Looks: A Halide Mark III Preview

Hey everyone. Halide guy here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey everyone. Halide guy here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we launched a public preview of Halide Mark III, the next generation of our flagship photography app. When you download today's Halide update in the App Store, you'll find a new "③" button to switch to Mark III.

Mark III is still a work in progress, and we'll share more details about that at the end, but we're ready to start sharing what we've worked on for the past year through a series of app updates alongside posts like this. Today, we're diving into Looks.

In the early days of digital photography, the look of a photo amounted to little more than contrast and color palette. In the era of smart phone photography, algorithms now alter lighting, local contrast and much more. Consider these four different interpretations of exact same data.

The first example is from the default the iPhone camera, which chose to "nope" most shadows

We don't point this to denigrate the first-party camera, which serves a billion people. It does this through simplicity. You tap a button, you capture a decent photo. Most people, most of the time, people want to see details in shadows and highlights.

The convenience of smart cameras has the unintended consequence of making everyone's photos feel the same. It's reached a point where folks who want a unique look to their images buy old digital cameras that lack algorithms. Others download advanced apps, only to be overwhelmed by hundreds of presets that all kind of feel the same.

This was my life until a few years ago, when I woke up one morning and found myself bored with digital photography. That's an awful place to be after a decade building camera apps. So I did what every millennial does in a midlife crisis and took a deep dive into analog photography.

It starts innocent enough. You buy a Canon AE-1 off the internet, remove the dead fly from inside the lens, and shoot your first roll. Next thing you know, there's a camera collection.

You learn to develop film at home. Then you dig into alternative processes like cyanotype, colloidal chloride, and platinum palladium.

This path ends in Hillsborough, New Jersey, buying a discontinued lab scanner, yellowed from age, trying to explain to the seller what you do for a living.

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh, digital photography.

I grew up during the transition from film to digital, so I assumed that convenience and flexibility made digital inherently better. Revisiting film decades later, I appreciate the constraint. An "out of the box" look frees me from worrying about histograms and bit-depths. I found joy popping a roll of film in a camera and just shooting. Some of my favorite results came from accidents.

If there is a single goal of Halide Mark III, it's to marry the simplicity, joy and beauty of analog photography with the power and convenience of digital.

It starts with embracing a film stock metaphor, but it's about much more than film emulation. We're calling them "Looks."

Artwork by our friends at The Iconfactory

Typical photo-preset apps simply swap a photo's color palette. Halide's Looks are capable of much more, virtue of being part of the camera itself. When you select a look, it changes the way the camera captures a photo and interprets the results. For the best results, you should pick the final look at the time of capture.

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But if you aren't ready to decide, shoot with RAW and you can try different looks in the Image Lab.

The Default look matches the iPhone's built-in camera app, algorithms and all. This is great if you want convenience with a little extra control, such as manual focus.

Our next look is Process Zero II, the second generation of our acclaimed look we launched it a year and a half ago. The Process Zero disables all computational photography at the time of capture, for photos with stronger contrast, subtler details and an overall more natural feeling.

Left: Default Camera. Right: Process Zero.

We added a "II" to Process Zero because it's receiving a few big upgrades, starting with High Dynamic Range Photography. For the full details on the power of (tasteful) HDR, can check out a lengthy deep-dive we shared last year. In short, HDR is perfect for dramatic, high-contrast scenes, such as sunsets.

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HDR also leaves more room in the highlights for vibrant colors.

Sunflowers in SDR. Color is washed out as it approaches peak white.

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The same photo in HDR

At the same time, we recognize that the use of HDR is a creative choice, no different than your choice to shoot in color rather than black and white. Many scenes look better in SDR, such as this foggy, low-contrast morning in Osaka.

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If you can't design whether or not HDR is right for your shot, you can just shoot with RAW enabled and play with both version in Halide's Image Lab. If you ultimately decide HDR isn't your thing, you can turn it off by default in settings.

Process Zero Meets ProRAW

Every iPhone shipped since 2015 has supported RAW photo capture, but RAWs came with a serious drawback: they often look bad before editing. Out of the box, parts of your photo appeared under or over exposed.

A typical classic-RAW before and after a few adjustments.

In 2020, Apple launched their own variant of RAW called ProRAW. It combined the flexibility of editing in RAW with power of Apple's computational photography. Unlike classic RAWs of yesteryear, ProRAW gives you Apple's default appearance without touching an editor.

ProRAW with its automatic adjustments off and on.

But sometimes you might disagree with Apple's algorithms. Consider this vivid sunset; the details in the clouds are lost with the default iPhone look, while the Process Zero look preserves them.

Left: Sunset shot with ProRAW with default SDR Rendering. Right: the same ProRAW with Halide's alternate processing.

In the past, you had to decide between the flexibility of Apple ProRAW or the natural look of Process Zero. Not anymore. With Halide Mark III, you can quickly experiment with ProRAW and Process Zero looks, after the fact.

Not only does this give you flexibility, you can even apply Process Zero to modes only available in Apple's camera app, such as Night Mode.

The same ProRAW. Apple vs Process Zero.

But turning off algorithms comes with a tradeoff: you've turned off algorithms! Sometimes you want more details in shadows or highlights. Consider that example above. Sure, we could fiddle with the exposure slider to bring down the brightness of the Family Mart sign, but reducing overall brightness hides details in the rest of the scene.

A Process Zero shot with exposure turned out.

This is not a new problem. Analog photographers solved this by "dodging and burning" their prints in the darkroom.

Ansel Adams, "The Print"

With Mark III, we're including a single Tone Fusion slider. It brings back details in highlights and shadows, in a style inspired by dodging-and-burning film.

Left: The original Process Zero photo. Right: The same photo after a gentle tone edit

Unlike Apple's algorithms, tone fusion is off by the default. We recommend applying a light touch, but even at extremes, we find the results feel more natural than letting a machine decide for you.

Left: the Apple camera version. Right: an extreme tone-edit in Halide.

We're proud to tell you that Tone Fusion does not use any AI. It uses pre-AI techniques to recover values already present in your image.

The Halide Film Engine

A conventional color grade just shifts colors around. Film operates in a much more complicated way, with chemical and optical characteristics that affect fine details. After studying these qualities over the last few years, and we're excited to launch our third Look, a medium-contrast black and white film we call Chroma Noir.

Several characteristics give film its look, but let's focus on just one today, halation.

A menorah with halation applied

When a very bright light source hits a film camera, the light bounce off the back of the camera, scatters, and pass through the film a second time.

Example via Wikipedia

Since color film has the red-emulsion in back, this creates a reddish halo.

Before and After Halation

In black and white, halation feels magical.

Halation serves as more than a visual gimmick. It communicates to your mind that you're looking at a very bright light source rather than, say, a pure-white piece of paper. Like most film characteristics, it's subtle but goes a long way.

To do halation right, we use real-world light values. This was only possible by building our imaging engine from the ground up with physical accuracy in-mind. And this is just one ingredient of Halide's new look system.

Film Meets HDR

We think Halide does something truly unique in the realm of film simulations: support for HDR. It may seem out of place, since HDR is a new display technology and analog film well over a hundred years old, but film itself is a high-dynamic range medium. You just never knew this because film was always limited to low dynamic range mediums, like print.

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Film and HDR Are Optional

If you aren't interested in the aesthetics of film, but you love the black and white look, you can always toggle it off in our Image Lab. Even without film simulation, our beta testers love our black and white treatment.

From Halide Mark III Beta Tester El Gebón

What's a Preview?

As we said at the top, today is a preview of Mark III. We hope to launch the final version by summer, but we've reached point where many testers find themselves using the unfinished version more than Halide Mark II. So if our new image engine excites you and you're comfortable living on the edge, you can opt-in to try Mark III by tapping this button in Mark II.

That said, it does have bugs, and the new design is a work in progress— which is why we aren't ready to talk about it today. There are many features we haven't gotten around to porting over from the old version. Yes, there will be custom white balance, focus peaking, and more. We're kicking off this preview to gather your feedback (and crash reports) while there's still time to steer the ship. If you'd to contribute, please join our Discord.

Today's Mark III preview is available to everyone who bought a one-time-purchase for Halide Mark II, along with all Halide subscribers. Likewise, the final version of Mark III will be a free upgrade to all Mark II buyers and subscribers.

What's Next?

We built Chroma Noir to prove out our new imaging engine. (Also, we love black and white photography.) With our new engine in place, now the fun begins. We have a number of exciting looks planned for the final version of Halide Mark III, which you'll be able to try in the coming months.

At the same time, we believe in quality over quantity. Sure, we could bundle hundreds of presets that all feel kind of the same. I bet we'd make good money selling them to you piecemeal. We'd prefer to bundle a handful of perfect looks, each solving a specific problem. There's a reason we're working with The Iconfactory to give each look their own identity.

Chroma Noir taught us that this work requires significant time, effort, and artistry. Based on the time it took to develop Chroma Noir, the remaining looks could take years. So we came to the obvious conclusion that we need to partner with an expert.

We're excited to announce that Halide’s full set of looks will be developed by an amazing colorist, image scientist, and educator with professional experience in film and television: Cullen Kelly. Cullen is an honorary member of the American Society of Cinematographers, and his work spans from Academy Award nominated films to high-profile projects for Netflix, HBO, and Apple. He also produces an invaluable YouTube channel that dives deep into the art and science of color grading. We couldn't be more excited to work together.

It's taken a year to get to this point, with many long hours, high-highs and low-low. We thank you for your support throughout this journey, and can't wait to show you more of what we've been working on, in the coming months.

— Ben, Doug, and Katie Rose

Hacker Times

Hacker Times

Looks: A Halide Mark III Preview

Discussion

Discussion

Process Zero Meets ProRAW

The Halide Film Engine

Film Meets HDR

Film and HDR Are Optional

What's a Preview?

What's Next?