Then they announced it’s coming to the built-in camera app.

Many developers in our shoes would freak out, thinking Apple wants to gobble up their customers. We were just confused.

Apple builds products for the broadest possible audience, and RAW is a tool for photo-nerds. These powerful files take skill to edit and come with significant tradeoffs. Why would Apple cram a complicated feature into an app meant for everyone?

As we dug deeper into ProRAW, we realized it wasn’t just about making RAW more powerful. It’s about making RAW approachable. ProRAW could very well change how everyone shoots and edits photos, beginners and experts alike.

To understand what makes it so special, the first half of this post explains how a digital camera develops a photo. Then we go on to explain the strengths and weaknesses of traditional RAWs. Finally, we dive into what’s unique about ProRAW, how it changes the game, and its few remaining drawbacks.

Grab a coffee, because this is a long read.

A Short Tour Through a Digital Camera

Imagine you’re looking at this scene through your camera.

When you tap the camera button on your camera, light passes through a series of optics and lands on a digital sensor where it is captured.

We’re going to talk through the three important steps that take place as your camera converts sensor values into a picture.

Step 1: Demosaic

Your digital sensor absorbs light and turns it into numbers. The more light it sees, the higher the number.

I used black and white for a reason — digital sensors are totally colorblind. In 1976, a clever engineer at Kodak found a solution: put a grid of color filters over the sensor, so every pixel sees either red, green, or blue.

This mosaic pattern is called a Bayer pattern, named after its inventor, Bruce Bayer. With a color filter in place, our sensor now sees a grid of alternating colors. Let’s zoom in on the leaves of the tree, and see what the sensor sees.

Each pixel is either red, green or blue. We figure out the real colors by going over every pixel, looking at its neighbors, and guessing its two missing colors. This crucial step is known as “demosaicing,” or “debayering.”

It’s a tricky problem. Compare a simple algorithm to a higher quality one, and you’ll spot problems like purple fringes.

Look at the pebbles in the shot. The fast algorithm is a little more “pixely.”

There are quite a few popular demosaic algorithms to choose from, each with strengths and weaknesses. The perfect algorithm depends on the type of sensor, your camera settings, and even the subject matter. For example, if you’re shooting the night sky, some algorithms produce better results on stars.

After demosaic, we end up with…

That’s not great. As you can see, the color and exposure are off.

There’s nothing wrong with your camera. Quite the opposite: your camera captures way more information than your screen can display. We have to take those sensor readings, which measures the light from your scene, and transform them into pixel values that light up your display.

Step 2: Transform from Scene to Display

Let’s start with color. The following chart represents all the colors a human can see, and the triangle in the middle covers what most screens can display.

When your camera captures colors outside the triangle, we have to push and pull those invalid colors to fit inside.

One detail makes this especially tricky: deciding which white is “true” white. If you’ve ever shopped for light bulbs, you know every white light in the real world has a slight yellow or blue tint. Our brains adjust our perception of white, based on hints in our surroundings. It’s called color constancy, and it’s why this yellow/blue dress optical illusion fools people.

Modern cameras are very good at figuring out the white point in most situations. So we pick our white point, run the math, and end up with a perfectly white-balanced image.

That looks pretty close to what we saw, but the awning in the top of the frame is under-exposed.

Let’s turn up the exposure to bring out detail…

… but unfortunately, now the rest of the image is too bright.

The technical name for this problem is “dynamic range.” It’s range of light you can capture or display at one time, measured from the brightest bright to the darkest shadow. You’ll frequently hear this range measured in “stops.”

Ever see terms like ‘HDR’ or ‘XDR’ being thrown around? The “DR” in “HDR” stands for Dynamic Range. People make quite a fuss about it. This is an especially difficult problem in technology, because the human eye is incredibly good.

It’s easily the most powerful camera in the world, as it can see up to 30 stops of dynamic range. Most screens can display 8 stops. Digital cameras capture up to 15 stops. When we try to display all this information on a screen with lower dynamic range, it’s going to look wrong, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Notice the sky has weird patch of cyan, caused by one of the color channels clipping.

The solution to our dynamic range problem is a little more complicated than bringing up shadows and turning down highlights everywhere. That would make the whole image feel flat.

Instead, you want to darken and lighten small areas of the image. Fifty years ago, photographers took hours to tweak their negatives using a process called “dodging and burning.”

Today it’s called “local tone mapping.”

With that, our image looks great.

Let’s go ahead email it to our friends… oh, oops it’s 100 megabytes. The image still contains all that data we can’t see. Luckily, we don’t need all of that data now that we’re done editing.

Step 3: Optimize

In computer graphics, if you use more bits, your math gets more accurate. While editing, we needed to use 64-bits per pixel to get nice results. Once we’re done editing we can cut it down to 32-bits — halving our file size — and nobody can tell the difference.

Next, we can throw out most of our color information. This cuts it in half again.

Finally, we can apply something called ‘lossy compression’ — the kind you find in JPEGs. We end up with an image that’s only 1.6 mb to share with our friends.

Phew. Take a breath, and let all that sink in. When you’re ready, we can finally answer…

What is RAW? Why is it Magic?

We just developed a photo. Every step in development is destructive, meaning we lose information. For example, in Step 2, once you shift colors around to fit into that triangle, you can never figure out the original, real-world colors.

So what happens when mistakes are made? Let’s go back to California’s recent wildfires that turned the sky orange. I took a photo with a color chart at the time, figuring it would come in handy someday.

In real life, it looked like this:

The built-in camera app was confused by that orange sky, and tried to make everything neutral — because that’s what the world usually looks like. People were confused to find their cameras refused to take an image of the world as they saw it.

A lot of folks used manual settings to override their camera’s automatic white balancing, but let’s say you didn’t. I’ll take that incorrect JPEG into an image editor like Lightroom and try to match it back to the original…

Hmm. Notice that how it’s messed up some colors, shifting blue to purple.

Trying to un-process a processed image like a JPEG is like trying to un-bake a cake. When your camera produces JPEGs, you’d better love the choices it made, because there’s no going back.

Now imagine if instead of saving a JPEG, your camera saved the original sensor values. Now you can make totally different processing decisions yourself, like white balance. You get the raw data.

Welcome to RAW files.

We have written about RAW a lot on this blog. We love it. Shooting RAW gives you magical powers. With a few knobs, you can rescue photos that you thought were lost to poor exposure.

So far, we’ve only talked about mistakes, but RAWs also give you the freedom to experiment with radically different choices for artistic effect, letting you develop the photo so it looks how you experienced it.

Remember old film cameras? Their photos also had to be developed from a negative. RAW data is usually stored in the DNG file format, which stands for Digital Negative. Some camera makers have their own formats, but those companies are jerks.

DNG is an open standard, so anyone can build software that reads and writes DNGs. Best of all, the file format continues to evolve, as we’ll see shortly.

First, we have some bad news.

RAWs are Great Until They Aren’t

We make a RAW camera app, so of course we’re fans of RAW. That also means we get plenty of support emails about it. By far, the most common question is, “Why do my RAWs look worse than the built-in camera app?”

iPhone cameras got a lot better over time. At first, these were leaps in hardware: better and bigger sensors and lenses allowed sharper shots. Eventually, though, the processors got faster and the cameras couldn’t get larger. The camera got smarter.

iPhones take many photos and combine it into one shot, picking detail in the shadows from one photo, the right exposure on your dog’s face from another, and a few other ones for extra detail. This is merged into the final result in milliseconds without requiring any effort on your behalf. It’s very clever stuff, with cool names like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion.

On the other hand, iPhone RAW files are still just one image. Which means they look quite… different.

If you’re coming from the built-in iPhone camera app, switching over to manual processing is like switching from a car with automatic transmission to a stick-shift.

There’s a steep learning curve, and that’s why we built something called “Instant RAW” into our latest Mark II update, so you don’t have to spend an afternoon in an image editor tweaking your shot to get a nice result.

But even with Instant RAW or editing, sometimes RAWs still look different than what comes out of the built-in camera app, and it has nothing to do with your skills. RAWs lacks that critical piece of the puzzle: Apple’s smarts. Computational photography like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion.

Even if Apple handed these algorithms to third-party apps, they work on bursts of photos, fusing together the best parts of each image. iPhone RAWs are 12mb each. If you want to reproduce the results of Apple’s camera using one of these algorithms, you’re looking at ten times the storage needed per photo.

Oh, and there’s one more problem: neither the front-facing camera or ultra-wide camera can shoot RAW.

ProRAW elegantly solves all of these problems and more. You can finally reproduce the results of the first-party camera, while retaining most of the editing latitude from traditional RAWs.

Enter ProRAW

Technically, there’s no such thing as a ProRAW file. ProRAW images are regular DNG files that take advantage of some little known features in the specification, and introduce a few new ones.

Remember how DNG is an open file format? Apple worked with Adobe to introduce a few new tags. DNG released the 1.6 specification, with details about these tags, the very day ProRAW went into public beta tests.

This may be surprising to some: ProRAW is not a proprietary or closed format. Credit where it is due: Apple deserves kudos for bringing their improvements to the DNG standard. When you shoot with ProRAW, there’s absolutely nothing locking your photos into the Apple ecosystem.

Let’s dive into what makes ProRAW files different than RAWs of days past…

Demosaic is Already Done

ProRAWs store pixel values after the demosaic step. It’s like they took the output Step 1, from earlier, and stored those values. We’ll talk about why they’re doing this in a bit.

It’s just important to understand that these demosaiced color values still represent the scene, not your display. They contain all the original dynamic range. They contain all the out-of-range colors. They retain all the flexibility of working with a “true” RAW. They just skip step one.

In theory, you lose flexibility in choosing specific demosaic algorithms. In practice, most expert photographers don’t bother.

It’s also quite possible that iOS can do a better job demosaicing your images than any third-party RAW editor. Apple’s greatest strength is its unity of hardware and software, so they know exactly the sensor you’re using, and how it behaves with different ISO setttings. In theory, they could even apply image recognition as part of the process; if iOS detects a night sky, it could automatically pick a star-friendly demosaic algorithm.

This sly move also gives Apple greater control over the image sensors they use in the future. Earlier, I said most cameras use a Bayer pattern. Some camera manufacturers use different patterns, which require different algorithms. Fujifilm invented the X-Trans sensor that creates sharper images, with more film-like grain. There’s even a Foveon digital sensor that stacks color filters on top of each other.

Apple is now a company that designs its own silicon, and it’s very good at it. Cameras are a huge driving factor in phone purchases. It seems inevitable for Apple to innovate in the realm of sensors. Taking over the demosaic step would smooth such a transition. Hypothetically speaking, they could swap out their current bayer sensors with an “Apple C1,” and so long as it saves in ProRAW, it would work from day one in every pro photography process and app like Lightroom without having to wait for Adobe to write a new demosaic algorithm.

We got a taste for these benefits with the surprise reveal that ProRAW is available on all four cameras.

Previously, you could not shoot RAW with the front-facing or ultra-wide cameras. Apple is vague on the technical limitations, but indicated that even if third-party developers had access to the RAW data, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. With ProRAW, they can handle the annoying bits, and leave apps like editors to deal with what they’re better at: editing.

Bridging the Algorithm Gap

So now we have the data, but what about the local tone mapping and other computational photography goodies? Apple could open up their algorithms to third-party apps, but that isn’t as useful as you think. For starters, you’d need a save a ton of RAW files. We’d be back at that 100 megabyte file.

I also think there are reasonable questions about producing consistent results down the road as these algorithms evolve. It would be surprising to return to a photo a year from now to find Apple’s AI produces different results.

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.

That’s what we do in Halide when you’re looking at a ProRAW image with Instant RAW disabled.

Even if you opt-out of local tone mapping, you now have the underlying HDR data to work with in an editor, and the results are…

Shadow recovery on a ProRAW shot taken with the latest Halide beta. This is just... wow. pic.twitter.com/ti03Js2C5n

Deep Fusion is a different story. While it’s popularly known as “Sweater Mode,” the more technical objective is “noise reduction in low-light.” Unlike those Gain Table Maps, there’s no elegant way to separate its effects from the final image. If you don’t want Deep Fusion, your only option is to opt-out of the process at the time of capture.

If you’ve read our articles for a while, you know we’re fans of natural noise. Prior to Deep Fusion, the iPhone JPEGs were notorious for their “watercolor effects.” In this image I took a few years ago, notice faces get smeared into nothing.

Deep Fusion produces very different results. Instead of just smearing an image, it combines several results together to sort of “average out” the results. It looks way, way more natural.

If you’re not a fan of Deep Fusion, there’s an API to opt-out. We expose this in Halide under Capture Settings. As I was writing this article, I realized this toggle makes it easy to run an experiment…

I used a spotlight to create a high-dynamic range scene in my office.

I spot metered the two grey cards and measured a difference of 8.3 stops. I then exposed the shot using the top grey card and took three photos:

1) Native Halide RAW

2) ProRAW, with smart processing disabled

3) ProRAW with smart processing enabled

I took these into Lightroom and boosted the shadows. Let’s zoom in on the test pattern image.

If you wonder what camera settings I used to capture this, the answer is a bit complicated. When you enable these algorithms, the iPhone ignores manual exposure settings. After all, Deep Fusion takes multiple exposures with a variety of settings. While the metadata embedded in the final image reported an ISO of 40, it’s unlikely all photos in the burst had that setting.

As you can see, by disabling this Smart Processing in Halide, we can still skip a lot of the noise reduction in our ProRAW files if we so choose.

Synthetic tests like this are all fine and good, but what about the real world?

Sebastiaan spent the last few weeks testing ProRAW in the field with the Halide beta. He found the dynamic range in ProRAW pretty mind-blowing in the day-to-day editing process:

Semantic Maps Included

ProRAW has one more surprise up its sleeve. A few years ago, Apple began using neural networks to detect interesting parts of an image, such as eyes and hair.

Apple uses this to, say, add sharpening to only clouds in the sky. Sharping faces would be quite unflattering.

ProRAW files contain these maps! Both semantic maps used on faces and Portrait Effect Mattes that power the background blur in Portrait mode.

Flexibility in File Size

By storing the demosaiced values, ProRAWs can also tackle unwieldy file sizes in a few interesting ways. That’s really important, because when you shoot ProRAW with the first-party camera app, each file is around 25mb — and can get even heavier than that. That’s an order of magnitude or more than a regular photo. It adds up quick.

First, we can fiddle with bit-depth. By default, ProRAW uses 12-bit data, which can be overkill. JPEGs are only 8-bits per color channel, so going 10-bit means 4x the precision in editing. While the first-party camera app doesn’t present this option, it’s there in the API. we’ve added it to Halide and seen files drop as low as 8mb. In practice, you can get most of the ProRAW benefits at half the file size.

If you want to further reduce the file size, ProRAW offers lossy compression that can drop these files down to as little as 1mb, but not so fast. These compression APIs currently drop the bit depth to 8-bits. In our opinion, that too great of a tradeoff, as it leaves you with a file that’s only marginally better than a JPEG. We’re certain ProRAW compression will confuse users, so we’ve held off on compression support for the time being. Fortunately Apple’s camera team has been iterating on ProRAW very fast, so we hope 10-bit compression is on the horizon.

Finally, it turns out that every ProRAW file can also contain the fully-processed JPEG version. This is a fallback image for apps that don’t recognize RAWs— which is most apps. Even Instagram. The first-party camera doesn’t offer this, which means you cannot share ProRAW shots taken with it to apps that do not support RAW images. We’ve added the option in Halide.

If you’re planning to edit the image, it makes sense to opt-out of these 4mb images. Your RAW editing app will ignore it, and ultimately produce a new JPEG for your Instagrams.

Batteries Included

The most underrated improvement in iOS 14.3 is that the native Photos app now supports RAW editing. This is huge, because it abstracts away all the complexity of higher-end apps. No fiddling with “black point” and “color profiles.” Casual users who only know how to edit photos in the built-in apps don’t have to do anything different. It just works.

This is critical because we can expect it to take some time for third-party photo editors to adopt this new metadata. Until then, ProRAWs will not look like system JPEGs. Compare the results viewed inside Lightroom CC and Photos.app.

It looks wrong because Lightroom doesn’t yet detect the local tone mapping metadata. However, given Adobe participated in the designing these tags, we can expect an update in the near future.

As for other iOS editors, Apple has updated its RAW processing frameworks to support these new tags. For the most part, it “just works,” so you’ll find ProRAWs display properly inside Halide’s photo gallery. You can toggle tone mapping on and off with the Instant RAW button.

That said, not all metadata is exposed by Apple’s frameworks. They don’t even tell you whether the DNG is a native RAW or ProRAW. We’re certain this is just a matter running out of time. They launched this two weeks before Christmas, so this is clearly a feature that was coming down to the wire.

To get around this, we built our own proprietary DNG parser we call Dingus.

Dingus lets us interrogate low level tags within DNGs, which aren’t yet exposed by Apple. We’re using this to expose the bit depth and type of RAW in our metadata reviewer, but it’s also been useful for poking and prodding at ProRAW internals.

Is ProRAW Perfect?

ProRAW is a leap forward for everyone, but it will be especially impactful for beginning photographers.

If you know nothing about RAW, but want more flexibility in editing, shoot ProRAW. For true professionals, the decision is a bit more nuanced. Sometimes you’ll want to switch back to regular RAW.

First, ProRAW is only available on “Pro” level iPhones. Despite the usual conspiracy theories, Apple isn’t just flipping a bit in software to force you to spend more.

In the past, these algorithms did their math with lower bit depths, because their output was just low bit depth JPEGs. Outputting images in a higher bit depth requires twice the memory. Apple’s Pro iPhones have way more memory than non-Pro models, and ProRAW needs all of that. It’s that simple.

Once you get RAW in your hands, the first thing you’ll notice is capture speed. A traditional RAW capture takes as little as 50 milliseconds. ProRAW takes between two and three seconds to finish processing.

The built in iPhone camera does a great job hiding this, apparently processing each photo in the background in a queue. However, we’ve found the shutter stalls after firing three shots in quick succession.

ProRAW isn’t coming to burst mode anytime soon. This makes things difficult if you’re covering sports, have small children who refuse to stand still, or you’re a portrait photographer who takes hundreds of photos in a single session. There’s a chance you might miss that perfect shot.

In Halide, we decided to take a conservative approach at launch, and only let you capture one photo at a time. We’re a week away from the App Store shutting down for Christmas, so this is the worst possible time to contend with memory crashes. But we expect to speed things up soon.

The next issue we’ve found is sharpness and noise reduction. No multi-photo fusion is perfect. If you want the sharpest images with natural noise, and you’re not planning to boost your shadows through the roof, you might find “native” RAW is still the way to go.

In the field, we often found that in some conditions you can still get more detail in a shot with that quick-and-noisy regular RAW file.

Then there’s file size. A 12-bit ProRAW is 25mb, while a 12-bit native RAW is only around 12mb. This is almost certainly why the “RAW” button in the first party camera app defaults to off, and returns to off if you leave and return to the app. A casual photographer might leave it on all the time and eat up their iCloud storage in an afternoon.

Finally, there’s compatibility. Without something like Halide’s ProRAW+ setting, apps have to be updated to support DNG files. Sharing your ProRAW shot to Instagram doesn’t work:

And while Apple has done an amazing job supporting ProRAW development within its own ecosystem — just hop over to Apple’s Photos app, tap the “Edit” button, and you can edit a ProRAW the same way you edit a JPEG file — the DNG spec was only updated a month ago, so there’s no telling how long it will take for your favorite third-party RAW editors to adopt the new tags.

If you already know how to develop RAW files, and you aren’t shooting in a scenario where computational photography shines, you may find native RAWs give you more bang for your bytes.

Introducing ProRAW for Halide

We’re excited to announce Halide’s ProRAW support. We didn’t just add ProRAW and ticked the box. By actually extensively using ProRAW in the field and testing it we found how to make the best possible camera for it.

It starts with ProRAW+. When set to this mode, Halide will take a ProRAW photo along with a JPG file so you can quickly share and view images in apps that do not (yet) support RAW files. This makes it a lot easier to just leave ProRAW on and not run into any issues in other apps.

As we mentioned, ProRAW is great, but there’s tradeoffs.

As we beta tested our ProRAW support, it became obvious we had to make it easer to fiddle with capture settings without diving into Settings. Enter the new format picker menu. Just long-press on the RAW button, and you’ll be able to choose between RAW and ProRAW, your desired bit-depth, and whether you wish to save the processed version alongside your DNG.

Being able to quickly change your shooting format allows in-the-moment decisions depending on your exact needs.

As mentioned earlier, we allow you to customize your bit-depth, and disable capturing the JPEG version of your photo, inside Capture Settings. Together, you can expect to cut ProRAW file size in half without trading too much in your editing flexibility.

We also ensure to remember and persist your ProRAW settings. With great power comes great iCloud consumption, so please use this responsibly.

We’re still absorbing all of the implications of ProRAW, so we expect continue to iterate on our features over the next few months. We have a list of things we want to improve after the App Store holiday shutdown, so if you’re shooting ProRAW, 2021 is going to be an amazing year.

However, native RAW is not going away.

The vast majority of users can’t shoot ProRAW, there are circumstances where regular single-shot RAWs will be superior, and there are certain computational photography algorithms that rely on bayer-level information. We’ve got enough native RAW features planned to keep us busy for quite some time — and to keep bringing fantastic features to all iPhones that can run Halide.

The best part of building Halide, and writing these articles, is seeing what folks do with this stuff. If you’re proud of your ProRAW photo, be sure to tag us, because we’d love to see what you can do with it.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, congratulations on reading over three pictures. Now get shooting!

Understanding ProRAW was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Halide HQ, we’ve been busily working away on a very deep, technical analysis of what’s new in iPhone 12 cameras this year. All four of ’em. On Friday, we got our hands on the final iPhones in this year’s line-up, the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

The Pro Max was the wildcard this year. Apple devoted a whole section of their keynote to it, and we got a ton of questions about it on our Twitter. Some reviewers on the internet panned it as an indistinguishable improvement from the iPhone 12 camera, while others called it quite good.

We’ll get into the iPhone 12 camera — we have a lot of thoughts on that. But the iPhone 12 Pro Max tests were quite surprising. So surprising we’ve decided to create this whole separate post about it.

What Makes the iPhone 12 Pro Max Special

We had an advanced look at the Pro Max specs, but to recap, it has:

• A 47% larger sensor
• A faster ƒ/1.6 lens
• A brand-new ‘sensor shift’ stabilization system for low-light
• ISO sensitivity is 87% higher
• A new telephoto lens, reaching a new length of 65mm (full-frame equivalent)

Specs are cool, but now that we have the hardware we can take a deeper look at how these changes affect real-world photography.

A bigger sensor

The biggest news was that the iPhone 12 Pro Max got a bigger sensor. 47% bigger. Sounds big. Is it? What does that even mean? Let’s visualize it:

That’s significant. When iFixit took this chonker apart, they also noted how large it was:

Ok, practically speaking, what does this mean?

Imagine a camera sensor as a collection of lots of smaller sensors. Each collect red, green, or blue light. These sensors are packed together to get an image that measures 3024 by 4032 pixels. (Technically each pixel on that sensor is called a ‘photosite,’ as they collect, yes, photons)

You’d think a bigger sensor means more pixels — and indeed, a bigger sensor could allow you to pack in more pixels. But we’re at a point of diminishing returns in megapixel wars.

Instead, Apple decided to make the the photo sites bigger, because one most important aspects of image quality images (and really, life in general) is signal to noise.

Giving these sensor sites more room and making them larger makes them more sensitive to light. More light means more signal, less noise, and sharper results. Let’s look at a comparison:

Can you tell the difference? For reference, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is at the bottom. I can’t.

Here’s why we’re seeing stories that the camera is a minor difference at best: Most people who aren’t seeing the dramatic difference are shooting in daylight, with a fast ƒ/1.6 lens. On top of that, Apple’s intelligent image processing combines multiple shots together, which makes it harder to look into the hardware.

We get a better look with RAWs (shot with Halide, of course). RAWs omits steps like multi-exposure combination and noise reduction, there will be some noise; but that lets us see how much noise the camera really has to deal with.

Since the iPhone 12 has a bit more noise, there’s less detail. Still, the detail isn’t easy to spot in bright daylight. Everything changes between the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro Max the moment sunset begins. As shadows get darker and light gets dimmer, you can start seeing shifts in detail.

The difference gets dramatic as the sunset progresses:

Again, these are RAW files shot in Halide. Meanwhile, photos in the first-party Camera app get a bit… smudgy:

We can zoom in on this a bit to see that better:

It seems Apple’s Camera app applies just as much noise reduction to the 12 Pro Max image as it does for regular iPhone 12. This unfortunately ‘blurs’ superior details out of the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

This is even more evident when you look at images closely and there’s even less light. Take this shot I took passing a restaurant in Chinatown (the owner has consented with me putting up this image):

Smart HDR rescues detail in the highlights and shadows here, but it is at the expense of a lot of sharpness.

Mind you, this is a really close-up zoom of a cellphone photo. Our expectation is that it is kind of mushy and lacks detail. Instead, the iPhone 12 Pro Max packs in incredible levels of detail down to the pixel level.

It might not pack more resolution in terms of the image size, but the resolution in that 12-megapixel image is far higher. There’s just much more detail in every shot, especially in RAW.

The iPhone 12 Pro shot of the same scene shows the kind of noise that it normally being smudged out:

Seeing how there’s just that much more detail in the raw image data from the iPhone 12 Pro Max, it could stand to have less processing to show off its higher signal to noise ratio. It’s possible Apple will tweak the image pipeline in the future to bring some of that detail out better.

In the meantime, we got RAW photography. Hooray!

Now, with the sun past the horizon, there’s no contest between the iPhone 12 and the Pro Max anymore. In these, close-to-nighttime to nighttime shots the Pro Max is a clear winner.

We’d say this sensor is a big leap ahead in image quality.

In our first look at the hardware changes, we said larger sensors offer a different ‘look’. That means more depth of field, but it may also render scenes differently. If you’re a photographer that has been in the field for long enough to have made the move from APS-C to full-frame, you might have hoped for a similar sudden, dramatic change of ‘look’. Sorry: that’s not happening here.

Sensor shift

We’d need to point out that all examples were shot handheld. While you could do a comparison of the iPhone 12 vs. the iPhone 12 Pro Max by putting it on a tripod, it’s kind of a pointless benchmark unless you mount your phone on a tripod whenever you shoot. We believe good comparisons should be done in real-world conditions, which means handheld shots.

That bring us to the next big change. Since the iPhone 7 Plus, there’s been magical stabilization technology that counteract shaky hand movements, so you can land sharper shots. However, the stabilization was previously applied to the optics system.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max applies stabilization to the sensor. Since this is a a light, flat plane, it’s technically feasible to move further and faster than an entire lens assembly.

At first you may think this will help video. In practice, video stabilization is absurdly good on as-is, thanks to intelligent software that smoothly crops and transforms your video frames, even as you run down a street. Stabilizing sensor can help, but only so much. This isn’t a Steadicam.

Low light photography is a different story. Software can’t un-shake your hand. Night Mode on iPhone gets around this by taking a ton of photos and just throwing out the ones that ended up too shaky.

Now we see the iPhone 12 Pro Max pull ahead — way ahead, really — of its smaller iPhone 12 mini, 12 and 12 Pro siblings:

That’s a RAW shot. Taking a single frame, there’s a clear winner. But even in that multi-image-taking, auto-stabilizing Night Mode, the difference in detail is obvious:

(images via Austin Mann’s fantastic iPhone 12 Pro Max initial review)

Even though Night Mode involves heavy computational photography, it ultimately benefits from having sharper images to work with before it merges them into the final shot.

Achieving the impossible

The iPhone 12 Pro Max’ new sensor-shift technology really shines when you take away that computational magic and focus on traditional, single-shot photography.

Notice that sharp RAW shot we just looked at? That was taken at a fraction of a second. The longer you open the shutter, the more light you can let in, and the less noise you get.

With a traditional DSLR, nobody would dare take a one-second photos handheld.

Yet the iPhone 12 Pro Max can take sharp images at ridiculous exposure times.

How about a third to half a second?

This looks like an image I get out of a modern mirrorless camera. Here’s a comparison with the Night Mode in the Camera app, and the (poor thing) iPhone 12 Pro:

In this last comparison, you can see that Night Mode can get this shot, but it sacrifices lots of fine detail and makes the scene look a bit unnatural. The iPhone 12 Pro, with its more basic stabilization, can’t get a steady frame.

It would be impossible to get a shot like this on the iPhone 12, 11 Pro, or heck, the high-end digital cameras I have lying around the studio. This is very cool stuff.

65mm lens

As a professed lover of the 52mm telephoto lens on the iPhone 11 Pro, I was particularly excited about having an even longer telephoto lens. Yes, it’s just a bit longer, now reaching 65mm — 2.5× instead of the previous 2× zoom — but reach is reach.

I quite enjoying getting the extra reach:

A longer lens in this case means a slower aperture, so a bit less light collected. That, too, isn’t that noticeable until sunset:

After all: less light collected means a bit more noise. That’s OK before it gets really dark: you can see what kind of noise the image pipeline has to deal with well in the comparison above.

The iPhone 11 Pro and 12 Pro both feature a regular 52mm (2×) lens with an ƒ/2.0 aperture, while the 12 Pro Max’s makes due with ƒ/2.2. In practice, that makes it worse at night. And on top of receiving less light, longer lenses amplify any camera shake.

With Night Mode coming to all lenses on the iPhone 12 except the telephoto lens, that makes it less than ideal when it’s dark out. I found that once the sun sets, you are sometimes better off using the new and incredibly sharp, stabilized wide angle sensor and cropping the result.

It seems the first party camera agrees with me. Once it gets dark out, open up the app, tap the “2.5x” button, and cover the telephoto camera (on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, the top lens) with your finger. You won’t see it covered.

In low light, the first-party camera quietly changes over to the wide angle lens, which receives more light. It then crops the result. It’s deception, sure, but it’s classic Apple: they know what’s best for you.*

*a note: We don’t do this in Halide, since knowing exactly what lens you’re shooting with is important for creative control. But we tackle a different audience than Apple. We really do believe that their way of auto-magically switching and swapping lenses is the right decision when you’re trying to serve the broadest possible audience.

An Aside about the future: ProRAW

A few days ago, Apple released a beta of iOS 14.3, which includes ProRAW. Initially teased during the announcement of the iPhone 12 Pro, ProRAW is a new format by Apple that ostensibly brings the best of the huge computational advancements in the iPhone camera to a format that offers complete creative control.

We’re writing a deep dive on what ProRAW means, but there’s one practical implication worth talking about today. One reason people choose RAW is for fine grained control over noise-reduction, and unfortunately ProRAW files have already had some noise reduction applied. Not as much the JPEGs of the past, but it’s there.

For this and a few other reasons, ProRAW is less of a ‘true’ RAW, and more of a very high quality format for your shots. Aside from the noise reduction, it does expose fine control over magical processes like Smart HDR.

So far ProRAW has shown to be fantastic quite often, but we’ve also observed tradeoffs. However, ProRAW is currently in beta. We’ve been submitting feedback to Apple. Once ProRAW ships, we’ll publish our analysis. That being said, we can say today — with great confidence — that ProRAW is coming to Halide.

Anyway, back to regular ol’ RAWs…

Halide and the iPhone 12 Pro Max

Halide, as a pro camera app, has never captured RAW files this great out of an iPhone by a wide margin. We’re incredibly excited to begin work on getting even better results out of this camera.

So let’s get started: we’ve just released Halide 2.0.4, with updates for the new iPhone 12 Pro Max.

We have improved framelines and lens controls for the new 65mm lens, tweaked exposure logic and more to take full advantage of this new phone and its tiny mini sibling. We’re not done there, though: there seems to be a lot left for us to squeeze out of this camera.

Conclusion

There are varied opinions about the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Is it a huge leap forward in iPhone camera quality? We say yes— the results speak for themselves.

But why did so many first impressions fail to pick up on the improved quality? It’s in the name of the device: iPhone 12 Pro Max.

As developers of a camera app, the results mind-blowing. It achieves images previously only seen in dedicated cameras, with sensors four times its size. It allows photographers to get steady and well exposed shots in conditions that weren’t imaginable a year ago. It captures low-light shots beyond anything we’ve seen on an iPhone. By a lot.

If you are an advanced user, the type that uses more than just the stock apps, this phone offers a lot.

Compare it to when Apple releases a new chip. They’re already ahead of the curve, and then they release an even newer chip that blows the old one away. Some will ask: “What can this even be used for?” Before you know it, you have console quality graphics and amazing AR experiences.

We’d compare this camera to a next-generation chip. In daily use, an average person won’t notice the signal to noise ratio or longer lens or superb stabilization and sensitivity. But as developers like us build apps for it, and this camera system works its way into future iPhones over the next few years, we can expect even the ‘traditional’ camera market to be forced to step up.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max is a Pro photographer’s iPhone. And we couldn’t be more excited to start building for it.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max: Real Pro Photography was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s that time again. Every year, we take a deep dive into what is new in the iPhone camera. This year is special: Apple is introducing several new cameras in the iPhone 12 and a whole new sensor in the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

We’ll be doing a thorough analysis of the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro Max cameras, comparing them to previous iPhones and tearing down the new processing in Smart HDR 3 and the benefits of their new lenses. First, however, we’ll take a quick look at what is new in the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Why just the iPhone 12 Pro Max?

The iPhone 12 Pro Max is the first iPhone in a while to get a bigger sensor. Not just a bit bigger: the sensor is a whopping 47% larger, which should not just help it in low light but also allow for more depth of field, more detail in photos and generally a different ‘look’.

A note: These are just the hardware specs

Thanks to Halide’s Technical Readout feature, we can take a look at what an iPhone reports as its camera specifications.

iPhones tend to get better every year even when not changing their sensors and lenses; the real leaps in camera performance are made in computational photography, with merging many images and using AI and machine learning to augment the tiny sensors that fit into these magical devices we hold in our hands.

As usual, we’re following up with a look at the work that is being done to turn simple raw sensor data into such great shots.

What’s New?

47% Larger Sensor, 85% More Sensitive

A new sensor means new specs. Paired with the new, faster aperture the iPhone 12 gets across the line of ƒ/1.6, the iPhone Pro Max does not just gain low-light ability with its sheer sensor size or new in-body sensor-shift stabilization: the maximum ISO sensitivity of the sensor is up 85% to a maximum ISO of 7616.

That’s the highest ISO sensitivity we’ve seen in an iPhone, ever.

This should make for a pretty fantastic iPhone for night- or low-light time shooting.

While computational photography can help a lot with collecting more light over more shots, higher ISO can also help freeze motion better; this makes this iPhone uniquely more suited for capturing action in lower light. You can do a lot in software, but not everything.

A new telephoto lens — 25% zoomier

The technical readout confirms we’re going to about a 65mm (Full-frame equivalent) telephoto lens on the rear, with a slight sacrifice to light-collecting ability: we lose our nice ƒ/2.0 aperture and go back to the iPhone XS and X telephoto-standard ƒ/2.2. Not too terrible.

When composing, this is the change in your field of view:

That’s a nice 25% of extra zoom.

Here’s an actual comparison of how it would shoot and what kind of image you would get:

It’s not a huge change, but it might be more dramatic in real-life use.

What isn’t new

There’s changes, but there’s also things that stayed the same.

Ultra-wide ultra-same

Every lens seems to have gotten a revision with this new, larger phone, and very eagle-eyed iPhone users might notice that it is also… larger:

However, it seems by the technical readout and from reviews that the ultra-wide lens and sensor is the same one as in all the other iPhone 12s. It might get a larger bump on the back of your phone, but it’s not collecting more light as a result. Sorry, Pro Max-ers.

You do get a slightly improved ISO sensitivity and night mode on all iPhone 12 Ultra-Wide cameras. Yay!

Longer lens, same sensor

No changes in the telephoto sensor. This is unfortunate, as the telephoto lens is my favorite:

Catching the sunrise on Twin Peaks. 52mm lens, iPhone 11 Pro, @halidecamera Mark II. pic.twitter.com/HBrzSycdf7

Its sensor has been a bit… well, it is just not as great as that awesome regular wide-angle sensor. I don’t want to call it ‘underwhelming’, but it’s been the same size since the iPhone XS and it still struggles a bit in low light. I would certainly be excited by a revision next year.

You might notice this even more on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, as the iPhone’s default camera app will just crop the image from your (now even faster, better-in-the-dark) Wide lens when the light gets low or conditions are otherwise non-optimal for the tiny telephoto sensor. It’ll be interesting to see if the Pro Max more aggressively forces the telephoto to step back in low light.

Same old TrueDepth

Since the iPhone X, the infamous ‘notch’ of the iPhone has stayed the same size. That little lip at the top houses a camera and a few other interesting tidbits like an IR flood illuminator and sensor; they have not been miniaturized or changed in this revision. Last year, the sensor got a small bump to 12 megapixels and a wider lens; perhaps next year we’ll see a smaller notch and corresponding camera changes.

iPhone 12 Pro Max Technical Readout Comparison

That’s it for my take — here’s the raw specs you’ve been waiting for. Changes from last year’s iPhone 12 Pro Max are bold.

A note on these changes

Every year we are tempted to look at just the bare specs of iPhone cameras. As there’s now competing smartphones throwing around terms like 108 megapixels and 100-times zoom, you would be tempted to make a judgment based purely on numbers. We’d caution against that.

Every year we re-emphasize that quality in mobile photography is now largely coming from the integration of hardware and software and increasingly significant leaps in processing in the form of computational photography. This year is no exception, new sensor size or not. When looking at the actual images coming out of smartphones, the iPhone continues to come out on top — and we wouldn’t be surprised if the iPhone 12 Pro Max sets the new standard for mobile photography quality, regardless of its megapixel count.

We’re curious to take these new iPhones’ new software pipeline apart in our upcoming analysis, to see just how much they can squeeze out of a single RAW frame. With ProRAW coming this year, it’s an exciting year for iPhone photography as Apple increasingly begins to treat it as a real camera, with proper RAW support, various settings for managing the imaging pipeline, and technology like sensor-shift image stabilization.

One thing is for sure: the new iPhone 12 is a fantastic camera:

yup yup yup I like the iPhone 12 camera RAW files pic.twitter.com/5jLbgaC8xA

Check back in with us for our upcoming software- and RAW analysis of iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro Max.

This technical readout was brought to you by Halide. You can shoot RAW with every iPhone with Halide, and get pro-level controls. We just introduced a new version of Halide called Mark II, which packs some of our best tools and a total redesign. For more information on the app, check out our website.

iPhone 12 Pro Max Preview: The Camera Hardware Changes was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After eighteen months of work, today we’re excited to announce a new photography app. It takes everything we’ve learned since launching the acclaimed manual photography app, Halide, and combines it with the technology developed for Spectre, Apple’s 2019’s iPhone App of the Year.

We call this new app Halide Mark II.

Mark II is more than an update: it’s a new camera. An elegant, intuitive camera casual photographers can enjoy, while providing the most advanced features expert photographers demand.

We have a lot to talk about — so much we can’t fit it all in one post — so today we’ll highlight the things that most excite us.

Next Generation Design

In 2016, we set out to build a camera that is both approachable to beginners and intuitive to experts. Three years in, we knew it was time to take things to the next level.

We approached this as a bottom-up redesign. We set out retain all of our strengths, while improving every single aspect of how the app looked and felt. We looked through every screen — every pixel — from the fresh perspective only possible with years of real-world use.

The result? At first glance, Halide Mark II looks as simple as the built-in camera…

But looks can be deceiving. Tap the “AF” button to disable auto-focus, and watch the UI transform to support manual focus, with focus aiding tools.

There’s a theme that runs throughout the interface: “Stay out of the way.” For example, when you begin dragging the focus dial, our new Focus Loupe activates. When you release your finger, it deactivates. We call this Intelligent Activation.

You’ll notice something else: as you tap to toggle any of the icons in the focus dial, Halide will briefly describe your action:

Not only does this confirm your action, it also helps new photographers learn the names and purpose of these features. We want Halide to be a powerful tool to not just take photos, but learn more about photography. We’ll talk more about that later.

As form follows function, technical advancements freed us to further simplify our interface. Consider our manual-exposure toggle. In Halide 1 we put that button front-and-center because, at the time, we frequently switched to manual controls to deal with noise. At the time, it made sense to have that control within thumb reach.

A few years later, we tackled that noise problem head-on by developing our own auto exposure algorithm. Now we find ourselves reaching for the manual exposure toggle less often, so we’ve freed up that prime “thumb reach” zone for other controls. It feels really nice.

If you still need to switch to manual a lot, have no fear! Simply swipe left from the edge of the screen — or tap the ‘Auto’ icon in the top right ‘ear’ of your iPhone — to reveal the new mode switcher.

All of this is typeset in a beautiful, all-new typeface. It’s one of three completely custom typefaces in Mark II designed from scratch to resemble the aesthetic of the etched text on film cameras, with a modern twist. We call this family of typefaces Ambrotype, consisting of a new regular, bold and monospaced variant.

Its weights and design language were harmonized from the get-go with our in-app iconography and the styling of modern iPhones.

We embrace using every pixel of the iPhone screen, and that goes for the latest iPhones too.

The new OLED displays of the iPhone 12 curve up right to the edge, and so does our interface: you will notice the space next to the ‘notch’ is used for our histogram or new waveform; we show if you have location tagging enabled with a small icon up in a wee corner of the display, and even your last shot sits tucked into the bottom left, with its shape adjusted for the curvature of your particular iPhone’s screen corner.

That lets you see more of your last shot, and enjoy every bit of screen real estate you have. It also frees up more space for what matters: the photo you are framing.

But not everything is about chasing the latest and greatest: The new interface of Mark II was an opportunity to rethink everything, and nowhere is this clearer than on iPhones with home buttons, like the iPhone SE 2.

When the iPhone X launched, we redesigned Halide to cope with its new, taller screen. Now, we’re bringing that reachability to every phone: All controls fall within easy thumb reach.

The Halide photo reviewer has also been redesigned and gained many features. You’ll notice it gives you more information at a glance, but you can now also dig in to surface relevant metadata about your photos.

There’s also a new, powerful feature in there, and we have some big plans for our new reviewer in the future.

But first, let’s talk about one of the biggest new features in Halide Mark II:

The Power of RAW without the Complexity

Halide is well known and beloved as a way to take RAW photos on iPhone.

When you take a photo with the built-in camera app, it makes a ton of important creative decision on your behalf by saving your shot as a JPG. Think of shooting in JPG as the camera doing a lot of very quick edits.

That’s great for most people, but a photographer’s involvement in development is part of the artistic process.

While cameras today are incredibly smart, they aren’t mind readers. This is why many folks shoot RAW: you get an image file with zero edits applied, so you can make choices yourself.

This year Apple embraced this advanced workflow by announcing ProRAW. ProRAW allows you to adjust — or just disable — the iPhone’s various computational photography features such relighting and much more. This feature is coming to third-party apps soon, and Halide is ProRAW ready.

That said, it’s way too early to tell just what ProRAW provides out of the box, and any tradeoffs compared to “classic” RAWs. It’s also not coming to every iPhone that is out today and only half of the ones coming out tomorrow, as ProRAW is limited to iPhone 12 Pro.

So today, let’s talk about three challenges we’ve seen when beginners dip their toes into RAW. Then let’s talk about what we’re doing to address them.

First, unprocessed RAWs look pretty bad when you first load them. Beginners have no idea what levers to push and pull to get what the system JPEG gives you automatically. Many folks give up. Some reach out to support to ask, “Why are my RAWs worse than JPEGs?”

A second problem is that today’s iPhones can’t perform advanced computational photography while capturing classic RAWs. This is confusing if you enable simultaneous “RAW+JPEG” capture and discover your JPEG is sometimes worse than what you’re used to.

The third problem affects beginners and experts alike: the most popular photo filter apps can’t load RAWs. This means you have to open your RAW in a dedicated editing app to create a JPEG, just to bring your photo into the app you actually want to use. It’s a cumbersome experience.

These problems leave photographers in a conundrum: “Do I want to take a photo that’s ready to share, or easier to edit?” Now you can have the best of both worlds.

Coverage: RAW Without Compromise

Mark II is the first camera to capture both classic RAWs and computational photos in one burst with a feature we call Coverage. Now you can take amazing photos that leverage all the advanced photography of the latest iPhones, while having a RAW in your back pocket in case you think you can do better.

Coverage takes a photo with all of Apple’s smartest processing: that is, Smart HDR 3, Deep Fusion, the works — and then also snaps a RAW DNG and saves it all in one file. So you can shoot first, and ask questions (like “Do I want to edit this as a RAW file?”) later.

We built Coverage through software-based bracketing, which unfortunately leaves a split-second delay between the RAW and processed images. Since this might confuse casual photographers, we leave Coverage off by default. You can enable it in “Capture Settings.”

You’ll see Coverage is enabled in your viewfinder when the RAW icon looks like a little stack.

Instant RAW

Next, Mark II removes the complexity of developing RAWs with a feature we call Instant RAW.

To really harness the power of RAW, you have to do quite a bit of editing to get it looking even somewhat like the JPG your iPhone produces. We know that RAW files can have amazing results:

Parisian yonder.#HalideMKII pic.twitter.com/wgykHFDReu

But not everybody has the ability or time to develop RAW files precisely to that level. It makes RAW inaccessible to most users.

Instant RAW develops your RAW file in one tap. Just like how Smart RAW helps Halide expose RAW correctly using Machine Learning, with Instant RAW Halide goes through a 17-step process of intelligently developing your file to get the best possible result. It’s optimized differently for different iPhones; it enhances detail and color; and above all, it’s neutral.

iPhone photos are increasingly intelligently processed: they are a result of many photos, merged, intelligently combined, enhanced and massaged. A RAW capture is a single shot. It makes for a very different look —and yes, it has grain, just like a film photo — but we think it’s beautiful.

Instant RAW can work as a midpoint between a completely unedited RAW and a totally processed JPEG. In a world where the-built in camera has its own filters, Instant RAW is a “No Filter” module. You are free to use and share the result directly, or use it as a starting point for editing, just like ProRAW.

That said, sometimes results are amazing straight-out-of-camera.

Look closely at the fur in the following photos. (Instant RAW on the right)

How do we recover so much latent detail? As we said before, Instant RAW is much more than a photo filter. Our process hooks into the RAW processing pipeline so we can operate on linear, 16-bit data as we process exposure, color, local contrast, and more.

In summary, we’re really excited about what we’ve heard about ProRAW, and will embrace it as soon as it’s available. But folks on every device that isn’t iPhone 12 Pro (or just end up preferring “classic” RAWs) have a lot to be excited about today.

Groundbreaking Focus and Exposure Tools

Mark II overflows with new tools to help with focus and exposure. First we revamped our existing Luminance and Color histograms. You can now keep them small and out of the way if you want your full attention on your photo, or enlarge them to obsess over fine details.

But our groundbreaking change is the addition of a third type of visualization, the Waveform. Up to now, this powerful tool was only used in high-end motion picture work, and we’re the first app to bring it to photography. In short, this tool horizontally scans over your image to exposed which color channels are clipped.

If you don’t quite get it, don’t worry, we’ll go into detail in a future post. In the mean time, marvel in how cool it looks.

You may be familiar with our next tool, Zebra Stripes. These stripes appear when parts of your images are either clipped, or fall below a noise threshold.

However, it’s often overlooked that images are made up of three separate channels. So you may take a photo of a bright red rose thinking nothing is overexposed, only to find out later that the red channel is clipped.

What if we color-code the zebra stripes when you enter this danger zone? We call them Color Zebras. 🌈🦓

If both red and green are clipping, it turns yellow. If all three channels are clipped, you get familiar grey stripes. Don’t worry about memorizing this stuff. Just know that when you see different-colored zebras, you’re in a danger zone.

XDR

These are all incredible features on their own, but there’s one final aspect that makes all of these tools revolutionary. It’s a little technical, so bear with us.

Up to now, every image visualization tool you’ve used, on every camera, has lied. You think that the data you see in the image represents what will be recaptured by your camera. In fact, every camera shows you post-processed, 8-bit result. They’re close, but if you’re trying to get the absolute best results, close doesn’t cut it.

Consider that video of the Golden Gate Bridge from earlier. Your histogram, analyzing 8-bit data, might think the sky is clipped. If you saw that in your zebra stripes, you’d say, “It’s over exposed, I should go down turn things down a bit.” In fact, the cloud are not over exposed in the RAW, and there’s no need to turn down your exposure. By under exposing, you’re now going to lose details in the shadows!

Halide is the first and only camera app that visualizes the full 14-bit RAW data in real time. We call this XDR Analysis. When RAW streaming is active, the zebras, waveform, and histogram is based on the real sensor data.

Why is this a big deal? We have a deep technical dive planned for the future, so today we’ll keep this short. Bits work in powers-of-two, so jumping from 8-bit to 14-bit means 64x more accuracy.

We’re not going to lie, this took a lot of shenanigans to get working. For performance and battery life, we only enable RAW streaming when interactively adjusting ISO or shutter speed. You’ll notice the moment it engages, as your exposure tools will suddenly shift to reveal the honest truth.

A Camera That Makes You A Better Photographer

We have users that range from professional National Geographic photographers and journalists to people that have never used any camera but their iPhone’s. We pride ourselves on being easy to use, but photography is still a pretty complicated hobby to pick up.

We found that there’s two ways to help people take better photos.

The first is creating a button or a filter to magically make images look better. This is great: it makes for instant results, feels empowering and requires little effort from aspiring photographers. In a way, Apple’s Smart HDR and our Instant RAW do this. Unfortunately, this does limit creativity, as you have to make decisions on the photographer’s behalf in how images are taken and rendered.

The second is helping people learn the fundamentals of photography. Our simple interface has already helped many of people learn more about RAW, manual focus, and more. But we can do better. We can be an app that makes people better photographers.

That’s why in Mark II, you’ll now be able to start learning more about photography in the app. We’re starting this in a simple 10-day course for new and experienced users alike, that highlights the features of Halide, but also explains photographic concepts through easy examples.

In the future, we’re building further on this, working with photographers to create lessons and content that are great for both beginners and advanced Halide users alike.

And more

Phew. And that’s not it. As we said before, we can’t squeeze everything into one post — we’d love for you to discover what is new. We packed in over 50 new features and changes. You can download Halide Mark II here.

What’s Next?

The old saying goes, “If I had four hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first two hours sharpening the axe.” Well, much of the last eighteen months has involved building sharpening our axe, laying down new infrastructure to ship bigger, more ambitious features faster than ever before. This is the foundation of our new Halide. We have some really big plans for the future.

And now for the most important question:

How much does Mark II cost?

Halide is now three and a half years old. We haven’t charged for an update in all of that time.

We could write a whole blog post on our approach to pricing, because we put a lot of thought into this.

We fiddled with the price of Halide 1.0 to figure out “price elasticity.” We compiled a list of Pay-Once prices for similar apps, and found prices ranging from $30 to $60. Finally, we solicited feedback from Mark II beta testers; after walking folks through all the new features, we asked them to name a price. Any price.

With all that in mind, we’re confident launching Halide Mark II at $36 (for new users). To celebrate the launch, we are discounting it to $30. As we have done in the past, we plan to raise that price as we add more features.

Introducing Memberships

Pay-Once is not going away, but we’ve decided to offer an alternative that fits quite well into our long term plans. We’re calling it a membership. We think there are three reasons to consider a membership.

First, there’s price. $11.99 per year. Yes, year, not month. Long term, this is cheaper than buying future upgrades.

Second, memberships include perks above and beyond the core Halide experience, like exclusive icons.

Third, memberships allow us to offer things with ongoing costs in the future.

We recognize subscriptions are a new thing. If you’re willing to take a chance with us today, we’re going to reward you by locking in $9.99 at launch. In the near future, we will raise it to the normal $11.99. As we build out more features, we expect the price for new members to rise. Existing members keep whatever price they started at.

We want our early supporters, decades from now, bragging to their friends about how little they pay. We want to be the next Costco Hot Dog.

And one more thing to sweeten the deal: we’re offering a one week free trial.

Unfortunately, we now have to make Halide free-to-download for all of this to work. Any sort of subscription — even optional — acts as a lightning rod for toxic reviews. If you like what we’ve been doing, please consider taking a moment to leave a review. It goes a long way.

The Price For Existing Users

Now what about existing users? Unfortunately, the App Store does not offer upgrades. We explored workarounds, like clever uses of app bundles, but found these tricks too complicated. They also require having two Halide’s in the App Store simultaneously, and we don’t want new users accidentally downloading the wrong version.

Next we considered locking new Mark II features behind an In-App-Purchase in Halide 1, but that would mean carving up our app into chunks and delivering an inferior experience to some users. That just feels wrong.

If we want to do right for our most loyal users, there’s really one solution.

Anyone who has already paid for Halide 1 gets Mark II for free. We’re also including a year of members’ updates.

We’d still ask that if you love the app, consider supporting us by purchasing a membership. You will lock in today’s introductory low price, and we’ll even give you special black icon that only early supporters are able to unlock and use.

Summary

Well that’s enough for one day. Keep your eyes out for future posts where we dive into more detail about these huge big features in Mark II. But to summarize…

Halide Mark II is a whole new app. It’s completely redesigned, features an all-new set of RAW tools for everyone, and packs the most powerful pro photography tools on the App Store. We packed over 50 new features and changes into the app.

This huge update does cost money, but existing Halide users get it for free. New users can either pay once, or join a premium membership for added perks.

This has been an epic undertaking for our three-person team. It wouldn’t have been possible to spend the last year on this without your support. From the bottom our hearts, thank you.

It would mean so much to us if you would spread the word on Twitter, Instagram, etc. — and tell your friends. Again: thank you! We can’t wait to hear what you think.

— Ben, Sebastiaan, and Rebecca aka Lux

Special thanks for this release go to:

Jelmar Geertsma (type design);

Martijn Bosgraaf (3D rendering and modeling);

Jackson Hayes (video, web, testing, support and too many things to count);

Louie Mantia (icon design of some of these special app icons);

Jonathan Hollander (web engineering);

Our testers and supporting users;

Friends and family that have missed us and supported us all these sleepless nights.

Thank you all so much!

Introducing Halide MkII was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s iPhone 12 day! A lot was announced today, from tiny HomePods to new iPhones and magnetic accessories, but as we make one of the more well known camera apps on iOS, we really cared about one thing:

What’s new in iPhone photography?

Here at Halide HQ (Halide HQ in COVID 2020 being, all three of us at home) we were reeling with the amount of information dropped on us. Here’s a very quick summary.

You can also read our initial impressions on Twitter, of course:

OK, there's a lot of stuff to be exited about with cameras and photography on iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. Let's unpack (thread). pic.twitter.com/ylNrmLxohE

Hardware

Even though most iPhone users will not likely be upgrading from an iPhone 11, we’ll use that phone from last year as our baseline to see what is new in iPhone camera hardware-land.

Note that most major improvements in photography on phones come in software nowadays; we usually expect to see minor changes in hardware. Evolution, not revolution.

Let’s start with what’s unchanged: On the iPhone 12, 12 mini and 12 Pro (non-Max), the sensor on the main (or “wide”) and ultra-wide cameras is unchanged. The 11 Pro and 12 Pro will both still come with the same telephoto lens and sensor as well.

That’s where similarities end. That main wide camera gets a new lens, which according to Apple lets in 27% more light thanks to its faster (that is, bigger) ƒ1.6 aperture (previously ƒ1.8) and sharper 7-element construction.

There is some mention of sharpness improvements on the ultra-wide lens, but we’re unsure if this is a software correction improvement or a new lens design — or both. The images certainly look sharper.

But if you like large phones, this is your year. The iPhone 12 Pro Max has the real goods.

In addition to a better lens, the 12 Pro Max has the room to pack a new, 47% larger sensor. That means bigger pixels, and bigger pixels that capture more light simply means better photos. More detail in the day, more light at night. That combines with the lens to result in almost twice as much light captured: Apple claims an 87% improvement in light capture from the 11 Pro. That’s huge.

But that’s not its only trick: the 12 Pro Max’s Wide system also gets a new sensor-shift OIS system. OIS, or Optical Image Stabilization, lets your iPhone move the camera around a bit to compensate for your decidedly unsteady human trembly hands. That results in smoother video captures and sharp shots at night, when the iPhone has to take in light over a longer amount of time.

Again, only the 12 Pro Max gets this; it will allow it to do thousands of corrections per second; it will be interesting to see how much of a difference this makes against its smaller siblings.

Photos out of this camera system will be pretty fantastic. Conspicuously absent is a big megapixel boost. Android flagship phones have been touting absurd megapixel counts (like Samsung’s 108 megapixel camera); Apple is simply not participating in this race.

The megapixels across the board are unchanged. This huge new sensor? 12 megapixels. The ultrawide? 12 megapixels. The telephoto? You guessed it, 12. The selfie camera? 12 megapixels.

On the Pro Max, the telephoto camera also gets an upgrade. It can look a bit further now, to 65mm vs. its previous 52mm. Why only the Pro Max gets this is a bit of a mystery, but it will enable a nice, high zoom range (again, nothing crazy here like Huawei’s 100x zoom). The new 65mm telephoto lens does lose a little bit of light gathering capability as its lens is a bit slower at ƒ2.2 vs. the iPhone 11 Pro / 12 Pro’s ƒ2.0 52mm lens.

Finally, the 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max both gain something we’ve seen in the new iPad Pro: a LiDAR sensor. What’s a LiDAR sensor? We did a very deep dive, complete with a proof of concept app for mapping 3D space in this blog post:

LIDAR: Peek Into The Future with iPad Pro

LiDAR on the iPad Pro did more for AR and very little for photography. On the iPhone 12 Pro, it promises to vastly speed up autofocus and help with Portrait mode.

As it stands, Portait mode combines data from multiple cameras as well as using Machine Learning to add depth to a scene. More data is always better, so we’re excited to dive into it with Halide’s Depth Mode to see how high resolution the new combined depth sensing is.

Hardware Summary:

iPhone 11 to iPhone 12 : A better wide camera lens that collects more light, an unspecified but better ultrawide camera.

iPhone 11 Pro to iPhone 12 Pro: The same improvements as above, and the same telephoto camera we get in the iPhone 11 Pro. But: LIDAR!

iPhone 11 Pro to iPhone 12 Pro Max: Okay, now there’s no comparison. This is a much better Wide camera, with almost double the light collection, a new sensor, improved OIS and more. It has a new and greater zoom range on its telephoto lens. This thing is a beast. And it also gets LiDAR!

Software

As we said before, we really expect to see the greatest leaps in photographic improvement on phone cameras to come in software. Google has demonstrated this, with the first Night Mode that does seemingly impossible night shots on tiny phone cameras to various other computational tricks.

The key here is combining the very powerful processors in our phones with the ability to take many photos at once; something that small sensors can do better than the large and high-megapixel sensors of large professional mirrorless and SLR digital cameras. This is how our app Spectre (which Apple chose as 2019’s App of the Year) can do handheld 9-second long exposures. It’s all in the smarts.

We noticed that with the iPhone XS, Apple started to publicly shed light on, and market, its smart computational photography systems. Smart HDR was introduced then, which promised to combine many exposures at once in an instant when you press the shutter to produce images with better detail in shadows and highlights. It wasn’t perfect; some felt like it was aggressively smoothing over faces, for instance.

With Smart HDR 3 on iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, Apple segments images to prevent that kind of thing happening. This was already happening on iPhone 11, but this is a software challenge that only gets better with more processing power. Its other computational photography technique, Deep Fusion — a technology that kicks in in low and medium light — is promised to be improved as well.

Once you get more processing power, you can also start combining all these smart photography processes. We previously got Night Mode on iPhone 11 and 11 Pro.

Now it’s everywhere: Night mode is coming to the ultra-wide camera and selfie (TrueDepth) camera. What’s more, iPhone 12 and 12 Pro do just that smart combining of technologies: you can now get Night Mode to kick in on your Portrait photos.

This is big: a lot of crazy computational photography happening real-time. For this to work, the phone has to compare data from LIDAR and multiple cameras to infer depth, render real-time blur while also doing some crazy Night Mode enhancements. This is where that incredibly fast, Neural Engine and bigger ISP (image signal processor) toting A14 chip comes in handy.

Apple benefits from this tight integration of hardware and software: the new chip and better software enable better noise reduction, which means better video in low light (and photos, probably). Apple says the new ISP (Image Signal Processor) on the chip is to thank, but I bet some machine learning is involved. Apple claims 87% better low-light video on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and states that on all phones, the new ISP allows better noise reduction for more detail. I bet some Machine Learning is used in this noise reduction, too.

RAW comes to iPhone

This was scary to us for a moment: a lot of people buy Halide to shoot RAW on iPhone. And why not? The cameras on iPhones are incredibly impressive and can shoot shots like this in RAW:

NYC moods. 52mm lens, iPhone 11 Pro, @halidecamera RAW. 🏙 pic.twitter.com/AbtZowNstg

Now, RAW gets stage time. Apple announced ProRAW. We had previously written about how RAW is both handicapped and benefits from not getting the ‘smart’ photography benefits of Smart HDR and Deep Fusion, which prompted us to release a Halide update with a feature called Smart RAW:

Halide 1.10: The Smartest RAW

ProRAW, according to Apple, gives you the standard RAW along with this pipeline information, which should offer some fantastic flexibility when editing. Note that this might be a custom format; little is known, and it seems it was only announced and might be limited to the iPhone 12 Pro.

It’s also listed as ‘coming soon’:

More on that as we find out about it. Apple announced an API, so we’re eager to get our hands dirty on it.

Other improvements

There’s a small slew of other improvements: Machine learning improvements are said to have further improved Portrait mode. Night mode now comes to Timelapses, and video can now be captured in 10-bit HDR with Dolby Vision, a remarkable first. As we learn more about the soft- and hardware of these devices, including its Technical Readouts, we’ll post them here.

Feel free to send us any questions on Twitter!

iPhone 12 Event: All The Camera News was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our team is excited and inspired by the technologies and announcements of this year. However, we can’t let products overshadow the time we live in. Normally we use this space for product announcements, but today we’d talk to talk about a few things we believe in deeply.

First off, Black Lives Matter. As a team and as people, we are dedicated to doing the necessary listening and work needed to fight systemic racism. We stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and we pledge to stay committed to fight racial injustice. It should not have taken us until 2020 to get here. We ask that you join us in supporting this cause.

We are actively working on long-term initiatives to promote Black photographers and look forward to using our resources and channels to create a lasting impact beyond this news cycle. We look forward to sharing some of our efforts with our new product releases this year. We also urge you to reach out to your local government representatives and demand they rethink their law enforcement and defund the police.

What can we do as a company? Since starting Lux Optics, we’ve donated over $25,000 to charities. It’s a good start, but we want to do more.

2% for Causes

In the last month we’ve thought about how to make charity an ongoing effort in our company. We did some research, and 1% for the Planet caught our attention. It is a formal organization where the member companies pledge to donate 1% of profits toward environmental charities.

To start, today we are pledging 1% for Society. 1% of all profits will go toward helping create a society that is equitable and good for everyone. To that effect, so far we’ve selected the following charities:

• Campaign Zero
• ACLU
• Equal Justice Initiative
• Black Girls Code

However, society and the planet are not two separate issues. Often times, societal oppression directly overlaps with environmental injustice. That’s why we’re also applying to join 1% for the Planet. With these commitments, we will have an ongoing effort to support the causes we consider the most important issues facing us right now.

For transparency, we will have a post every year to detail the organizations that we donate to and solicit input on other great charities we can support.

We Are Not Done

We consider 2% the minimum of what we will donate every year, and we will continue to donate in other ways.

For example, we’ve decided that instead of giving new hires a signing-bonus, we will have a “charity bonus,” where they will have $5,000 donated to a charity of their choosing. Earlier this year saw our first hire, Rebecca, and she selected The Vanessa T Marcotte Foundation, which strives to stop violence against women in society.

In Closing

Our little 3 person company wouldn’t exist without your support — we want to thank you for helping us support these causes when it matters: now, and tomorrow. Feel free to let us know what you think of our efforts, and how we can do better.

Doing The Right Thing was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s Halide’s third birthday! Every year, we’re going to celebrate with a recap. Last year was big. Buckle up, because this one’s a rollercoaster.

In the last year, we’ve released five major updates to Halide. Our second app, Spectre, was chosen by Apple as 2019 iPhone App of the Year. While 2020 turned into a rather challenging year, we’re relieved to report things are going to be all right.

Even when things go well, one does well by remembering Ed Catmull’s advice: “Success hides problems.” That’s why we’re going to be fully transparent, sharing where we missed our marks, and a few of our anxieties. We’ll explain how we’re addressing these things, so they don’t grow into real problems.

But that’s not all: this year, we’re looking at the future. We’re looking at what we’re building next, and have one of our most exciting announcements yet — so stick around to the end.

The Lost Summer

This time last year, we had just finished a series of small updates to Spectre to settle the app into a solid state. Now we were ready to roll up our sleeves and work on our next huge Spectre update. Sadly, this story ends with our only misfire of 2019.

Spectre covers a lot of new territory for me, and I never studied the math behind computer vision while in school. Our next big update involved a lot more theory, and I underestimated the time spent decyphering funny symbols.

It took two months to get a functional prototype up and running. When we finally tested it in the field, sometimes the results were amazing, and sometimes they sucked. We hold ourselves to very high standards, and we knew this wasn’t ready for prime time.

Meanwhile, a storm brewed on the horizon: iOS 13. At the start of summer, we tested Halide with the first iOS beta, and found significant issues. We filed tickets with Apple and hoped for the best, but as iOS 13 reached its last few betas in August, it was clear these issues weren’t going to be fixed in time. If we didn’t find workarounds, we expected users breaking down our doors with torches and pitchforks.

So we halted work on Spectre to find iOS 13 workarounds for Halide.

Halide 1.13 launched with little fanfare but no complaints, which is all we hoped for. It was now too late to finish the Spectre update we’d started over summer, because Fall means two things: pumpkin spice lattes and new iPhone hardware.

Fall

The iPhone 11 Pro introduced a three camera module. In our first prototype, we just set the zoom button to cycle between cameras, but it was obvious that having to cycle through all the lenses would be annoying.

We rethought the interaction and designed a new control, inspired by pie menus — but with the classic gestural flexibility and power that you’ve come to expect from Halide. Quick swipes enable faster lens switches than any other camera app around.

As we started playing with the experience, we thought, “You know what would be cool? A preview of the focal length crop!”

And so our lens guides were launched in Halide 1.14.

Before we could catch our breath and get back to work on Spectre, Apple had one last card up its sleeve with iOS 13.2: they had opened up Deep Fusion and Smart HDR to third party developers! These “smart processing” features have been a user request for some time, so we dropped everything to add them to Halide.

Whenever Apple releases a new device, we update our metering algorithms to make the most of the new sensors’ characteristics. So while I worked on Smart Processing, Sebastiaan explored the iPhone 11 sensor in the field. These featured all launched in Halide 1.15, alongside a deep dive into the new hardware.

The email

Just as things were calming down, and we were returning to work on Spectre, we got a mysterious email from Apple. The email said:

“ I have an opportunity I’d like to talk to you about that I think you’ll find interesting.”

In a follow-up call, we found out Apple selected Spectre as 2019’s iPhone App of the Year.

Apple invited us to a celebration in New York, to meet press, executives, and other award winners. They also asked us to put together a demo for the event. This was tricky — have you noticed all of Spectre’s marketing photos feature the outdoors?

We spent two weeks putting together a special build for the event, optimized for light painting on the iPhone 11 Pro.

It even worked with PixelStick, an LED bar that lets you flash custom patterns as you wave it in the air.

We never ended up using the PixelStick at the event, because it takes a little too much practice for casual folks who would only be there for a minute. Regardless, the event went off amazing!

The Winter of our Discontent

In the followings days, Sebastiaan and I faced an existential question. “Where do we see this going?”

There’s a million things we want to do, but the lost Spectre update was a warning sign that we’re bumping up against our limits. In the last year it’s felt like we’ve had to weigh the opportunity cost of everything. Does it make sense to spend two weeks building a demo for Apple’s event? (Absolutely.) Should we spend a few days writing this post? A few days doesn’t feel like much until you realize all product work grinds to a halt.

This is the point we’re supposed to hire someone else, but it’s scary. When it’s just the two of us, we have absolute freedom. If we make a dumb business move we only hurt ourselves. When you add an employee, now you’re risking someone else’s livelihood.

In the past, we’ve mostly planned a few months ahead. Our product vision boiled down to, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”. That’s great for individual features, and even brought us to our second app. But if we’re going to bring on someone else, we need a long term vision. So we sat down and sketched it out.

We have three projects on the horizon. There’s our big Spectre update, which has the working title Banner. There’s a second project, Stark, which is even larger in scope but with fewer technical risks. Finally, there’s our most ambitious project, Fury.

At this point, Banner has too many unknowns. For now, we’ll focus on Stark, which allows us to develop a better understanding of Banner’s challenges. We hope to launch Stark in 2020, Fury in 2021, and Banner somewhere in between.

That brings us to worries for our first employee. If updates to our current apps slow as we approach the final months before launch, we should expect sales to slow. We need enough money in the bank to weather the storm. Fortunately, we had App of the Year.

In the past, Sebastiaan and I just split our profits every month. This time, we set aside a safety buffer for our first employee. Even if app sales drop to $0, we should be able to cover six month of salary.

As 2019 drew to a close, we had a plan. Convince an amazing developer to join our team, and focus all of our efforts on Stark.

Welcome to 2020

If I could pick one moment to summarize 2020, it was the call from my brother on a Sunday morning in January.

“Dad had a stroke.”

I dropped everything and hopped on the first flight to Boston. After his emergency surgery and aftermath, my brother and I spent the next month helping our dad settle back into daily life. I’m happy to report that he feels mostly back to normal.

By mid-February, I was able to return to work. We began figuring out the nitty-gritty details involved when hiring an employee. Then the world turned upside-down.

The Spring COVID-19 Slump

Worldwide shelter-in-place orders shook up the App Store. According to SensorTower, apps in the Travel and Navigation category saw dramatic drops, while apps in the Business category thrived.

We make camera apps, and we follow a pay-up-front model. People use camera apps when they’re out and about, and in frightening economic times, $3 can feel like a lot. In addition, the App Store is mostly promoting apps to help people through the crisis. By April, two months into the lockdown, our monthly revenue dropped 30%.

Sales picked up a bit when we shipped Halide 1.16. It added Image Rescue, a feature that helps recover photos otherwise lost by crashes or system bugs. We also refined Smart RAW.

A few weeks later, Apple shipped the new iPhone SE. On this new device, just like the iPhone XR, the first-party camera app only supports portrait mode photos for humans. And just like the XR, we released Halide 1.17 to allow you to take portrait photos of pets and inanimate objects. We also gave Spectre an update to work and look its best on this latest, shiniest, tiniest iPhone.

Between the new hardware launch and Halide updates, April revenue returned to pre-COVID19 levels. We doubt Apple will release a new phone every month, but it’s nice to get a taste of normalcy, however brief.

Other folks aren’t so lucky. That’s why last month we donated $5,000 to Compass Family Services, which assists San Francisco’s homeless and at-risk families, one of the hardest hit groups in this crisis. We also donated $5,000 to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Silicon Valley. If you have spare resources, please check out your local charities.

In April, we took our first dip in the toes of iPad with Esper. We built this prototype to flex Apple’s fancy new LIDAR technology. While it seems weird for us to spend a week on a prototype after complaining we’re low on resources, it’s extremely likely this technology will find its way into a future iPhone. The prototype taught us that LIDAR is amazing for room scanning, but doesn’t provide the resolution for use in photography apps, just yet.

Finally, we wrapped up April getting boring business stuff out of the way. To hire our first employee, we registered with the necessary state agencies, picked a payroll system, researched health insurance… the fun never stops.

We also decided it was time to convert our business entity from a partnership to a corporation. We are now officially employees of Lux Optics Incorporated. It’s been an incredible journey, and Sebastiaan and I are super pumped to work for Sebastiaan and me.

That brings us to the awkward situation of trying to hire someone during a global pandemic. This is not a great time to make dramatic career changes.

A few months ago, as the magnitude of COVID19 sank in, Sebastiaan and I decided six months of runway just doesn’t do it for us anymore. So Sebastiaan and I are paying ourselves $1 a week. Once we have enough cash reserves to cover one year of our first employee’s salary, we will resume paying ourselves a more normal (but modest) salary. With our anxieties quelled, we were ready to move forward.

Announcing Our First Hire

We didn’t have to look far to find an amazing iOS developer with a decade of experience. Most importantly, she’s really cool and makes an awesome friend. Everyone, please give a big hand for the third member of our team: Rebecca Slatkin! Rebecca, why don’t you take the mic?

Excluding the woodpecker/squirrel fight I broke up last week, joining the Lux Team is easily the biggest event to occur in my life in 2020.

I’ve used my time in quarantine to do my share of puzzles, cooking, and organizing the boxes of photos in shoeboxes, albums, and misc drawers. I’ve tried to organize my photos before and it always starts out with good confidence, but always suffers the same fate of every project I don’t have a clear goal from the start

A camera has always been a fixture in my life. My dad, a professional photographer, carried a camera around like an appendage. He regularly snapped photos of seemingly trivial occurrences often while dodging swats and protests from me and my siblings as we brushed our teeth, struggled with math homework, and cleaned dishes. I took on a similar role as my dad in college. Insisting my friends “act natural” and carry on with whatever they were doing as I snapped away.

Years later, surrounded with piles of photos, I am grateful to have in my possession hundreds of photos that are not mere stiff, hard, posed photographs; they are photographs with feeling in them, and sentiment, and capture who we truly were at that moment. A collection of photos of life that leaves out the little moments and enumerates only the big isn’t a proper picture of my life and the events that led me to where I am today.

As I begin my work on the Lux team I will use the love and affection for my collection of photos to build products and features for you to use capture moments to hang feelings on: little or big, majestic or trivial.

We’re incredibly excited that Rebecca is joining us and we can’t wait to show you what we’re all working on together!

In Closing

It’s been a crazy year, and none of it would be possible without the support of folks like you. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for being there with us for three years and letting us do what we love.

Check out our new team page here, and expect big things from us all at Lux Optics in the future!

Lux Year 3: The End of the Beginning was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After four years, we have a new budget-conscious iPhone. Like previous SE, it reaches that price point by sticking to components from previous generations. iFixIt found the the camera sensor interchangeable with that of an iPhone 8.

If this were a story about hardware, we’d just tell you to read iPhone 8 reviews. In short, we think this is a fine camera, though it’s three years old. Sebastiaan is actively out shooting RAW shots with it to see just how well it stacks up.

But this story is about the software. This iPhone goes where no iPhone has gone before with “Single Image Monocular Depth Estimation.” In English, this is the first iPhone that can generate a portrait effect using nothing but a single, 2D image.

“Doesn’t the iPhone XR do that? It also only has a single camera!”, you might say. As we covered previously, while the iPhone XR has a single camera, it still obtained depth information through hardware. It tapped into the sensor’s focus pixels, which you can think of as tiny pairs of ‘eyes’ designed to help with focus. The XR uses the very slight differences seen out of each eye to generate a very rough depth map.

The new iPhone SE can’t use focus pixels, because its older sensor doesn’t have enough coverage. Instead, it generates depth entirely through machine learning. It’s easy to test this yourself: take a picture of another picture.

You probably want to use Halide, not just because we built it, but because the first-party camera app only enables depth when there are humans in the photo. We’ll discuss why, shortly.

Let’s load this photo full screen and snap a photo with our iPhone SE:

An iPhone XR sees a mostly flat surface, the computer monitor. It seems to refine this depth map using the color image, and guesses that the lump in the middle sits slightly in the foreground.

The iPhone SE2 generates a totally different depth map. It’s wrong, but amazing!

Hmm. While cleaning out my dad’s house, I came across 50 year old slide film of my grandmother…

Wow! Ok, this is an awesome party trick, but a contrived test. How well does this stack up in the real world?

The Real World: Mostly Amazing Results

So why does Apple prevent the first party app from shooting non-people? They have a second process that works really well with humans in the frame. Without humans, it sometimes fails in weird ways.

Here the neural network confused the trees in the background with June’s head. Maybe it was confusing them for antlers?

It also appears that the depth map is really good at segmentation (masking different parts of an image), but it’s hit or miss with actual distances. Here we have June wrapped up in existential dread:

I took the above photo using an iPhone 11 Pro and the SE2, and it’s obvious that having multiple cameras generates way better data. While the iPhone 11 captures the full depth of the hallway, the SE2 misses the floor receding into the background.

What does this mean for real world photos? Let’s use this succulent as a subject, since it has some nice layering going on.

The iPhone 11 Pro’s shows distinct edges in the depth map. The SE2 gets the general gist of things. Maybe the neural network was exposed to a lot of dogs, but not as many plants?

What is the final result? The blur all just blends together, rather than elements in the foreground getting a different blur strength than elements in the background.

Keep in mind, I cranked-up our portrait effect to illustrate the difference. If you prefer the iPhone SE2’s look, you always can recreate it with an iPhone 11 Pro. You can’t get the distinct layering of the iPhone 11 Pro on an SE2.

Layering is where Apple’s second machine learning process plays a roll. Alongside the iPhone XR, Apple introduced a “Portrait Effects Matte” API that could detect humans in a photo and create a very detailed mask. In fact, this matte is higher resolution than the underlying depth data.

As long as the subject in the foreground is sharp and in focus, most people will never know you’re playing fast and loose with the background blur.

So back to the question, “Why does Apple limit this to people?”

Apple tends to under-promise and over-deliver. There’s nothing stopping them from letting you take depth photos of everything, but they’d rather set the expectation, “Portrait Mode is only for people,” than disappoint users with a depth effect that stumbles from time to time.

We’re happy that this depth data — both the human matte and the newfangled machine-learned depth map — was exposed to us developers, though.

So the next question is whether Machine Learning will ever get to the point that we don’t need multi-camera devices.

The Challenge of ML Depth Estimation

Our brains are amazing. Unlike the new iPad Pro, we don’t have any LIDAR shooting out of our eyes feeding us depth information. Instead, our brains assemble information from a number sources.

The best source of depth comes from comparing the two images coming from each of our eyes. Our brains “connects the dots” between the images. The more they diverge, the further an object must be. This binocular approach is similar to what powers depth on dual camera iPhones.

Another way to guess depth is through motion. As you walk, objects in the distance move slower than objects nearby.

This is similar to how augmented reality apps sense your location in the world. This isn’t a great solution for photographers, because it’s a hassle to ask someone to wave their phone in the air for several seconds before snapping a photo.

That brings us to our last resort, figuring out depth from a single (monocular) still image. If you’ve known anyone who can only see out of one eye, you know they live fairly ordinary normal lives; it just takes a bit more effort to, say, drive a car. This is because you rely on other clues to judge distance, such as the relative size of known objects.

For example, you know the typical size of a phone. If you see a really big phone, your brain guesses it’s pretty close to your eyes, even if you’ve never seen that specific phone before. Most of the time, you‘re right.

Cool. Just train a neural network to detect these hints, right?

Unfortunately, we’ve described an Ill Posed problem. In a Well Posed problem, there is one, and only one solution. Those problems sound like, “A train leaves Chicago at 60 MPH. Another train leaves New York at 80 MPH…”

When guessing depth, a single image can have multiple solutions. Consider this viral TikTok. Are they swinging toward, or away from, the observer?

ana * nsfr on Twitter

Im losing my mind can someone tell me which way he's facing https://t.co/gIvIDzRkOd

Some images just can’t be solved, either because they lack enough hints, or because they’re literally unsolveable.

At the end of the day, neural networks feel magical, but they’re bound by the same limitations as human intelligence. In some scenarios, a single image just isn’t enough. A machine learning model might come up with a plausible depth map, that doesn’t mean it reflects reality.

That’s fine if you’re just looking to create a cool portrait effect with zero effort! If your goal is to accurately capture a scene, for maximum editing latitude, this is where you want a second vantage point (dual camera system) or other sensors (LIDAR).

Will machine learning ever surpass a multi-camera phone? No, because any system will benefit from having more data. We evolved two eyes for a reason.

The question is when these depth estimates are so close, and the misfires are so rare, that even hardcore photographers can’t justify paying a premium for the extra hardware. We don’t think it’s this year, but at the current pace that machine learning moves, this may be years rather than decades away.

It’s an interesting time for photography.

Try it yourself

If this made you more curious about the cool world of modern depth-capture. we launched our update for Halide last Friday — iPhone SE launch day.

If you have any iPhone that supports Portrait mode, you can use Halide to shoot in our ‘Depth’ mode and view the resulting depth maps. It’s pretty fun to see how your iPhone tries to sense the wonderfully three-dimensional world.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any more iPhone SE questions, reach out to us on Twitter. Happy snapping!

[Editor’s Note: In an earlier version of this post we said the iPhone SE2 doesn’t have focus pixels. It does have focus pixels, but they don’t have enough coverage to generate a depth map.]

iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King? was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two weeks ago, Apple dropped a new iPad Pro into our lives via their website. One of its headline features? A brand new camera array. In this quick article, we look at what’s changed, including a whole new “3d” sensor — and what this new technology enables.

If you’re just joining us: we’re the team that makes Halide, an iPhone camera app.

A New Camera Array

Does the new iPad Pro pack a great camera? We have to look at the whole package. Today’s high-end smartphones pack a cluster of cameras, with multiple lenses (and sensors!). Google entered the fray last year with the Pixel 3 double-shooter. Now the iPad Pro joins this camera superstructure elite.

Let’s start at the ‘primary camera’:

The Wide Angle

Not to be confused with the ultra-wide angle lens we’ll get to shortly, this 28mm wide-angle camera is similar to all cameras ever put on the iPad, going back to the iPad 2. It’s table stakes. How does it compare?

iPad Pro 2020 vs iPad Pro 2018

Shot head-to-head with the iPad Pro that preceded it, the changes are… minimal. It appears the sensor and lens is either identical or almost identical to the last generation iPad Pro. They certainly match physically, with new accessories like the upcoming magic keyboard fitting both generation iPads.

The camera module hasn’t moved much; it just grew a little bit, adding two new sensors to its mesa-like structure.

Processing appears a little different. The sensors show wider sensitivity to light with their ISO ranges, with low-light image processing slightly improved.

These minor changes are likely only software. Big changes like ‘Deep Fusion’ typically require new chips, but the iPad Pro’s chipset is basically identical to the 2018 model, with an extra GPU core enabled.

Also unchanged? The lens focal length, which determines the field of view. iPhone XS and XR moved to an ever-so-slightly wider 26mm lens; this carried over to the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, with their ultra-wide lens being exactly half that at 13mm.

Not the iPad Pro. iPhone 8 and iPhone X had 28mm lenses — and so does this iPad Pro, like the iPad before it.

Here’s our full Technical Readout and comparison:

If you need something to compare it to, it’s the iPhone 8 camera. Don’t expect parity with Apple’s latest iPhone 11 Pro shooters, but it’s still a great set of cameras.

(Yes, our test setting definitely looks like a picturesque Apple marketing mockup.)

The ultra wide angle camera

Here’s a big and obvious change: this is the first iPad to have a second camera. The ultra-wide, famous from last year’s iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro arrives on the iPad. There’s some changes compared to the iPhone, however:

Remember when I said the iPad Pro’s wide angle lens was a bit less wide than the iPhone XS/XR/11 series of phones? That applies here, too: the ultra-wide has a grand difference of 1mm with the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro’s ultra-wide lens, bringing it to a tidy 14mm. In daily usage, it’s not noticeable.

What’s most interesting is the mere 10 megapixel resolution. It’s up from previous iPads, which packed an 8 megapixel rear camera, but this is the lowest resolution on a “new” rear camera since the iPhone 6.

Of course course megapixels are only one factor in an image, and don’t always tell the full story. So let’s compare:

In short, the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro pack a significantly larger (and better) sensor with its wide-angle camera, compared to iPad. The ultra-wide sensor on iPhone is comparable to the ultra-wide on iPad in quality, but the iPad is lower resolution.

It appears the hardware just isn’t there to support night mode, Deep Fusion, and even portrait mode. The iPhone XR pulled off single-camera Portrait Mode thanks to a larger sensor, and tapping into focus pixels — we even got single camera Portrait mode working fornon-human subjects in Halide!).

Some have asked if it’s possible to add portrait mode with the third little disc on the back of this new iPad, which is the…

The Depth Sensor

Here’s the biggest and totally new thing, then: The LIDAR sensor.

This is the first time a new imaging capture technology has appeared on iPad before iPhone. So we were a bit surprised by a lack of marquee applications to show off its potential. The AR Measure app that Apple bundles makes handy use of it:

AR experiences are way more seemless and accurate. You no longer having to ‘calibrate’ the device by waving it around in space. It can detect and classify features in your room like windows. It can even measure how tall people are. So what is this LIDAR wizardry?

How LIDAR Works

The LIDAR sensor, also known as a 3D ‘Time of Flight’ sensor (ToF for short) is a sensor that is exceptionally good at detecting range.

Regular camera sensors are good at focused images, in color. The LIDAR sensor doesn’t do anything like this. It emits small points of light, and as they bounce off your surroundings, it times how long it took the light to come back.

This sounds crazy, but it’s timing something moving at the speed of light. This window of time that amount to hundreds of picoseconds. Pico? Yes, pico — that’s an order of magnitude smaller than nanoseconds! A picosecond is 0.000000000001 seconds. Count the zeros.

If this sounds familiar to all you rocket scientists out there, the name LIDAR is a play on RADAR, but instead of using RAdio waves, it uses infrared light.

Could this Power Portrait Mode?

Today, the iPad doesn’t support portrait mode on the rear cameras. Could they fix this in a software update in the future, by using this depth data? While I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, it’s very unlikely.

The problem is that the depth data just isn’t high resolution. This fantastic experiment from iFixit shows how big the dot pattern is that this sensor projects:

Compare that to the infrared dot pattern that your iPhone (or iPad Pro!) projects for Face ID:

The Face ID sensor is trying to only resolve an area the size of a human face, with enough accuracy you can use it as a security device. The LIDAR sensor is made for room-scale sensing. It’s basically optimized for scanning rooms in your house.

The only reason we won’t say it could never support portrait mode is that machine learning is amazing. The depth data on the iPhone XR is very rough, but combined with a neural network, it’s good enough to power portrait mode. But if portrait mode were a priority, we’d put our money on Apple using the dual-cameras.

How We Can Use LIDAR

With Halide, we’d love to use the depth data in interesting ways, even if it’s low resolution. There was only one problem: there are no APIs for us as developers to use to get access to the underlying depth data. They only expose the processed 3d surface.

What if we re-thought photographic capture, though? We built a proof-of-concept we’re calling Esper.

Esper experiments with realtime 3D capture using the cameras and LIDAR sensor at room scale. It’s a fun and useful way to capture a space.

In the GIF above, we scan a kitchen. Panning around helps the resolution of the LIDAR sensor immensely, as you can see it forming — and refining a 3D mesh of its surroundings. When you tap the capture button, it textures the 3D model, using the camera data.

Once captured, you can view the space in 3D or in AR. You can change the way it looks:

And thanks to it being a three dimensional capture, you can even walk around in it!

The smallest ‘resolution’ we found this to be feasible in is about furniture-size. This chair captures pretty well:

If you’re interested in seeing how this works, download one of Ben’s chairs that he ‘captured’ in Esper. (insert ‘you wouldn’t download a car’ joke here)

You can view it on any device and even place it into the ‘real world’ using AR. Thanks to the LIDAR sensor, its scale is accurate.

That’s Esper! It’s our quick proof of concept to show that while this new LIDAR sensor isn’t something that is (currently) able to augment our ‘traditional’ photography, it opens the door to new applications that are powerful and creativity-enabling in their own right.

Let us know what you think of Esper on Twitter!

We think this is a super exciting thing about the way camera hardware is evolving. It’s not simply new sensors used to augment photography or video capture as we know it: it will enable entirely new ways to capture reality around us.

It’s up to us as developers to re-imagine the art of capturing the reality around us and give users the tools to explore what’s possible.

Your questions

We asked for some questions, and we got them. Let’s answer some:

Tinko Vialard on Twitter

@sdw @halidecamera How much better is lidar compared to a dual camera setup. And is it worth adding it to a dual camera setup?

It’s not better or worse, because it’s going for something different — room scale scanning. Just like having a gyroscope or GPS opens up new possibilities, it would be great for this sensor to find its way to an iPhone.

Call of Facchin - Modern Warfare on Twitter

@sdw @halidecamera Does it offer anything better than the iPhone 11? :)

With LIDAR, this iPad is easily Apple’s best device for sensing three-dimensional space. Whether it comes to measurements or AR, there’s no contest. Outside of that, your several-year old iPhone will still take better photos.

Johannes Freund on Twitter

@sdw @halidecamera Could it be used to scan objects for 3D printing?

Ah, objects. Unfortunately, the mesh output by the system right now isn’t accurate enough to send to a 3d printer. If you look at Ben’s chair scan, you’ll see that the surface is rough, and it has trouble with details like chair legs. But it’s a great starting point for a 3d model, since all the proportions will be very accurate.

David Klein ☕️ on Twitter

@sdw @halidecamera Are you excited as a photographer? Are you excited as the developer of Spectre/Halide? Where do you see the industry in 2 years, 5 years?

We’re super excited as photographers and developers to see what the next few years bring . Photography isn’t traditionally taking photos anymore; it’s combining all the data and smarts in our devices into allowing totally new interpretations of what ‘photography’ can mean. And if you’re not excited about that, we’re at a loss!

Thread on Twitter

@sdw @halidecamera The 2018 iPad Pro models lost optical image stabilization. Does these new models have it and if not isn't it a big deal?

No optical image stabilization (OIS) was added, and while it’s not exactly missed at the ultra-wide end (the wider the lens, the less OIS is necessary), it’s a bummer that the camera did not improve at all on the wide end. Next year?

Ryan McLeod on Twitter

@sdw @halidecamera If I put my mouth around it could it scan the inside of my entire mouth?

Ah, the hard hitting questions.

Unless the inside of your mouth is about the scale of a room (like a blue whale), you could conceivably do that a lot better with the infrared, front-facing TrueDepth camera on your iPhone X (or newer). Halide will let you capture the raw depth data. Let us know how it goes!

Wrapping up

Thanks for your questions, we hope you enjoyed our regular virtual ‘tear down’ of this camera module! We’re excited to see cameras get ever more interesting with additional sensors and modules.

Happy snapping!

LIDAR: Peek Into The Future with iPad Pro was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2020 is shaping up to be an eventful year, and we’ve been hard at work in 2020 on new features for Halide, Spectre, and beyond .

Today we’re breaking our silence with our latest update: here’s Halide 1.16, a ‘groundwork’ update with several features that improve everything about RAW — it improves how Halide displays your RAW captures, how it saves RAW (and regular compressed) files, improves Halide’s file output, and makes your life a bit better. On top of that, we’ve improved Halide’s performance even more.

Let’s start with a feature that merits its own description: Rescue.

Rescue

There’s no worse of feeling than going into your camera roll after a day of shooting, only to discover that perfect shot is disappeared. This is extremely rare, but not impossible:

• You taking a photo at 5% battery, and suddenly the phone shuts down.
• You get a phone call in the middle of a shoot
• Or, a bug in iOS or (believe it or not) Halide causes an issue

Even it’s a one in a million chance, we cannot accept even the slightest chance of losing a photo. We treat data loss as a critical problem, and that’s why we built Rescue.

In the past, when you took a photo with Halide, we would simplify hand it off to iOS to upload to iCloud. We assumed everything worked as expected, so long as iOS doesn’t hand us back an error. In Halide 1.16 we trust but verify.

Now when you capture a photo, we keep a backup copy around, similar to how your email client might have an “outbox.” We don’t remove that backup copy until we’ve verified for ourselves that the photo exists in your library.

If you ever feel like, “I swore I took more photos,” and you can’t find it in your iCloud library, take a peak inside Image Rescue.

1. Open the photo reviewer.
2. Tap the “Grid View” icon.
3. Tap the “Lifesaver” icon in the upper right.

Rescue is a feature that we’ve put together thanks to feedback from our community, which includes photographers that have pushed iPhones to their limits in extremely remote locations or extreme conditions. We’re excited to release this update to show that Halide is the ultimate photography tool that everyone can truly rely on, even when the going gets tough.

Smart RAW is Smarter

We first introduced our Machine Learning based Smart RAW adjustment last year. We gather data continuously to improve camera settings for better RAW output with more editing headroom and lower noise.

Halide 1.16 packs a nice update to Smart RAW, based on iOS 13 behavior and our own research. You’ll notice better highlight recovery during day scenes.

Here’s a few sample photos which were captured with the parameters that Smart RAW now uses:

Flat RAWs Previews

This is a big one.

RAW files deserve several posts of their own to explain just how they work, what the power of RAW is, and why you should — or shouldn’t — shoot in RAW. We did just that (so click here if you’d like to read up!) but it’s still not exactly intuitive.

The Power of RAW on iPhone, Part 1: Shooting RAW

Many people just getting started with RAW complain that at a glance, the image looks much worse than a picture taken with the default camera app.

Yikes, what’s happening with the sky? It looks like the highlights are blown out:

So what’s going on? The iOS RAW engine is trying to develop your RAW file for you. You see, a completely unadjusted RAW is pretty “flat” looking. When studying this RAW file, you’ll find that it actually has more detail in the sky and shadows than the picture straight out of the default camera app.

So why do RAWs look like that in most apps?

The standard iOS RAW engine adds a contrast curve and other adjustments to punch it up. Unfortunately, it doesn’t employ any sort of sophisticated computational photography algorithms— it twiddles some knobs and calls it a day. Very often this makes it appear as though your RAW has clipped data, making you think it’s worse than a JPEG.

Halide 1.16 renders flat RAWs in the Photo Reviewer. While the image appears less vibrant, it makes it much more obvious what areas are actually clipped, without having to jump into an editor. Images do appear a bit ‘bland’ and flat, but the beauty of RAW is what you can do with them in an editor. You can now even export the ‘Flat JPG’ straight to apps that support it.

The Power of RAW on iPhone, Part 2: Editing RAW

From looking at the underlying RAW, it’s obvious we only need to stop down the image a little bit to recover more sky.

Faster Saves

While updating our plumbing to support Rescue, we improved the way we saved photos so narrow the window where bad things can happen. We make saving photos the highest priority task in the app, and throttle other behavior (e.g. fetching photos from the library) while there’s a queue of photos to be saved.

Reduced Memory

When we say this is a groundwork update, we mean it. One of the most essential things of iOS apps is performance and memory usage. We’ve reduced the chance of running out of memory in depth mode, causing a crash. We say “chance,” because crash-worthy memory usage is less predictable than you think. Want details? We’ve got them:

Warning: Technical Details Ahead.

Apple doesn’t share hard numbers on memory limits. You can force a crash on an iPhone 7 by deliberately eating up to 1.4 gigs of memory, but iOS can consume memory on its own in surprising way. For example, if your email client wakes up in the background to fetch new emails, it’s suddenly going to need more memory than when it’s chilling in the background.

Last year we measured that Halide typically used between 100mb and 150mb of memory. That seems reasonable when you consider a single full-resolution photo consumes nearly 50MB of memory.

However, in depth mode, Halide would peak a 576MB when generating our portrait effect — it has a lot of moving parts. We planned to get that number down, but traced most memory usage to internals of Apple’s Core Image framework. Apple didn’t expose knobs for us to adjust to fix it, so this could take a while to find a solution. “Well, 576MB is still way below that 1.4 gig limit, so things are safe for now, right?” Well…

When any app uses the iPhone camera, it fires up an iOS daemon called mediaserverd. Normally this daemon consumes 230MB of memory. We found out that in depth mode, it would hover around 850MB, which sends iOS into a “Danger! Free up memory!” zone. Sometimes you’d be unlucky, and iOS would decide to kill Halide. We solved this experimenting with different camera configurations, and ultimately got Apple’s daemon to only use 515MB. We were back in a safe zone.

In this update, we’ve further optimized our Core Image usage, and reduced Halide’s peak memory use in Depth Mode to 300MB. As before, when shooting RAW, it peaks at 150MB. In addition to getting us into an even safer zone, it makes us a better iOS citizen.

Spectre

Today we’re also issuing a small Spectre update — it has been in solid shape since being awarded with Apple’s pick as iPhone App of the Year. This update brings it up to speed with Siri Shortcuts and fixes a few bugs.

The Future

Spectre will receive Rescue (and our optimizations) in an upcoming release. In fact, we’re working toward launching these sort of common features simultaneously on Halide and Spectre by sharing code.

This has slowed down some Halide feature development, but once we’re through those woods, it will be worth it.

In addition to this update, we’ve had our heads down on something really big. Stay tuned: this year will be a great one for Halide and Spectre users alike.

Stay healthy, stay safe, and happy snapping from the Halide team!

Halide 1.16: Safer, Better, Faster was originally published in Halide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.