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Lux Releases Halide Mark II
22 October 2020
In a blog post today, Ben Sandofsky has announced Lux has released Halide Mark II, its iOS camera app, featuring a redesign with over 50 new features that took 18 months to develop.
FEATURES
"Mark II is more than an update: it's a new camera," he writes. And that camera has a theme: Stay out of the way. "For example," he explains, "when you begin dragging the focus dial, our new Focus Loupe activates. When you release your finger, it deactivates. We call this Intelligent Activation."
The app has added three custom typefaces "to resemble the aesthetic of the etched text on film cameras, with a modern twist."
And it has redesigned its layout to make it easy to control the camera with one hand on any supported iPhone. "All controls fall within easy thumb reach," Sandofsky says.
The redesigned Halide photo reviewer provides more information by default but lets you dig deeper into the metadata about your photos.
The new version is Apple ProRaw ready, Sandofsky said, but it adds its own approach to the Raw vs. JPEG problem with a feature it calls Coverage. "Coverage takes a photo with all of Apple's smartest processing: that is, Smart HDR 3, Deep Fusion, the works -- and then also snaps a Raw DNG and saves it all in one file," he writes.
And Raw editing has been given a boost with the new Instant Raw feature to optimize your Raw file with one tap. "Just like how Smart Raw helps Halide expose Raw correctly using Machine Learning, with Instant Raw Halide goes through a 17-step process of intelligently developing your file to get the best possible result," he writes.
Mark II also features new tools to help with focus and exposure. The revamped Luminance and Color histograms are joined by a new Waveform visualization that "horizontally scans over your image to exposed which color channels are clipped."
Mark II also introduces Color Zebras, color-coded zebra stripes to indicate which color channel is clipped.
And with its XDR Analysis, Mark II becomes "the first and only camera app that visualizes the full 14-bit Raw data in real time."
PRICE, AVAILABILITY
Halide Mark II is available now for a launch price of $30 (regularly $36) for new users. But Sandofsky said "we plan to raise that price as we add more features."
So the company is also offering a membership program at $11.99 a year, which should be less expensive than upgrades, he said. And that too gets a launch discount of $9.99 that will be locked in.
There's also a one-week free trial available.
Owners of Halide 1 get Mark II as a free upgrade, he added.