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Hey everyone. Halide guy here!

This post came out a few weeks ago. To answer your question in advance, your favorite thing from Mark II that’s missing is eventually coming to Mark III.

I’m right now on a short detour updating our video app, Kino. I couldn’t justify touching it until this Mark III preview was out. After that, look for a few more Mark III preview updates before the big launch.

Not going to lie, it’s been an exhausting 12 months, but I’m genuinely excited for what’s ahead.

I like the weird arms race here: phone manufacturers develop more and more computational photography techniques to convert the output from potato sensors and optics into what looks like a professional photo... and phone-based photographers put more and more effort into undoing a lot of that work to avoid the look they used to covet. Back in my day, that first baby photo would be widely considered the best.

I would think there's a point where, if you want this level of creative control and image quality, you go back to a mirrorless camera, which now costs less than iPhone Pro. But I guess the convenience is hard to beat?

Apple makes a pretty strong creative decision in how it 'computes' photos for its camera. In recent years they've got a fair bit of criticism from both tech reporting and regulars I've seen on tiktok commenting that they're just crushing the shadows out of any image (presumably in an attempt to get better low light images), aggressively colour balancing, and over-smoothing to eliminate noise.

If the old man Process Zero comparison is fair, it shows that sometimes this pretty clearly makes the photo worse and there's room to tweak the processing to get a "better" photo. The difference to his skin colour and shadows across his face is astonishing.

It's the convenience, for me anyway - why carry around multiple devices, when one can do the job.

For travel photography, I went from carrying around a Sony full frame, to a Fuji XT3, to hoping by iPhone 19-20 that I can sell all my bodies and lenses and just rely on the iPhone.

The Sony felt like a chore - from carrying around a big camera and lens, through to the editing and photo management. The Fuji was a breath of fresh air - a bit more compact, and the film sims allowed me to cut the editing process out. But there was still lugging around a camera, and then the photo transfer etc.

With mobile phones' improvements in photography, coupled with the endless opportunities for apps, I can't wait to rely on it as my sole camera.

What do you expect the iPhone 19/20 to have that the iPhone 17 doesn't?

The tradeoffs will fundamentally be the same. You're not getting a > 100mm^2 sensor (with the glass lens required to image on it) on the iPhone anytime soon (or anytime ever really, unless the form factor of the iPhone dramatically changes).

Hopefully 48MP telephoto lens, with similar aperture to the main lens.

The telephoto sensor is already 48 MP on the 17 Pro, so that's a given.

I don't think we're getting a f/1.78 lens on the telephoto anytime soon. The widest aperture the tele's ever had was a f/2 on the 12 Pro, and that was back when the tele was a 2x (52mm equivalent, so not even really tele...). Maybe f/2.4 or f/2.2 (what the ultra wide has)? That'd already be a significant improvement.

The next big upgrades on the ultrawide/tele for the 19/20 generations will likely be larger sensors - they're currently 1/2.55", compared to 1/1.28" for the wide lens. I don't think they can fit three 1/1.28" sensors in there, so plausibly 1/1.7"? But that might mean that effective aperture remains constant.

(and yet none of that will beat an equivalent focal length lens on your XT3)

The first baby photo is definitely the best. Artistic lighting setups can work for adult portraits, photographers used to recommend side lighting for male bone structure, but it just looks wrong in these baby photos.

Not true. Phone sensors are amazing even without any processing. The difference is not as large as you might think.

As a person who has an expensive phone and a professional camera, let me retort by saying that the difference is larger than you think. On some level, it's basic physics. You get fewer photons, etc. Apple hasn't unlocked the secrets of optics or semiconductor manufacturing that are out of reach for Canon or Nikon. So if they keep making sensors and optics that are many times larger and bulkier than in a phone, there's probably a reason for it.

I like to think I have some experience in this area. I have an app on Android that records RAW video (MotionCam Pro). We've compared large expensive cameras to phone sensors many times (you can see it on our YouTube channel if you like).

Not GP, but for me the biggest differentiators of larger sensors are less perspective and better low-light performance. There are probably some other details like f-stop range but I haven't played with those much. I'm just a smartphone shooter (I don't even own a large sensor), but I still prefer to use the telephoto when possible to get squarer-looking shots with less noise, and to me that feels like what a larger sensor should deliver.

Really depends on the environment. Low light and nighttime are much worse than you might think, anything else isn't so bad.

(Try taking a photo of the moon with an iPhone. You can't do it, not even with Halide.)

The lenses are also different and direct lighting can cause annoying internal reflections. I don't know this area as well, but lenses are more important than sensors for photos.

You absolutely can:

https://mastodon.social/@heliographe_studio/1156653713048409...

(taken with BayerCam.app, not Halide, but Halide can capture the same raw Bayer data)

It's not an amazing photo by any means. But it is a photograph of the moon - the seas are all well delineated, Copernicus/Kepler/Aristarchus/Grimaldi are visible/recognizable.

A test that smartphones did not pass a few years ago.

Love Halide, and Pro Raw and Nitro, and pay for these even the iPhone's looks grid + RAW meant I didn't really have to.

This could bring me back, the B/W with shoe-black blacks is lovely.

Hopefully some folks using the preview ask to dial back the grain. In the blog post there's a comparison of grain in the Oculus. The Apple multi-exposure is, as expected, plastic. The first grain example is perfect; then the author cranks it and is happier.

The app behaves like the exaggerated grain. As a T-Max and Ilford photographer, I'm blown away by finally getting blacks in B/W on an iPhone, but the exaggerated grain is not cool.

Here's hoping they dial it back, or offer a slider in settings. (Not per photo, this is likely to be an overall B/W pref.)

Grain will definitely be tweaked! It landed late in the release cycle, and I want to give it more love before the final launch.

> Many scenes look better in SDR, such as this foggy, low-contrast morning in Osaka

I have to disagree here entirely. The feeling of that raw light, glowing just out of reach, is well appreciated in the HDR.

One of the big benefits of Halide (and working with raws) is that I'm not beholden to the aesthetic preferences of its creator. It should be built into the phone, but it isn't. So I've been a big fan for awhile.

Halide is such a great example of how to make a business serving a niche audience with a high-quality product. They very obviously care deeply, and that's reflected in the product, and that makes it a genuinely unique hard to replicate app. They'll never be the most used camera app out there, but they'll always have a market, and they'll always get to explore their passion while doing it.

I think this is what a lot of people react to with LLMs - often times, the point is the passion, and the point is to truly dig in at 100% on something, and the output of that shows when you experience the product. A lot of our economy right now is built on "cheaper, faster, and good enough," and I think a great many of us have found that to be both a disappointing experience and very hard to avoid. I know I personally have been trying to focus on carefully selecting fewer higher-quality items/services/stores/etc, and it's part of why none of the sales pitches for LLMs are landing for me - yes, I could get that thing done faster, but that's not actually what I want. I want the passion, I want the care, I want to be able to look at every part of the object and see how it contributes to a harmonious whole.

> A lot of our economy right now is built on "cheaper, faster, and good enough"

And, essentially, price fixing (or, UX fixing, or something?). You make something worse, but not too worse; then, your competitors, seeing it can be tolerated, each become the same worse as well, one by one, until there's nobody left to switch to. Keep doing this, over, and over, and over, and over... People get used to it being the only option, and it becomes tolerated and even expected. You avoid becoming worse enough at once for everyone to switch, but you end up way worse over time, as your entire market slowly trends that way with you. I'm sure there's some sort of enshittification-like term for this, but it seems different than enshittification to me, because you pick on individual tiny things in a free-ish market rather than taking a sharp turn against a captive audience.

Race to the bottom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom

Related:

Market for lemons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Adverse selection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

Commoditization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commoditization

And, as you say, enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification.

That's why it's hard to have nice things.

In 2020, when the sky turned orangish-red in California due to massive wildfires, Apple's phones were unable to accurately capture it (I read Android too, but I use iPhones). It was very frustrating. The camera app kept overcorrecting the images. I remember reading that people using Halide's app were able to capture correctly and seeing examples on blogs and such.

Thank you Halide for making high-quality software, even if I'm not in the target market.

The ones I took out my Mid-Market apartment window looked pretty true to my eye. But I had an iPhone X, which was 3 years old at the time. Perhaps the correction had gotten worse in newer iPhones.

All cameras behave this way because of how auto white balance works. Some camera apps are just always in AWB mode.

I asked a phone camera engineer about this once and they told me that shooting through windows also causes issues, but I don't remember why.

I bought Halide and it is indeed a nice app but it also taught me I don’t like editing photos.

A camera app I’ve been enjoying even more is Dazz. It’s got a bunch of preset looks from various cameras, and you just select one and shoot. The preview doesn’t actually even apply the filter, which some people may not like but I think it’s actually a feature. It’s pretty fun to select a random camera, take a photo, and go in afterwards and see how it turned out. It’s similar to taking photos on an old point and shoot, where you don’t see how they turn out until after you take the shot.

I’ve ended up with some pretty cool photos I would have never got through editing.

It also has a cool golf camera mode where it’ll take a handful of photos back to back, and keep a fixed object in focus, then make an animation with that focused object locked in place as the frames of the photos move around it. It’s hard to explain but it’s available to use in the free version of the app.

I really want to like Halide, and I've had it save a number of photos that the native app couldn't handle. But as a lifelong photographer, technologist, and occasional developer, I still somehow get really lost in the inscrutable icons and self-hiding what-have-you of the UI. I think I want it to be about 50% uglier.

I feel like instead of saying a photo is "in HDR" (which implies you can view it in HDR), they should be saying the camera can capture HDR. None of the photos in this post are actually HDR for me. (Using Safari on macOS 26.3 with an XDR display)

(Edit: Oops. A few of the photos are HDR. Just, not most of the comparisons, which are where I was looking.)

If the sunflower and Osaka photos aren’t in HDR, there’s something off with your system. Make sure you aren’t in low-power mode.

Fun fact: the HDR photos are actually looping videos, because that’s way more reliable for browsers and CMS platforms than actual HDR photos. Hopefully this improves in the next few years.

They are in HDR for me - Safari on Macbook Air, 26.2. You must have something misconfigured in your display.

I tested again on one of my iOS devices and still can't find any way to get the images to display in HDR. I can tell they were obviously captured better but they don't actually seem to exceed SDR in brightness.

Edit: I actually found that a small fraction of the images do display in HDR: the first cityscape image, the photo of the sunflowers, the second photo of the cityscape right after, and the first photo under "Film Meets HDR". Nothing else in the article is HDR, though.