The makers of the Halide iPhone camera app write about iPhone photography, ProRAW, camera reviews, and interface design.
Commenters admire the team's articles on computational photography and cite the ProRAW explainer. A post on physical, textured UI drew praise during a UI redesign discussion.
I found this interesting as I'm someone who used to travel with at least one camera most of the time, but I've recently come back from a holiday where I used my iPhone 13 Pro as my only camera.
Overall I actually found it a great experience – I love having an ultra wide angle lens in my pocket and after a bit of time getting used to it, I find the 3x zoom a more useful focal length than the 2x zoom on my previous iPhone X – but I did find the over-processing (the "painterly" look) frustrating, and even more annoying is that it will often use the wide angle lens and upscale rather than using the 3x zoom (even with ProRAW enabled – see [1]).
I understand why the software makes these choices for the "average" user, but it would be nice to enable a "pro" mode which reduces noise reduction and favours the zoom lens in more situations.
I ended up using the stock camera app for "snapshots" (e.g. photos where I didn't care too much about the quality, or where I was just using the wide angle lens), and Lightroom Mobile's camera for shots where I wanted more control, or when I wanted to ensure that the zoom lens was being used (Halide is also good for this, but I found it convenient to have the photos in LR Mobile for processing immediately, even if Lightroom's UX is clunkier).
This actually worked pretty well for me – you can trust the stock camera to take a photo which will look good at mobile screen sizes even in challenging conditions, so it's great for "capturing the moment",…
Other commenters here are correct that the LIDAR is too low-resolution to be used as the primary source for the depth maps. In fact, iPhones use four-ish methods, that I know of, to capture depth data, depending on the model and camera used. Traditionally these depth maps were only captured for Portrait photos, but apparently recent iPhones capture them for standard photos as well.
1. The original method uses two cameras on the back, taking a picture from both simultaneously and using parallax to construct a depth map, similar to human vision. This was introduced on the iPhone 7 Plus, the first iPhone with two rear cameras (a 1x main camera and 2x telephoto camera.) Since the depth map depends on comparing the two images, it will naturally be limited to the field of view of the narrower lens.
2. A second method was later used on iPhone XR, which has only a single rear camera, using focus pixels on the sensor to roughly gauge depth. The raw result is low-res and imprecise, so it's refined using machine learning. See: https://www.lux.camera/iphone-xr-a-deep-dive-into-depth/
3. An extension of this method was used on an iPhone SE that didn't even have focus pixels, producing depth maps purely based on machine learning. As you would expect, such depth maps have the least correlation to reality, and the system could be fooled by taking a picture of a picture. See: https://www.lux.camera/iphone-se-the-one-eyed-king/
4. The fourth method is used for selfies on iPhones with…
Sure! For most point and shoot situations, I just leave Halide in HEIC mode and treat it just about exactly the same as the camera app. The controls are largely similar - you tap and hold to get an exposure slider, you tap the icon indicating the current lens to switch lenses, etc.
If I want 48 megapixel resolution and/or the added capture detail from ProRAW I'll turn on RAW+HEIC. That gives you a ProRaw you can edit after, as well as an "instant exposure" that basically just converts it to what you'd expect from HEIC mode. There is a tremendous amount of detail captured in the ProRaw shots that is processed away by the default app. As far as I know, you can't actually take 48 megapixel photos in the default camera app.
I seldom ever need to edit an individual file, because even if I'm shooting in 48mpx Halide will cook off an instagram-friendly edited version right away automatically. If I ever do want to tinker with the raw exposure, it's an option. The rest of the UI did take some fiddling to get used to, but I started out switching to Halide whenever I wanted to take a particularly good photo and before long I found myself using Halide for everything, because otherwise I'd be reviewing pictures and realize how much better one could have come out if I hadn't used the default app.
I found the official review of the 14 Pro camera by Halide's developer Lux to be a good primer on leveraging the app's capabilities:…
Hi Dang, OP here.
I am aware of this guideline. The problem is that the original title is so... meaningless? that I decided to give the site a title that explains why it's interesting.
In no way do I disrespect the idea behind this rule, I can see how it would lead to clickbait titles and such. I also didn't want to write a blogpost with a better title that simply refers to this resource at Apple's.
For full transparency, I came across this site because this interesting blogpost referred to it: https://www.lux.camera/halide-for-ios-17/
The reference is in this sentence:
> Apple wants to avoid a similar fate in still photography, so this year they put their weight behind an open standard called "ISO HDR." Ok, technically it's ISO/TS 22028-5, which doesn't quite roll off the tongue. The important thing is that with iOS 17, Halide captures HDR photos. In fact, it has for years!
I assume the native Mac-app ecosystem will die from this update. iOS will recover, but for Mac it's gonna be custom designs and electron all the way.
- I haven't dealt much with SwiftUI myself, but several developers mentioned¹ a buggy and unstable migration process to the new design.
- Most pro users (aka devs) are probably not convinced by this design language anyways
- Even before Tahoe, cross-platform apps had been eating away at the native market (Obsidian, Figma, VSCode, 1Password, ...).
- Apps that are still native are usually not best-in-class anymore - especially Apples own apps.
Their reasoning may be that, if Mac apps are dying anyways, they could at least get iPad apps to replace them. If it didn't work for Microsoft, maybe it will work for Apple.
On the bright side, I feel less locked into MacOS now.
¹: https://www.lux.camera/the-road-to-halide-mark-3/
You are right that they are demosaiced raw files but that’s about it
> Instead, ProRAW stores results of computational photography right inside the RAW. This is another reason they need to store demosaiced data, as these algorithms operate on color, not RAW data. Once you demosaic, there’s no going back. I mean, what would you even call that, remosaic?
> Smart HDR does this in the least destructive way. Apple worked with Adobe to introduce a new type of tag into the DNG standard, called a “Profile Gain Table Map.” This data gives your editor everything it needs to know to tone map your photo image and end up with results identical to the first party camera. Because it’s separate data, you can turn down its strength, or turn it off completely.
source https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/