Halide Mark II - Pro Camera

I’m a designer and DSLR photographer, so the camera features on my phone is a big deal to me. When I upgraded from a 6, I was torn between the XS and XR. I’d been gravitating toward the XR due to the colors, battery life, price, and better lowlight photos, but was devastated it only had portrait mode for people. I heard about Halide finding a solution to this problem, so I went with the XR and bought this app. I took a photo of my dog and I’m in love with its ability to pretty accurately map out data for bokeh shots. My photo went straight to the default apple photos app, and reads it as a portrait photo now so I can adjust the blur like I can on people portraits. The only setback is not seeing bokeh in live mode, but it’s no biggie and who knows what exciting features future updates will bring. Thank you Ben & Sebastiaan for using your intelligence, skills, and talent to make a camera like this for the iPhone XR. Buying this app finally made me 100% happy with my decision to get the phone I did.

Phone being used: iPhone 11 Pro Length spent with application: 1.5 years I first started using this application on my iPhone X, over a year ago. It was probably my favorite camera go to app. It really used to feel like the company was thriving on a great idea that had never been seen on an iPhone before and they took the time to fine tune it. A lot has changed and here is its current state. It has now turned into a very hit or miss application. The app crashes from taking a depth photo and from that, the photo taken is never saved. Most of the features will crash the app as well. Even switching from different camera lenses will crash the thing. I feel like the company has realized they are at a loss for innovation. They are no longer spending resources on R&D let alone basic maintenance hours. I’m sure we will start to notice less and less updates, until it eventually gets lost among the rest. Please do not waste your money. Wait for them to prove me wrong and make the necessary bug fixes. FYI, A typical active company has two week sprints. At the end of each sprint, an update is pushed to insure continued application maintenance. Feature releases take a lot longer and are usually multiple sprints but bug fixes are not.

I like this app and the controls it gives for manual focus and the new best processing and deep fusion. What I don’t like is the lean or almost non existent documentation. I realize this is supposed to be an intuitive app one learns but doing and testing. To be honest the app is complex and what it does is complex. Only 5 opening pages and a pretty lean blog and support that often does not answer basic questions is a problem for an app that does what this does. You make exciting advances to iPhone photography but they are hardly explained and the settings menu seems contradictory at times. If I turn off RAW to use best processing I would like consistent menu choices in settings. Most of all the basic usability for someone wanting to experiment or take better photos is just not there. TBH I deleted the app more than a few times because it’s intimidating to use at times. A confusion of quick and gesture changes, no accompanying support doc. Some type of community would help as well. What if we don’t use twitter? Support forums may be nice. Answering support emails would be nice. The functionality explained in a downloadable manual would be wonderful.

If it weren’t for the article I read on medium I wouldn’t have stumbled upon this app hearing about its journey in design to truly be tailored to this new iPhone X is what not only sparked my interest but it’s what made me willing to spend the money on it. It was no longer a random app on the AppStore. I had insight on its origins and an understanding of the detail put into place for it. As far as my usage goes I love it. It brings powerful features and a one handed UI to the iPhone X. Every interaction seems to have been thought of and much like the X you have to familiarize yourself with the gestures and icons. There are however a few bugs with the app one of them being landscape mode. Yes it orients the photo correctly but the UI does not shift. I’m sure this will be and can be fixed in a future update. But for now this is the best app to take advantage off both the camera technology in the iPhone X and it’s design. Bravo, 5 stars.

Issue with raw files not being handled properly was an system wide issue with iOS 13.0. It has been fixed on iOS 13.1. All in all I am happy with Halide. Now that I can save photos in both raw and jpeg formats, I have the flexibility of either playing with raw files or use jpeg as it is. Generally the results I get buy editing raw files are superior (better colors.) Darkroom integrates nicely with Halide, I with premium upgrade on darkroom was little cheaper than $10. Anyone with iPhone should have an option for capturing raw files. Until Apple integrates that in built in camera app, Halide is an excellent option. I like its smart raw capture more than other manual camera apps. It doesn’t offer lot of granular controls, but I like it for keeping it simple. ProCam 7 offers more manual camera controls, but it can get little overwhelming. Halide over any other manual camera apps any day.