, so we were prepared for the worst. One year later we can say Halide has exceeded our wildest expectations. Let’s dive into what we..
Halide 1.8: Timing Is Everything
Right on the heels of our last huge update, we’re here to bring something entirely new to your iPhones. Halide 1.8 is here, and it’s a huge one. This major update packs an Apple Watch companion app, a new Self-Timer feature, a completely redesigned photo reviewer, lots of design tweaks, but also two new areas of focus for us: we worked to make big pushes in Accessibility and Privacy. Let’s dive in! New in Halide 1.8: Apple Watch Companion App The Apple Watch is an excellent companion to the iPhone, so it seemed natural to build an app to remotely frame shots, trigger Halide’s shutter and set timers. The Halide Apple Watch app is blazing fast and shows a realtime preview for easy shooting. To use the Apple Watch app, just launch Halide on your iPhone and then open the Halide Apple Watch app. New Self Timer For users without an Apple Watch, Halide now also lets you set a timer of 3, 10, or 30 seconds. When the timer is active, the shutter button stays depressed and shows a countdown in the icon and around the shutter button itself. Halide also uses the iPhone flash to show the progress of..
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Cookies
This year is turning into a wakeup call for privacy. First we learned about Cambridge Analytica. Now we know Facebook collected call and SMS history for years by abusing Android permissions. It almost feels like every week, we’re seeing another egregious data breach or privacy violation. Working on a camera app, we have a deep understanding of what’s stored on our phones. We think about privacy a lot, and we’re surprised when people grant access to their photo library without pause. Modern phones can analyze a thousand photos per minute. Combine your “Selfies” album with machine learning, and it’s trivial to figure out your age and gender. It bears repeating, this can be done on your phone. No need to upload photos. Just summarize the interesting details, and upload to the cloud in seconds. And once you grant an app access to your Photos, you really do give it access to all your photos. Here’s the thing: modern neural nets can recognize objects in real-time. Take a lot of photos of your dog? Ad companies can show you ads about dog food. Ever snap a photo of an awesome dinner? Ad companies can figure out your favorite food. The GPS coordinates stored in your photos can show your travel patterns, where..
Halide 1.7: In Depth
Between the iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, and X, over half of all iPhones sold come with dual cameras. With two cameras, killer apps like Portrait Mode become possible. At this rate, depth capture might one day be as standard of a feature to us as the camera flash. We built Halide as the very best camera for iPhones — heck, for any smartphone — and we always want Halide to be ahead of the curve. So today we’re launching Halide 1.7, a huge update that packs tons of new features and enhancements to make it the very best camera for depth. Here’s five new features that make Halide 1.7 the best camera for Depth Capture: I. Built-In Portrait Mode We now include Portrait Mode directly within Halide. We didn’t rush this one out: we spent a lot of time perfecting a great Portrait Mode experience and ensuring the results are spectacular. What makes Portrait Mode in Halide special? For one, zero waiting: you’ll notice Halide doesn’t ask you to change your composition or move around to get the effect to appear. We do this with a carefully considered portrait logic that balances control, speed and simplicity. If you pick a point-of-interest, we keep..
The Power of RAW on iPhone, Part 2: Editing RAW
This is the second in a series of posts on RAW photography on iPhone. I previously wrote about what RAW is by explaining a little on how cameras work, how you can use RAW, and what some key tradeoffs of using RAW are. New to this series? I suggest you start there. I’m the design half of the team that builds Halide, a camera app for iPhone. As a result, I take — and edit — a lot of photos on my iPhone. This guide will walk you through the basics of RAW editing and adjustment. Most of these pointers also apply to editing RAW files from other cameras, but some parts focus on iOS editing workflows and how to transfer your RAW files from your iPhone to your Mac or PC. Most of Halide’s (and other iOS RAW camera apps’) RAW shots come out fairly ‘flat’, as they are basically designed to give you maximum editing freedom instead of looking punchy right out of the camera. My workflow is typically to edit them a bit and share them: Editing RAW files can be done right on your iPhone, or on your Mac or PC. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves: the editing..
5 Tips for shooting great iPhone photos on New Year’s Eve
New Year’s Eve is upon us again, and it’s always nice to get the first moments of the new year captured. While I finish my article and video about RAW editing on iPhone to follow up my last RAW on iPhone article, I figured I’d share my 5 tips to make your shots of the last night of the year shine by shooting with Halide: 1. Underexpose for fireworks and sparklers Pushing your exposure down a bit helps your camera not blow out the colors and highlights of the bright fireworks and sparklers. If you’re fairly close to them — that is, they take up about half of your screen — you should push down about 0.5 to 1 EV. Not only do you get more fireworks details, you will also ‘freeze’ the motion better and get a sharper shot, as the shutter speed will be shorter! With sparklers, the background is darker and the sparkler looks brighter: The above is a great shot by Halide user Vainer91 showcasing some good sparkler-snapping. In Halide, just swipe down slightly on the viewfinder to compensate your exposure down a bit. Voilà: sharper fireworks shots. 2. Play with manual focus We all love bokeh, and fireworks bokeh are pretty spectacular...
Halide 1.6: The Speed Update
Today’s Halide update focuses on speed. We now snap photos 2–4× faster, added shortcuts, and taken the guesswork out of files and formats to make you more efficient. For iPhone X users, we’ve also made some minor ergonomics improvements, now that we’ve had the device in our hands for a month. Lock Screen and 3D Shortcuts By popular demand, we’ve added a lock screen widget to launch Halide with one tap. We’ve also added 3D shortcuts to launch the app in either Manual or Auto mode. Even snappier snapping! Faster Capture Halide now captures your shot between two to four times faster. You read that right: up to four times faster. Everything feels a lot more responsive, as we’ve cut down the time between hitting the capture button and the new photo appearing. Now you immediately know when you’ve captured the perfect shot. RAW Without Compromise When you open a RAW image in an app that can’t read RAW, the image looks blurry. We can’t fix those apps, but we’re improving the situation. Apps that aren’t compatible will now fall-back to a processed image we save alongside your RAW. A few editing apps won’t find the RAW photo when saving a..
How to Design for iPhone X (without an iPhone X)
Our camera app, Halide, was just weeks old when the first leaks of the iPhone X surfaced. We didn’t know what the device was called, let alone exactly how it would impact our user interface — but we nevertheless decided to start working on what a camera app for it could look like. Now, a month after the release of iPhone X, I want to show you how we designed and released an app redesigned for iPhone X, without ever even having held one. What we knew There were a few assumptions we made about the iPhone X (which still apply today!) it has a significantly taller screen than the regular iPhone the bottom area of the screen is occupied by a system navigation area it packs a dual camera into a smaller package than the Plus iPhones that came before These assumptions would significantly affect our UI design. Fortunately, Ben built Halide with auto-layout, so it could theoretically automatically scale to fit a larger screen. We could be ready for the new iPhone with as little as a few tweaks! But these kind of form factor changes don’t come around often. We thought there was a better way to approach it. Design..
The Power of RAW on iPhone, Part 1: Shooting RAW
I take a lot of photos. Usually I pack either a Sony A7R2 or a Leica M—two cameras with massive sensors and brilliant lenses. But lately, I’ve been shooting exclusively with the iPhone X, and have found it absolutely excellent. I am the design half of the team that makes the iPhone app Halide, which is a camera app with manual controls and, most importantly, RAW capture. RAW is a file format that holds an incredible amount of information. We’ll get into the details later, but first let’s show what you can do with it. RAW affords you editing freedom. Absolute freedom to change the colors and white balance of a photo, or recover too-bright highlights and too-dark shadows. However, as awesome as RAW is, it’s important to know RAW isn’t a magic “enhance” button. Some of our users sometimes reach out with confusion about their RAW images looking worse than a regular capture from the stock camera app. It’s helpful to understand how a RAW file is fundamentally different than JPEG, to fully understand the tradeoffs. So What’s a RAW file? Think of the process of taking a photo as three steps: 1. A sensor captures light 2. Software translates..
Halide 1.5: A camera app made for iPhone X
With the launch of the iPhone X, we’re proud to announce the release of Halide 1.5. Halide 1.5 is a huge update which features a new camera UI, designed from scratch for iPhone X. It was clear to us that the iPhone X is a huge step in the evolution of the iPhone. We could simply adapt our previous Halide interface to scale correctly to the new, bigger screen, but we wanted to create a camera experience that was not only unique to this new device, but also took advantage of its strengths. It presented unique challenges for ergonomics (it’s a very tall screen!) and layout. For Halide for iPhone X, all of the camera controls now sit within thumb’s reach, letting you easily shoot with just one hand. Beyond your hand’s reach, we are still using every pixel of the new edge-to-edge screen, including the upper corners. With the extra vertical space on iPhone X, we were also able to design the camera UI so that nothing obstructs the viewfinder, giving you a uniquely clear look at your subject. Of course, it goes beyond just the camera: every other screen in Halide was designed from scratch for the iPhone X..
Halide 1.2: Updated In Depth
We’re excited to roll out the latest version of Halide: Halide 1.2, our second major update, and also the first to take advantage of iOS 11! We’ve added several features, fixed some bugs and made Halide even snappier*. Here’s what’s new: Depth Mode The first thing you’ll notice is depth support on iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 8 Plus, with support for the upcoming iPhone X as well. Tap “Depth” in the focus bar to activate it. A sonar-like depth effect shows when it is active. Any shot you take captures the depth data in a scene. In the photo reviewer tap the Depth button to see the depth-map — or force-touch for a quick preview. Due to the way capturing depth on iOS works, you can’t capture RAW or use manual settings in Depth mode. You can still tap to focus and expose, and swipe up and down to change bias. Don’t worry: we grey out any controls you can’t use while Depth is active so it’s clear what you can and can’t do. Miss the zero-compromises quality of RAW? You can also tap the “MAX” button, and we’ll save your image at the highest quality. Halide isn’t focused..
Halide 1.1: Better, Faster, Stronger
After spending the summer seeing people use Halide in the real world we’re excited to bring our first large update. Halide 1.1 focuses on user feedback and continuing to polish the user experience. These are the highlights! Volume Button Support You can now use the volume buttons on your iPhone, similar to built-in camera app. This was the number one request from users. Sebastiaan gave it a field test diving without an underwater case, and here are the unedited results: Focus Peaking v2 We’ve overhauled our focus peaking, inside and out. You first thing you’ll notice is our switch to green, which stands out best in most real world situation. Under the hood, our new algorithm has better results and uses fewer resources. It now works on the iPhone 5S, and people on newer devices will appreciate the 30% drop in power consumption. Faster Capture When you cold-launch a RAW camera app and tap the capture button, it may take over a second to respond. This is because the OS waits until the first RAW capture to allocate the large buffers required. Subsequent captures are faster, but that’s still a poor experience. We cut the time between tapping shutter button and capturing..
One Weird Trick to Lose Size
Popular social networking apps are over 400 megs. With weekly releases, over one year you’ll download twenty gigs of data. Since we launched Halide, the most unexpected compliment we’ve heard is about its size. At 11 megs, we’ll push less data in one year than a social network pushes in a single update. “So you aren’t using Swift,” asked a friend. After all, Swift bundles its standard libraries into your app, bloating its size. Halide is almost entirely Swift. How did we do it? Let’s start with the technical bits. A lot of this is a review of QA1795, but it’s important. Measure, Don’t Guess Export a build from Xcode. Choose “Save for Ad Hoc deployment.” Assuming your app supports app thinning (which it really should at this point), choose “Export for Specific Devices.” Make sure “Rebuild from bitcode” is checked. Not only do you get a final representation of your package size, but you also get an App Thinning Report. Inspect your app package to find the biggest offenders. Use Asset Catalogs Keep your assets in asset catalogs. When you upload your app, Apple will slice it up into device-specific versions, so devices with 2x screens don’t get 3x assets, and vice versa. Run PNG-crush..
Introducing Halide
We’re incredibly excited to launch Halide, a new take on iPhone photography. Smartphone cameras have improved massively over the years, but the shooting experience hasn’t. The built-in camera app is a little too simple, while advanced apps feel like an airplane cockpit. We needed an elegant app for deliberate and thoughtful photography, so we built Halide. Halide’s beautiful design keeps everything important within reach. Its intuitive gestures become muscle-memory over time — like dials on a camera. Button layout is customizable, to fit your individual style. We think it’s a tactile, connected experience that feels like holding an old-fashioned camera. By default, Halide shoots in a smart automatic mode, but one tap toggles manual. Dive into the details like ISO, shutter speed, and white balance. Halide packs powerful tools you’d expect from professional equipment, such as focus peaking, a detailed histogram, adaptive level grid and RAW support. Half of photography is curation, so we built a triage workflow that’s fast and fun. Flick through recently captured shots and swipe right to favorite, left to delete. It’s fluid to pop in-and-out of the reviewer, so you can check your work in the middle of a session without breaking the flow. Lots of little..
