The Lens Guides overlays in the viewfinder without interrupting your viewing and composing experience. When you are ready to commit to a lens, just let go and Halide will rapidly switch to that lens and let you take the shot.

Smart RAW for iPhone 11

This is our first update for iPhone 11, and we’ve begun tuning our exposure engine to ensure you can get RAW shots with less noise.

That being said, this is an area of ongoing research. We’re currently building a lot of data to research and improve our Smart RAW for iPhone 11, and we’ll have a blog post soon about how the new iPhone 11 camera processes images in software and how it compares to the RAW shot. There’s a big difference!

The iPhone XS first introduced RAW files that are significantly different-looking than their JPG / HEIC counterparts. While this version of Halide introduces some logic to ensure they are exposed for minimal noise, you should be aware that we’re just getting started with optimizing Halide’s RAW capture for these brand-new phones and sensors.

Questions and Answers

As with every major update and hardware release, you might have some questions. We have answers!

Why is the ultra wide camera so limited?

The first thing you’ll notice when you switch to the ultra-wide camera on the pro is the lack of manual focus controls. It turns out the ultra-wide angle camera has a fixed focus. Obviously it would be better to have manual focus, but this is only a problem when shooting subjects fewer than a meter away. Sebastiaan will talk about this in a deep-dive he’s currently writing.

The second issue is that the ultra wide camera is not capable of RAW output. We don’t think this is a conspiracy to get you to buy an iPhone 12 next year. This year the first-party camera received a ton of new features. With how relatively rocky Apple’s iOS 13 launch has been, it’s possible the frameworks team ran out of time. We hope to see RAW available in a future iOS update.

In the meantime, Halide will have a toggle for ‘MAX’. MAX will output the highest-possible quality image. In Advanced Settings, you can even enable this output format to be TIFF. It’s the best we can offer right now.

Where’s MultiCam support?

If you saw the iPhone 11 announcement, you know that iOS 13 allows developers to capture from multiple cameras simultaneously. For example, Apple’s new Camera app previews what is outside of your current lens’ frame by displaying the image from one of the wider lenses. The developer API for this is called ‘MultiCam’.

A peek outside of your current reference frame in Apple’s Camera app.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to take RAW photos from a MultiCam session. It could be that MultiCam puts a lot of pressure on the hardware, and RAW is just too much. Or it’s possible that RAW was cut this year due to time constraints.

We could still add multi-cam features, but they’d require the user entering a special mode. It would be similar to our “Depth Mode,” which doesn’t support RAW, manual focus, or manual exposure. But modes are confusing, and we frequently receive support emails asking why certain features aren’t available when taking a depth photo. Before we added depth mode, we went back and forth about whether it made sense with all its trade-offs, and ultimately decided it was worth it for the depth data.

MultiCam would involve switching between complex internal iOS machinery, which hasn’t worked out well in the past. For example, if you take a RAW photo and then switch to depth, iOS camera frameworks can get into a confused state where it can’t take any photos in your app. It just throws vague error, and the only fix is to force-quit your app.

(As an aside, we only found a workaround to that depth issue through experimentation and luck. We found that if you take a non-RAW photo before entering depth mode, everything is OK. Our workaround is to trigger a non-RAW photo before entering depth mode, and discarding the result. That seems to “unstick” iOS. Occasionally we get support emails asking why Halide makes a capture sound when you enter depth mode; now you know.)

We expect similar issues with MultiCam. We know a lot of folks are coming up with incredible uses for it — just look at Filmic Pro. At this time, with these limitations, we can’t think of anything more than gimmicks. We’ll likely revisit MultiCam in the future, but right now we’ve got bigger things planned.

In Closing

Finally, we’ve made some other small improvements. We now render RAWs in our photo reviewer over 3x faster! As we spend more time with the new iPhones, you can look forward to other improvements tailored to the new hardware. We have also issued an update with iPhone 11 support for Spectre, with more the works.

We can’t wait for you to check out our newest update — let us know what you think!

Get the latest version of Halide here.