Weird take. Until recent years the majority of software was sold via one time purchase. Subscription annoyance becoming the norm is a more recent phenomena. And you're mad about having both options?
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Halide 2.15 Lets Users Take Shots With Zero Computational Processing
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I'm just not going to subscribe to a camera App and $60 is absolutely bloody insane
These features all need to be in the stock camera app
These features all need to be in the stock camera app
If anyone happens to know - is the app ProCam a similar one to this? I’ve recently grown tired of the post-processing on iPhones (seems I’m not alone lol) and I’ve noticed subtle changes when I use ProCam, but I don’t know enough about photography settings to really understand what’s different.
Good question (hi folks, I am Sebastiaan, I make Halide!)
Because of the way photos are captured, you gotta pick one or the other. The good news is, you can choose another process with a tap and take another pic!
There's a beautiful irony in the fact that the perfection and flawlessness of processed and AI-enhanced photos has made us long for the imperfection of "real" photos.
Makes me wonder if in deed imperfection is not the the true perfection of life
Makes me wonder if in deed imperfection is not the the true perfection of life
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Hey — sorry to hear about your issues and you’re right, there’s tons of great free and paid apps in the App Store that do all sorts of neat things! We do our own thing, and I am glad you supported us early
I will look into that issue with processing a file - what iPhone are you using?As for Halide and Mark II: the app launched seven years ago, and started at $2,99. When we rolled out the second version of Halide three years later, we decided to give this update to everyone who had bought the app for free — and give years of updates on top of that, also for free! So you definitely got Mark II for free.
All Halide users who ever bought the app can use it for life, along with all the features they paid for and over two years of updates on top of that*. That's true to this day. The same would go for Kino if that ever happens. We pride ourselves on that. Even Process Zero, despite being way past our cutoff is a gift to our existing users. You don’t have to upgrade, subscription or not. That’s just something we did!
Yes, by the way, last year, we started offering an option for those users to upgrade to get new updates with extra features. But that's completely optional. The app, and all its features will always keep working, will still get compatibility updates for new iPhones, etc. I think that’s fair!
We try to do the best for our users at all times, and part of that is honoring the people that supported us from the beginning. In all of our apps' history for the last 7 years in business, we've always taken care of our users first.
I'm confused about how this differs from the classic Halide raw process. Doesn't that already eschew Deep Fusion, Smart HDR, etc?
Hey Alex! Lots of camera apps out there, of course
Glad you are doing your thing.I wasn’t aware of mood camera but going by your site, you use ProRAW or JPEG as well as color presets. That’s all a lot more processing than we do - we always work with native RAW and do not apply any presets, and we skip the entire iPhone processing pipeline. We start with the raw sensor data.
Again, lots of room to do different things in the App Store, and plenty of room for us to all get along. Dismissing lots of our work as just ‘nice branding’ isn’t very fair though! I am sure your app is a lot more than just a nice brand, too.
Must this turn into a developer AMA with someone "defending Halide" every other post?
Yup. Just what I wanted - a way to take lower quality photos. When it’s important, I take RAW photos with my iPhone and process in Lightroom. If you know what you’re doing, this provides the highest quality, most natural results.
Unless these CCDs are unimaginably more accurate than physics says they can be at that size, yeah, there’s always processing. I’m sure they mean “a tiny amount” of computational processing, not zero.
Yeah and I paid a one time fee for Halide until they decided to move to a subscription model and make early adopters pay another fee to own it for life. I'm sure they'll do the same with their video app Kino. Not supporting this company.
By making them pay the same fees new users have to pay? If you were going to honor them you'd offer a free or discounted lifetime option but you didn't.
Hey - thanks for supporting us way back when. We are super grateful. But - that’s... literally not true. You own it for life. Always have, always will, and you got the free update too. You can still use Halide today, right? With all those features, plus the Mark II features? What are we making you do?
Depends on the iPhone. For one, native RAW (non Pro phones) got Apple JPEG plus a raw file. Pro phones with ProRAW get ProRAW, but those both use Apple processing.
We now have an option to take a photo with *zero* apple processing. We do the processing for you, based on the raw sensor data (native bayer raw).
I have a Pro phone but I use the DNG setting in Halide not the ProRAW. You're saying the DNG also had apple processing?
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Agree, after a lot of looking I think it's Deep Fusion thats the issue. It tries to add back in "detail" and "sharpness" from multi-frame HDR, but just results in this unpleasant, crunchy, over-sharpened look that people complain about. A weird texture unlike film grain. Looks bad on everything bigger than a phone screen.
Apple should give an option for a cleaner end look because ProRAWs on the other hand look great. So it's capable of it. They give a smooth, natural look to photos and still retain HDR capability, just without the "deep fusion".
I take all my photos ProRAW but they're huge filesizes. Convert to HEIF on Mac to shrink (doing it via shortcut on iPhone gives you the processed photo). But this is a hassle. And you can't take live photos with ProRAW or 48MP.
I wondered if I could make an app that does this in one step - or if it exists already. I found two: PhotonCamera and NoFusion. Both seem to be chinese (they care more about this over there?). They both convert the proper ProRAW and do not give a processed version (unlike iPhone shortcut).
- PhotonCam: Allows you to take 48MP ProRAW and converts instantly to HEIF, bringing the size to 5-10MB in your photo library. (watermarked trial)
- NoFusion: Now this one is amazing. Allows you to take 48MP ProRAW, and converts instantly to HEIF, AND lets you take Live Photos, which should not be possible! Calls it "HEIF+". You get the natural look, high resolution, small filesize, and a live photo with one button press. Still new and some bugs to be worked out but I'm pretty amazed. (3 day full feature trial, but can still take HEIF+ after that)
Halide seems to be doing another thing entirely here - custom processing themselves - something interesting to check out! The examples provided look nice and clean, maybe it gets a similar or even cleaner result. Should be good for pros.
I think ProRAW conversion is a nice easy option to get away from over-processing for average users if you don't want to handle RAWs and just want a ready-to-go picture with smaller filesize in your library.
Edit to add: When I tried the disabling "smartest processing" in Halide with the standard HEIF output, I still found them more "processed" looking than 48 ProRAW files, which is why I did not include them here. Other apps like Fjorden Camera have the same issue with "no processing" not helping much.
But I just noticed even NoFusion has this on 12MP. In fact, even a 12MP ProRAW from the default app has this. It seems that the 12MP pipeline/process itself has this processing built into it. While the 48MP does not. Which explains why I didn't like the 12MP "no processing" Halide (and other apps) vs the 48MP ProRAW.
Maybe deep fusion is not the only issue, but the 12MP downsampling pipeline from the 48MP sensor.
And also I guess it makes sense why Halide would make their own "Process Zero" processing since they offer 12MP photos! That way they can get around this at 12MP.
(Also Just found their blog post on the update which is a general good explainer: https://www.lux.camera/introducing-process-zero-for-iphone/)
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I think it'll be cheaper to just dig my iPhone 5 out of the closet and go around taking pictures with that instead... the photos might come out the same too. 😩
Any RAW/DNG taken from default app will be Apple ProRAW - their own special version of RAW with some processing added - but still looks a lot more natural than the default to me. (you have to click "edit" in the Photos app to see the true ProRAW file, otherwise you see a processed thumbnail - or better, airdrop to mac to see on a larger screen).
Sorry I should have specified I use Halide, which lets you choose DNG over ProRaw (post now updated). Personally I like the colors and tone mapping of ProRaw but find the noise reduction far too aggressive.
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This is great. I'm ok with the default processing much of the time, but there are situations where it absolutely ****s the bed. Specifically, every sunset golden hour portrait I've ever taken looks totally unhinged. The processing tries to somehow (I guess) "even everything out" so it ends up like some weird solarized psychedelic poster instead of what I'm expecting.
I have a pretty nice Olympus, but I don't have it on me constantly. Inevitably there's a situation where my choice is to either take an iPhone photo or none at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree, ProRAW does come out really smooth, with no grain. Which could be seen as unnatural if you're not a fan. But I find it looks a lot better than the "deep fried" default look, so my brain can just pretend it's a really sharp large sensor with lots of light gathering.