PICTURE PERFECT
Newer, upgraded features can help you take more professional-looking photos
These advanced camera apps help for more professional photos.
The camera in your smartphone is a wond’rous thing, with the latest models giving even high-end digital single-lens reflex cameras a run for their money.
They are also ridiculously easy to use, with the software and hardware handling much of the heavy lifting that makes a photo great. But in doing so, they also take away control. While you get killer photos, you don’t get much say in how that’s done.
Fortunately, you don’t have to use the camera app that comes with your smartphone. Both iOS and Android devices will let you work with advanced thirdparty software that provides the kind of control you’d get with a DSLR. In fact, if you search on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, you’ll find a slew of them.
Here are my favorites for each platform:
Halide Mark II by Lux Optics, halide.cam iOS 13.0 or later
Free 7-day trial, $11.99/year or $39.99 lifetime
Halide has long been a popular app among professional photographers who want to beef up the capabilities of their iPhones. The software was recently redesigned and upgraded – thus the Mark II designation – and got a bump in features when the Pro models of the iPhone 12 line came out.
I don’t make a lot of New Year’s resolutions, but one of mine this year is to become a better photographer with my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I’m semi-familiar with DSLR photography, but not enough to master the controls. The Halide interface makes it easy to move between the kind of automated shooting you get from most smartphone apps to more specific controls.
The original version made its name as an app that let you shoot in RAW format, preferred by many professional photographers because it captures more detailed information in each image. The look you get in a RAW photo isn’t quite as good at the start, but because there’s more detail in the image you have more to work with in editing software. That also means RAW files are much bigger than standard JPG or HEIC image files, so keep that in mind if you don’t have much space on your phone.
With Halide Mark II, you can now shoot both RAW and Apple’s “computational photographry” photos at the same time. This feature, called Coverage, snaps a RAW image and then quickly takes a photo using Apple’s processing capabilities. On phones that support it, that includes Deep Fusion, which captures images with all of the cameras on the device and fuses them together. You can then either use the processed image or the RAW one.
A recent update allows you to work with Apple’s own Pro RAW format, which uses some computation but preserves the RAW information, on the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max models.
As with most pro camera apps that mimic a DSLR’s controls, you can either work in automatic mode or switch to manual. In the latter, you can set the ISO, shutter speed, exposure, focus and white balance. The interface hides away the more complex controls until you switch over.
But even in automatic mode, there are some useful features that you won’t find on Apple’s own app. For example, there’s a built-in level, a box that shows you whether you’re holding your iPhone straight.
Halide Mark II can be as simple or as complex as you like, depending on your needs. And if the learning curve worries you, there’s a built-in, 10-lesson tutorial for using it.
Open Camera by Mark Harman, opencamera.org.uk
Android 4.0.3 or later
Free
This app has been around since 2013, updated steadily over the years and is refined, capable and – amazingly – completely free. While Mark Harman is the developer, he’s had other contributors. It’s an opensource project, and you can view the code and get details at sourceforge.net/projects/ opencamera.
Like Halide, the default interface is simple and will be easy to use for those trying it for the first time. As you need more capabilities, you can dig deeper into the settings. As you’d expect, you can control ISO, exposure, shutter speed, white balance and more. Whether you can jump to manual-focus mode depends on the smartphone, but there are different focusing modes — such as locked or infinity — if manual isn’t available.
In fact, much of what you can do with Open Camera will depend on the hardware and what version of Android you’re using. On a Samsung S20 Ultra 5G, for example, you can manually switch between two of the three rear cameras, but you can’t select the third ultrawide camera.
Open Camera gives you the option to shoot in multiple formats, including RAWif the smartphone supports it, and you can shoot in HDR mode. There’s also a Noise Reduction mode that takes a burst of photos, then merges them to reduce noise in the photo.
One of my favorite features — related to my sad inability to hold a smartphone straight when taking photos — is auto-leveling. If you turn this on, One Camera will automatically level the image when you snap it. There’s a cost, of course, because the app will be slightly slower. Don’t count on using this for action shots.
Finally, there’s a feature that uses faces for focusing. Turn it on, and Open Camera looks for a face and sets the focus there, as well as exposure and white balance.
The customization and controls available within Open Camera are impressive, and the settings menus scroll on for days. If you love to tweak and play with camera settings, you’ll have a field day with this.