{"id":126308,"date":"2022-07-05T14:00:58","date_gmt":"2022-07-05T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/news\/?id=x6bv1a36"},"modified":"2022-07-05T14:00:58","modified_gmt":"2022-07-05T14:00:58","slug":"behind-the-design-halide-mark-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2022\/07\/05\/behind-the-design-halide-mark-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Design: Halide Mark II"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Halide Mark II’s<\/em> Sebastiaan de With is an analog guy in a digital world. As co-founder and creative lead at Lux Optics \u2014 the company behind the Apple Design Award-winning camera app \u2014 de With is no stranger to design or digital photography. But he\u2019s also a big fan of falling off the grid.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love grabbing a pen and a notebook, going into the woods, and drawing and drawing,\u201d de With says.<\/p>\n

\"Lens<\/p>\n
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Lens flair: Halide\u2019s Sebastiaan de With designed the minimalist camera app to offer \u201cexcitement without intimidation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

That dual passion for analog art and digital design shines in Halide Mark II, an app that combines the power of a modern DSLR with the joy and beauty of a classic manual camera. \u201cCameras are just so fun to use,\u201d de With says. \u201cGive a child a camera and they\u2019ll play with the aperture ring and the dials and the switches. I thought, \u2018Maybe we can bring a semblance of that delight to an app on a piece of glass.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Behind the Design is a weekly series that explores design practices and philosophies from each of the 12 winners of the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Packed with pro-grade features but accessible to those learning their way around ISO settings, Halide beautifully strikes a balance between the professional and the practical. And its uncluttered, beautifully-organized feature set means that even high-end settings like depth mode and histograms are never more than a few taps away. \u201cWe didn\u2019t say we made an app,\u201d says de With. \u201cWe say we made a camera. That was a philosophical underpinning of everything we did.\u201d <\/p>\n

de With and Lux Optics co-founder Ben Sandofsky know a thing or two about cameras. They bonded on social media over their shared love of photo gear, and a partnership soon followed: The duo released the first version of Halide in 2016, aiming to capture the accessibility of Apple\u2019s camera app while providing easy access to advanced features. \u201cThe complexity is there,\u201d says de With, \u201cit\u2019s just not going to overwhelm you. When you\u2019re offered a somewhat accessible way into this world, it can kindle excitement without intimidation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Halide<\/p>\n
\n

Halide provides both pro-grade manual controls and powerful autofocus settings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

That philosophy was a key factor in recruiting Lux Optics\u2019s third team member, iOS developer Rebecca Slatkin. \u201cI really admired \u2014 and aligned with \u2014 their pragmatic approach to software development,\u201d she says. \u201cThey weren\u2019t reinventing the wheel. It was all simplicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Slatkin had grown up around photography, her camera usage had been far more casual than either de With\u2019s or Sandofsky\u2019s \u2014 but that perspective brought even greater accessibility to Halide for people across all skill sets. \u201cYou know in bowling, where they put bumpers in the gutters to make sure you at least hit a pin?\u201d says Slatkin. \u201cWe support [people] like that. No matter your background, you can take a great photo.\u201d<\/p>\n

To translate this ethos to interface, the team designed the app\u2019s controls to largely stay out of the way. \u201cOther camera apps looked like flight simulators with lots of dials, which was intimidating, even for someone like me who loves film cameras,\u201d de With says. “A camera is an extension of your body, and it works best when it creates muscle memory. We need to have consistent gestures. We need to be flexible without changing buttons around all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Halide\u2019s<\/p>\n
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Halide\u2019s Ben Sandofsky \u2014 seen here testing the app firsthand \u2014 connected with de With over their shared love of photo gear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Color, too, is used carefully and deliberately in Halide, with a single yellow highlight color (another homage to classic cameras) used to indicate active state for a feature. When the team was redesigning Halide in 2020 for its Mark II release, however, they discovered that color wasn\u2019t always enough to help someone identify what tools they were using \u2014 a lesson Slatkin learned the hard way when trying to experiment with the app\u2019s RAW feature. <\/p>\n

\u201cI remember I went to the Adirondacks and took all these photos, and was excited to show Sebastiaan and Ben and my dad,\u201d she recounts, \u201cand I got back and none of them were in RAW \u2014 because I thought the deactivated state was the opposite.\u201d While frustrating, the real-world test helped the team update the feature\u2019s button design to better reflect each individual mode when selected.<\/p>\n

\"Halide\u2019s<\/p>\n
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Halide\u2019s powerful macro mode is always just a few taps away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The team\u2019s focus on simplicity for Halide goes beyond interface design \u2014 they also bring it to the design and implementation of their advanced camera features. Take their approach to RAW photography: While pros may love working with uncompressed images because it offers them more color data to manipulate, RAW processing can often be confusing and time-consuming for first-time photographers. In response, the team developed Instant RAW, which uses machine learning to help people shoot and process RAW images instantly. \u201cIt\u2019s all about what you create,\u201d says de With. \u201cSo we thought, \u2018Let\u2019s just skip to the part where you create nice photos.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes, the team builds features that grow beyond Halide itself. Spectre Camera, a machine learning-powered long exposure app and the App Store\u2019s 2019 App of the Year, was one such project; the team is also currently hard at work on Light Forecast, an app that uses machine learning and predictive models to alert you when a particularly picturesque sunset is coming up. (You might have caught a peek in the WWDC22 keynote.) Originally conceived as a Lock Screen widget, the app has evolved into a passion project for Slatkin.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I was learning photography, I was trying to become more aware of light and golden hour,\u201d she says, \u201cand I found that being able to predict cloud coloration, sky coloration, and air quality makes a huge difference.\u201d She\u2019s spent the past several months collecting data, partnering with weather services, and tracking 30 webcams all over the country. \u201cI\u2019ve learned that we\u2019ve been sleeping on some really good sunsets,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"Rebecca<\/p>\n
\n

Rebecca Slatkin and de With often find themselves learning from their own app. \u201cI find myself being a lot more observant about my surroundings,\u201d says Slatkin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

That experience \u2014 and that unexpected delight \u2014 is what Lux Optics hopes people get out of their apps: the sense that cameras, even the complicated ones, are accessible to anyone with a device and a scenic location. \u201cI hike a lot, and I find myself being a lot more observant about my surroundings,\u201d says Slatkin. \u201cIt\u2019s made me appreciate the beauty of things I wouldn\u2019t have noticed before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simply put: You don\u2019t need be to a pro photographer to use a pro camera app. “It\u2019s a lie to say that some people have a creative gift and some don\u2019t,\u201d de With says. \u201cEverybody has a unique perspective on the world. We hope we can help people discover theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learn more about Halide Mark II<\/a><\/p>\n

Download Halide Mark II – Pro Camera from the App Store<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Halide Mark II’s Sebastiaan de With is an analog guy in a digital world. As co-founder and creative lead at Lux Optics \u2014 the company behind the Apple Design Award-winning camera app \u2014 de With is no stranger to design or digital photography. But he\u2019s also a big fan of falling off the grid. \u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apple-developer-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}