Halide: a powerful premium camera app for iPhone.
Halide is a groundbreaking camera app for deliberate and thoughtful photography. With high-end tools and beautiful details, Halide is your go-to camera when you want to really take a photo rather than a quick snapshot.
Halide’s gesture-based interface makes it fast and easy to change exposure and manual focus. It has customizable controls that adapt to your needs. Halide’s features include focus peaking, a detailed histogram, adaptive level grid, and RAW support.
Its creators, Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With, are no strangers to high-end photography. Previously, Ben had worked on Periscope’s video processing stack. Sebastiaan is a part time photographer motorcycle travel photography has been viewed over 5 million times on Reddit, People Magazine and other websites.
The two noticed that smartphone cameras continued to improve while the interface of camera apps remained stagnant. “Nothing matched the pleasure of using a well-built camera,” explains Sebastiaan. “Halide aims to fix that.”
The controls of Halide are gesture-based, but also work with a tap. They are consistent and require no hunting; they can truly become muscle memory like the dials on a camera.
While the app defaults to an intelligent automatic mode, just like the stock iOS camera app, just tapping the “A” button in the UI turns off automatic mode and lets you get down to the nitty-gritty: you can tweak values like ISO, white balance, and shutter speed.
For quick triage, Halide also lets you swipe through your recently captured shots and quickly swipe left or right on them to rate them as a favorite or delete them. This triage feature is a great way to ensure you only end up with the best shots from a shooting session.
Thoughtful design touches in Halide include things like an entirely custom designed typeface for the UI, carefully tweaked haptic and visual feedback for the controls and a retro-style camera manual tutorial welcoming you when you first use it that you can thumb through.
It really is made to be akin to the wonderful experience of using a nice camera to take photos.
Halide will be $2,99 at launch and available in English, with Spanish, Dutch, German, and French localizations on the way. Its price is going up to $4,99 a week after release.
Halide is built by Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With. Ben is a former Tech Consultant to HBO’s Silicon Valley, and used to be the tech lead of Twitter for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Sebastiaan is an ex-Apple designer and photographer that runs the San Francisco design shop Rune, which recently designed the Nylas email client.
