Important points
- The screen size and camera quality of smartphones continue to improve year by year.
- Halide provides a professional camera experience with control over exposure and focus.
- Halide’s Process Zero creates less-processed, natural-looking photos compared to standard smartphone cameras.
If there’s one consistent trend in smartphone features, it’s screen size and camera quality. Almost every year, screens become larger due to larger display panels and smaller bezels, and camera performance improves, such as adding lenses and increasingly complex photo processing methods. No smartphones are exempt. Pixels, Galaxy phones, and iPhones all face the same direction.
Apple has made its commitment to cameras clear. iPhone16 this year. Not only has the company apparently introduced an all-new sensor to this year’s smartphones, but it’s also added Camera Control, a multi-function button and touch surface that allows you to manipulate camera settings and ultimately serve as a means to capture visual information. It turns out. apple intelligence.
Despite the iPhone’s ability to function as a camera, I’ve never actually used it as a camera. In fact, I think I take fewer and fewer photos now that the iPhone has gotten better at taking photos. New photo processing options and iOS18 I’ve been offering support for the past few months in hopes of getting you interested in using my phone in the way its creator clearly envisions its use. And last week, it may have inspired me to take more photos with my smartphone, although not as much as I expected.
Understand the basics of Halide
A camera app with professional tools but a simple interface
Halide (technically Halide Mk. II) is a camera app — available as a $19.99 annual subscription or a one-time purchase of $59.99 — in a way that makes it more suitable for enthusiasts, making it Apple’s default app. We aim to provide you with more options. Photographer and real professional.
At least that was the idea at first. As Apple poured more money into smartphone camera hardware and software, camera apps became more capable and complex. With just a few swipes of the app, you now have tons of fine-tuning controls for exposure, focus, and photo style (Apple’s system for changing the look and feel of your final photo). In contrast, Halide gives you the ability to choose what information is available while taking a photo (including histogram and focus peaking), and what the photo looks like after it’s taken. As far as I can tell, the app still seems to be trying to balance the needs of serious photographers with the needs of average iPhone owners who just want to take good photos. They just do things differently than Apple.
Halide interface, features and controls
That’s not to say Halide is a radical reinvention of the camera. The viewfinder is where you’ll spend the most time, and as you might expect, it takes up most of the app’s interface. What you see there is what you actually get when you take the photo.
There are other simple controls as well.
- Shutter button to take a photo
- “Quick Bar” for adjusting Halide-specific settings and tools
- Focus ring for turning autofocus on and off and making other focus adjustments
- Lens switcher for switching between real and digital lenses on mobile phones
- Preview in the bottom left corner of the gallery of photos taken
Some tools, such as exposure adjustment, are available by swiping your finger across the viewfinder itself. It’s included in Apple’s app and we found it very intuitive to use within Halide itself. But the most important toggle is in the app’s quick bar. This is an option that changes how your phone processes photos in bulk.
Process Zero reinvents smartphone photography by making it smarter
Simplify the shooting process to a single image
In 2024, it’s important to understand that a photo taken with a smartphone is not a single image. Despite creating a single file, every smartphone photo is a combination of a series of images crushed to find the perfect dynamic range and exposure, so every image is as “good” as possible. ” it looks like. What is “good” varies by smartphone manufacturer and has changed over the years as tastes change. Rather, the photo looks of iPhone, Pixel, and Galaxy smartphones are starting to converge into the same overall look.
Halide has previously offered ways to disable some of Apple’s photo processing. Process Zero is simply an approach to photography designed by Lux Optics.
In other words, Apple, Google, and Samsung want to make cameras that can’t fail. Process Zero, a new option introduced in August 2024 by halide manufacturer Lux Optics, is quite the opposite. It’s basically designed to make your smartphone take photos like a classic camera, and I really liked it after using Halide over the past week. This system “develops” the photo from a single capture, which can produce noisy images (like grain and visual artifacts), but which look more natural due to the way the exposure is processed. It also generates images. In the photos I took, I liked how the noise added extra texture to what I was capturing, rather than the almost “digital” smoothness that creeps into many photos. It also gave me a good idea of how evenly most smartphones expose the world. Modern iPhones have a distinct aversion to shadows, and Apple just recently tried to make people counter by changing the “Tone” setting in “Photo Style.”
This system “develops” the photo from a single capture, which can produce noisy images (like grain and visual artifacts), but which look more natural due to the way the exposure is processed. It also generates images.
In fact, using Process Zero can result in a large number of bad photos. For every shot that looks more natural, you get another that looks pretty ugly. This is one of the reasons why Halide lets you adjust the exposure of these shots after the fact, and you can disable this feature completely if you want to go back to Apple’s way of creating photos. Process Zero’s shots have a pleasant lack of artificiality, or rather the presence of a kind of artificiality that isn’t actually unrealistic, for the first time in a long while in regular smartphone photography. I don’t think the majority of people will change the way they take photos, but I did feel like I took photos for the better.
Accessing the lock screen will make taking a photo a habit.
iOS 18 will make third-party apps feel more default
Camera controls are not only input methods within the camera app, but also dedicated shortcuts for launching the camera app. When you’re not using the iOS Camera app, press the new button to open the app, even from your phone’s lock screen. Apple neglected to extend that permission to apps like Halide, but by switching the lock screen shortcuts (default flashlight on the left, camera on the right) from Apple’s camera app to any app. You can now do the same thing. Including halide.
Halide supports these iOS 18 features, as well as camera control functionality when the app is open, but Lux’s approach is much more limited than what Apple does with its default app. Adjust exposure and focus with a simple swipe of the camera control button. The rest require you to physically touch the screen. Although it has its limitations, it’s more or less what I wanted when I was using the app. Exposure and focus are two of the things I adjust most often, especially when Process Zero is enabled, but when connected to physical controls like a real camera. I tend to play around with both settings.
Exposure and focus are two of the things I adjust most often, especially when Process Zero is enabled, but when connected to physical controls like a real camera. I tend to play around with both settings.
When you’re learning how to use a camera, or in my case, using your smartphone as a camera, you want to encourage experimentation. And what I’ve found is that Halide is very good at making it experimental. Apple’s apps have the ability to take the perfect shot, but 90% of the time it doesn’t.
Become interested in smartphone photos
Imagine you’re interested in your cell phone’s camera.
halide
Halide is a third-party camera app for iPhone with pro tools for photographers and a simple interface that anyone can use. There are also ways to create photos that require less processing than what you can take with Apple’s Camera app.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to fall deeply into the world of photography. You won’t find me running out to buy a disposable camera or a non-Polaroid film camera anytime soon. But I think ignoring the iPhone’s functionality as a camera at this point is a source of enjoyment for me and negates a different relationship with my phone. The more you can force yourself to think of your smartphone as a tool rather than a never-ending fountain of entertainment, the better you’ll feel. It really is a tool and a multi-functional thing, and I think it’s commendable that a good app can remind us of that, as Halide did for me.
