A picture-perfect camera app that helped you focus on the good moments
Some apps are fleeting. Others are core parts of the iPhone’s history. In this entry in our series on classic apps, we explore an app that powered up your iPhone’s camera by marrying cutting-edge tech with a hint of photography’s past.
What was Halide?
A highly regarded camera app aimed at photography enthusiasts. It brought aspects of real-world cameras to iPhone, with its tactile interface and manual controls, and made them accessible to anyone.
Why was it a classic?
Halide was far from alone in the iPhone camera space. But it stood out through its carefully crafted interface and superb feature set, which let you explore and select from the added extras most useful to you.
Where is it now?
On the App Store, in its ‘Mark II’ incarnation. Over the years, Halide has remained opinionated yet thoughtful about new features. One of the most recent is Process Zero, a way to take photos without Apple’s processing pipeline.
Visit the Halide website or get Halide ($19.99/£19.99 per year or $59.99/£59.99) from the App Store.
Q&A: a brief history of Halide
We speak to Halide designer and co-founder Sebastiaan de With. about Halide’s origins and the challenges and successes that come from making a camera app.
When did you first get into photography?
Around 2010, when I started playing with larger sensor digital cameras. I quickly took a preference for putting old Russian lenses on them. They were cheap, optically interesting and let me get my shot in focus instead of relying on the camera guessing for me.
Why do you love photography?
It’s a wonderful time machine, and a subjective lens to show others what I experienced. The world is a beautiful place, and as a hyper-visual person I can’t always find the words to relay how special some things are. It’s imperfect to capture the world photographically, but I’ve always enjoyed that means of sharing beautiful things.
Halide icon sketches. And a real camera!
How do you think iPhone changed photography?
To me, iPhone is as big of a sea change as the original Polaroid, where you could press a button and receive a physical version of a moment in time. Similarly, the iPhone put a camera in your pocket that was easy to use, which made photography intuitive and natural for anyone. It also gave you a way to view images at a size that made them tangible and free from interface elements, as if in a beautiful frame. People overlook how transformative the presentation of photos on iPhone was.
So what sparked Halide?
Ben (Sandofsky, my co-founder) sent me a message in 2016 about Apple allowing developers to make camera apps that capture RAW – essentially, not just a photo but also all the data the sensor captures. This gives photographers much more control over their shot and freedom when editing it. Photography on iPhone was about to get more ‘serious’ – and we didn’t love existing apps. You either had Apple’s, which was simple and lacking in control, or apps that were so complex it was like being on the flight deck of an airplane. We knew we needed a middle ground, partnered up, and a year later released version one.
A very early development version of Halide.
What features were essential to that first release?
Those things you’d use in ‘big cameras’ like DSLRs: manual focus, RAW capture, and being able to quickly change exposure to make your shot darker or lighter. We also added things that weren’t great but that we thought essential, including a Tinder-style reviewer you swiped to delete or favorite photos. We quickly ditched that!
And how did you approach Halide from a design standpoint?
Cameras are uniquely beautiful, tactile things. Lots of people like displaying them, because they’re so pretty – artful objects, with clicks and tactile wheels, dials and buttons that are an extension of your own eye. That’s not how apps feel – you’re tapping a dead pane of glass. But we wanted to see how much delight and tactile quality we could bring to Halide.
So we made a custom font that mirrored the quirks of numbers and letters you see on old cameras. We made the shutter button press in a bit as you touched it. And when you open the app for the first time, there’s a little manual to leaf through, like a brochure for a real camera. All those touches added up and people loved them.
Halide’s interface had to be reworked for the iPhone X (left) compared to older iPhones with Home buttons (right).
How have you kept up with Apple’s constant camera revisions?
That’s the biggest challenge and what most folks don’t get. They think we get iPhones early or for free, but neither is true. So each year we rush to the stores on the day new iPhones are released, start fixing what broke in our app, and begin adding support for new features.
One particular challenge happened within a year of Halide’s debut: Apple announced the iPhone X. There was no home button, meaning we had to reimagine the entire interface. The phone seemed very tall at the time, so we moved controls to place them under your thumb. Of course, we had no iPhone X in hand – we used an iPhone 7 Plus with paper cutouts to prototype the new interface and get a feel for things.
A year later, iPhone XS and XR gave us a taste of the future. Apple’s Smart HDR was the beginning of your camera using AI and other smart things to get a better result. But RAW shots came out noisier, because Apple was combining many photos together, tuning the camera for many shots, not just one. We had to tweak Halide and how it took photos to get the best results.
Why did you give Halide for iPad its own unique interface?
With iPhone X, we realized we wanted Halide to be ‘tightly’ designed to fit and match the hardware, to give you the best possible experience. For the iPad, we wanted to accommodate what you do on the device. You hold iPads closer than an iPhone, which makes the screens relatively larger. When you have a full-screen view, it’s hard to judge the composition without your eyes moving around a lot. That’s why we made Pro View, which makes the image smaller and gives your tools extra space.
Halide on iPad, showing full-screen and Pro View modes.
Finally, what is your favorite thing about Halide?
That it lets me be responsible for my own failures. Which sounds bad, so let me explain! When I got into photography, I found it frustrating that an autofocus lens would make a decision for me on what ‘it’ wanted to be in focus. If it can’t read my mind, it’s not ‘smart’ – it’s just wrong. Manual control doesn’t mean my camera can read my mind either – but it can become an extension of it.
I like being able to switch my lens in Halide and have it be the lens I pick. That sounds silly, but try zooming in on older iPhones and covering the telephoto lens: you’ll see it’s often using a crop of the regular camera if you are in low light. Sometimes, if you bring something close to your phone it will switch to your macro (ultra wide) lens.
I know what I want, and we made Halide in that image. If I set the lens, it stays that way. If I want to take a photo using all the fantastic processing Apple does to get a good image in low light, I’ll enable that. But sometimes I don’t – and I disable that feature. That’s my favorite part of the app, together with our ongoing effort to make Halide feel tactile and camera-like.