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Halide updated for iPhone 11 and 11 Pro with tactile lens switcher, lens guides, and Smart RAW mode

Popular iPhone camera app, Halide, is out today with its official update to bring rich support for the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. The latest software release brings a tactile lens switcher, lens guides, a Smart RAW mode, and more.

Halide detailed the new update with lots of additions for iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro users in a blog post.

We released a small lightning update on iPhone 11 launch day with basic support for the new cameras. Now we’re ready to release our big update.

We engineered new features that take advantage of the powerful new hardware in the latest and greatest iPhones, starting with…

A tactile lens switcher for the iPhone 11 Pro. Here’s how Halide describes the new feature:

We’ve come up with a fast, intuitive way to switch between the Wide, Ultra Wide, and Telephoto cameras on the iPhone Pro. Of course you can just tap on the lens button in the lower right to cycle through your options, as you’ve done before. Now you can also Haptic-Touch the button to bring up your choices.

What makes our switcher really unique is that once you’re familiar with the menu, you can press-and-flick from the lens button to quickly change lenses. We think this is a fast, natural way to switch lenses, and you’ll dig how it feels.

Try swiping up from the switcher to go directly to the 2x lens, or swipe left to get that ultra-wide view on iPhone 11 Pro.

Another major new feature for iPhone 11 Pro users in Halide is lens guides.

Meet our new iPhone 11 Pro exclusive feature: Lens Guides that help compose shots. They automatically appear when you open the switcher, and provide feedback as you pick different lenses.

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.
For both iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro, Halide has started dialing in the Smart Raw feature, with more updates for it coming soon.
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!
Halide also highlights that the ultra wide camera on the iPhone 11 Pro isn’t able to work with manual focus and RAW capture.
You may notice that the ultra wide camera does support manual focus or RAW capture. This is not a bug. The ultra wide camera has fixed focus. At this time, iOS does not support RAW on that camera. If that changes in the future, we’ll absolutely update Halide to support it.
Another change sees RAW images rendering 3x faster in the photo reviewer with more improvements on the way.
Finally, we’ve made some other small improvements. We now render RAWs in our photo reviewer over 3x faster! And 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.
The newest Halide release is available now from the App Store priced at $6.

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