Halide puts control of your final image in your hands.
In this tutorial, we will explain what image processing is, what choices you have, and help you unlock the raw power of your iPhone’s camera by shooting in the RAW format.
It starts with choosing a process. Out of the box, Halide lets you pick from 3 processing options. Processing is what your iPhone does to make your final photo. When you take a photo, iPhones typically combine many images into one to get a nicer looking shot.
It also does a lot of ‘smart editing’ on your photo. It makes the sky a bit more blue; people in your photo will be made a bit brighter. Grain and noise in your photo will be reduced or removed. If you want that, you’ll likely love having it. But with Halide, you can choose and experiment.
Choose ‘Process Zero’ if you want to skip all of the smart enhancements. This will result in images that look almost film-like, or like a classic digital camera. Lots of contrast; more grain with less light, and no ‘HDR’ to enhance detail in shadows or highlights.
The other options are what you are used to: standard iPhone camera processing. This will combine many photos into one for better shadow recovery, and make intelligent edits for you. You can fine-tune it by opting for reduced processing, or go with what you get in the regular camera app.
Formats
Halide can shoot RAW, JPG/HEIC, and ProRAW.
What does that mean? Simply put, a 'regular’ JPG or HEIC image has a lot of creative decisions locked up. Contrast, color, brightness, detail — you name it—are set, and cannot be changed as much later. We capture it all with that second RAW shot, leaving the creative editing up to you.
(If you’d like to read more about how this works, check out our detailed blog post.)
RAW images hold a lot of information - detail that is typically lost in highlights and shadows is retained. More detail in colors is saved. They are essentially the raw data from your camera sensor. It’s a lot more information than can even be displayed on your iPhone screen. To make that raw data usable, you have to process it and turn it into a JPG or HEIC image. We do that with our special Process Zero, which makes a beautiful, minimally edited shot from the raw data for you to use right away.
ProRAW is Apple’s special type of RAW. It's not raw data from your sensor — in fact, it’s a lot more like a processed JPG. It is a combination of many photos, with smart edits applied. It contains a lot more data, however, so you can edit a lot of things like white balance, contrast and more later. This is a great tool to get the best quality and the best of the processing, while maintaining flexibility if you want to edit your shot later. There’s a few caveats, though: ProRAW takes a long time to capture (several seconds) and makes very large files.
Halide offers various capture options you can access in settings or by tapping the format icon in the Quick Bar.
Process Zero, labeled ‘RAW’, will grab a ‘regular’ (JPG or HEIC) image as well as a RAW image. Don’t worry, you don’t get two shots: the RAW image will be stored together with the Process Zero shot.
Apple Processing will capture a JPG or HEIC, depending on your settings, with the default iPhone camera processing.
Tapping ProRAW will capture Apple’s ProRAW.
In the Advanced Settings above, you can also choose if you want to capture 12- or 48 megapixel photos with Apple’s processing in HEIC or ProRAW if your iPhone supports it. Process Zero is unfortunately only available in 12 megapixels for now.
For more options, go to the Halide settings and tap ‘Capture’ where you can choose your process and fine tune your settings — like HEIC or JPG capture options. We explain those settings more as you choose them in the app.
Have fun (continuing) to shoot RAW. Tomorrow, we’ll show you how you can push these images to their full potential with editing!