Today we’re releasing Halide 1.12, which features two great enhancements.

An RGB Histogram to Shoot Perfect Roses

Ever taken a photo of roses that look muddled and washed out? That’s because the photo is technically well-exposed, but one of the color channels is clipping. Take this photo:

Histograms can be very helpful to show us if we’re exposing correctly. Put simply, a histogram makes a graph of where most of the color values in your image are.

This is a regular brightness histogram. It tells us that everything is OK: the left and right bars are small, which means there is no highlight or shadow information being lost.

But if we tap the histogram in Halide 1.12, we switch to our new RGB histogram, which reveals we’re losing red data:

Note the bar on the far right side of the image (which is where all the highlights are). That means we’re losing some color data, which is exactly what we need to faithfully photograph the beauty of vivid red roses.

Armed with this knowledge, we can now under-expose our photo…

With all the important reds preserved, we edit:

Left: the default image. Our final photo after editing, preserving more details in red highlights.

The difference is staggering. To help you take even better photos, we found this was an essential addition to the toolkit.

If you prefer a clean histogram look and a more simple readout, we still have our regular histogram available as well. Both modes are just a tap away.

But the update doesn’t end there…

Smart RAW 1.5

We’ve made Smart RAW even smarter. Right now, Halide uses some clever tricks to get better RAW files out of your iPhone. We call that ‘Smart RAW’.

That was just the beginning. Through machine learning, Halide 1.12 now makes more intelligent decisions around exposure to pick the best dynamic range. We’re incredibly excited about bringing computational photography to iPhone RAW shots.