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Comment by hnarayanan | Hacker News Reader

As someone who (so very excitedly) upgraded from an iPhone X to an iPhone 14 Pro, I was and still am so disappointed sometimes by how artificial the photos on the new phone looks. I thought it was just me, now I see why it's a more general thing.

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I’m in the same boat, also upgraded from the X to 14 Pro just like you. It’s infuriating the amount of alterations it performs without my asking. Also equally infuriating is how buggy the whole camera app has become. Changing lenses uncontrollably, weird glitchy artefacts outside of the main canvas, live photos stutter, the additional “step” it does when showing a photo after it loads which ruins the whole looks. It’s a fall from grace and I don’t understand how Apple thinks it’s acceptable to ship this.

> Changing lenses uncontrollably

Settings > Camera > Macro Control

There are some other cases (like if you have your finger over one camera it might switch) but that’s the really noticeable one. You’ll usually regret changing it though.

I recently found and bought https://camerapixels.app/ which I love and it seems (to a hobbyist photographer) to give me a lot of control. The exposure and focus bracketing is really neat and pairs up with Affinity Photo 2 (and I'm sure many others). It has replaced the default camera app for me.

This f’n additional step it does kills me every time. Like the first iteration looks really good and then a fraction of a second later I know it’s going to change it and make it look much worse. :( (God those washed our blown out backgrounds.)

The sensor in the 14 pro is very impressive but at this point I take all my photos with Halide because otherwise it seems like a lot of that capability just goes to waste.

Could you please share your workflow for using it? I tried halide for about a week, but I found it awkward to use and I didn’t really want to keep editing each individual file.

Sure! For most point and shoot situations, I just leave Halide in HEIC mode and treat it just about exactly the same as the camera app. The controls are largely similar - you tap and hold to get an exposure slider, you tap the icon indicating the current lens to switch lenses, etc.

If I want 48 megapixel resolution and/or the added capture detail from ProRAW I'll turn on RAW+HEIC. That gives you a ProRaw you can edit after, as well as an "instant exposure" that basically just converts it to what you'd expect from HEIC mode. There is a tremendous amount of detail captured in the ProRaw shots that is processed away by the default app. As far as I know, you can't actually take 48 megapixel photos in the default camera app.

I seldom ever need to edit an individual file, because even if I'm shooting in 48mpx Halide will cook off an instagram-friendly edited version right away automatically. If I ever do want to tinker with the raw exposure, it's an option. The rest of the UI did take some fiddling to get used to, but I started out switching to Halide whenever I wanted to take a particularly good photo and before long I found myself using Halide for everything, because otherwise I'd be reviewing pictures and realize how much better one could have come out if I hadn't used the default app.

I found the official review of the 14 Pro camera by Halide's developer Lux to be a good primer on leveraging the app's capabilities: https://lux.camera/iphone-14-pro-camera-review-a-small-step-...

Thank you so much for this. I will try.

(Apologies for not seeing your response earlier.)

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