Halide Mk II — Pro Camera
RAW shooter for iOS gets a big upgrade
Free (IAPs) From Lux Optics, halide.cam
Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 12.2 or higher
Halide 2 builds on the success of the original and very popular camera app, maintaining its focus on usability while adding a bunch of clever new features that take advantage of the latest iOS hardware and software. It’s free to try for a week; after that you have the choice of a yearly subscription of $11.99 or a one–off purchase of $35.99. The update to version 2 is free for full owners of version 1, which is a nice touch.
The app feels even slicker and smoother than before, making extensive use of gestures to call controls and sliders onto the screen. It can still mostly be used one– handed, even if Apple’s largest phones are getting hard to hold with a single hand, and key shooting controls can be customized and moved around for your convenience. Halide still provides manual shooting controls, including shutter speed, ISO, focus and white balance, and is one of the most user-friendly apps to do so. There’s also improved focus peaking and multiple histograms that can display exposure and color levels in real time. A new focus loupe — essentially a magnifying glass — aids manual focusing.
RAW support has been expanded and you can now
shoot in RAW DNG format or RAW+, which also saves a processed HEIC compressed image. There’s also a new mode called Coverage which shoots RAW and a processed JPEG at the same time. This differs from RAW+ in that the JPEG uses all Apple’s computational processing like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion to produce an image that iOS has optimized, as well as an unprocessed RAW file. It’s turned off by default as it causes a slight time lag when shooting but is easily activated.
Halide 2 doesn’t offer conventional image editing tools but it does now have something called Instant Raw. This one–tap tool performs 17 steps of analysis and enhancement on your RAW file to quickly pull up its colors and exposure from the default flatness of a typical RAW file. Side by side with the ultra– enhanced JPEGs that Apple’s process outputs, these tweaked RAWs have much more detail and are less garish, especially when it comes to areas of highlights. In poorer light, Instant RAW seemed less effective, but you can always export a file to other editing software for more control.
There are some hardware– based caveats, such as the iPhone 11’s ultrawide camera supporting neither RAW capture nor manual focus for some reason, but you can choose MAX mode to save these as TIFF files, which is a decent solution. Depth capture and portrait mode are available where hardware allows, and the app has a good line in EXIF data, showing you the minutiae of every parameter of your shots. It’s the ability to shoot RAW and compressed files side by side that’s the unique selling point, providing about as much access to your device’s many sensors and cameras as it’s currently possible to get.
THE BOTTOM LINE. An excellent, easy–to–use camera app with deep access to all the hardware and computational image processing power on iOS devices. HOLLIN JONES