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.

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.

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.)

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

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?

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 have to disagree here entirely. The feeling of that raw light, glowing just out of reach, is well appreciated in the HDR.

One of the big benefits of Halide (and working with raws) is that I'm not beholden to the aesthetic preferences of its creator. It should be built into the phone, but it isn't. So I've been a big fan for awhile.

I still remember that 50-page community thread of people complaining about the ugly camera, and one guy swearing up and down that “it's fine, it's fine you're all wrong”.

> It's your *expectations* that are wrong, not the phone. If you go out and buy a "professional" $6000 DSLR and $6000 lens… you will have many of these same issues.

Then Process Zero comes and solves all of my issues...

I love your work. Keep doing what you do.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253181534?sortBy=rank&p...

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

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.

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.

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.