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jrflo 2 hours ago [-]
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple isn't already doing this and just doesn't say so explicitly. There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone photo. Would be interesting to compare a photo taken with the native camera app and photosynthesis to compare. I'm assuming your demo images on your site are the raw and processed images from your app that don't go through Apple's "secret sauce" processing pipeline.
101008 1 hours ago [-]
Hijacking this comment because of this line that reminded me of something:
"There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone"
I bought the Pixel 10 because it said it had great zooming capabilities. After 5X (that means 10X), it's completely stupid. Basically it takes a very blurred photo and then tries to reconstruct it with AI. The final results are completely awful and really distant from reality.
Any advice in how to improve that?
dgacmu 54 minutes ago [-]
In photos after you can toggle between the AI modified and original. The original isn't as blurry as the preview shown - there's still a lot of image stacking happening and it's often very decent in my experience.
Edited to add: I have a pixel 10 pro which has a better zoom lens, so I could be having a different experience than you...
Phones have been doing this for a LONG time, if you had a oneplus 7 pro (released may 2019) and took it into an extremely dark area, like where your eyes can't see anything at all, and take a 'night mode' photo, it asks you to hold it steady for about 4-5 seconds and is clearly taking a series of photos with long exposure time. Then it stacks them and uses data from the sensor of hand movement jitter to deblur.
The result when done outdoors (like, standing in a dark forest at midnight) will be a photo where you can actually see what's around you, and details show up as if it was a brightly full moon lit night.
hbn 1 hours ago [-]
That's a bunch of photos from the same camera, not 2 lenses at the same time
walrus01 43 minutes ago [-]
I know, I just don't think it's a huge jump from "take multiple photos over a 2s period from one camera and stack them" to "take several photos from discrete physical cameras and stack them". As a subscription of paid app I am not the target market for the person who made this, I agree with another person commenting in here that said they should be working for a phone manufacturer.
somehnguy 1 hours ago [-]
I think it's interesting that the same functionality appeared on iPhone in 2019 as well. Google tells me it was the iPhone 11 and iOS 13.
marmarama 33 minutes ago [-]
Night Sight appeared on the Google Pixel camera app in 2018. I think Nokia was doing it first on phones before Microsoft destroyed the remains of their phone business.
The reborn Nokia/HMD was also doing multi-sensor image stacking back in 2019 on the Nokia 9 Pureview.
It's different from just stacking exposures, it's a paid app that does progressive animation of exposures for creative effect and says it's "AI-powered" whatever that means.
sajomes 1 hours ago [-]
Yes exactly, the site shows photos all taken from within the app. I have done A/B tests against photos taken in Camera.app and the Photosynthesis composite does significantly beat the detail central area covered by the second lens in Photosynthesis.
Because of the limitations of capturing multiple lenses at once through isVirtualDeviceConstituentPhotoDeliveryEnabled, there is a second capture mode in the app for 'Quality' which takes a simultaneous capture then takes sequential shots from each lens which do benefit from Deep Fusion, then uses those for the stitch (as long as the Deep Fusion images outperform the simultaneous capture results). That's also what I do for our Night mode.
selectodude 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is just Deep Fusion.
stavros 1 hours ago [-]
This should be easy to check. In these photos, the center of the image has higher detail than the edges.
p1necone 36 minutes ago [-]
I just assumed this was what all phones with multiple rear cameras were doing, is it not? What are the multiple cameras for other than that?
hackingonempty 30 minutes ago [-]
Each camera has a different optical system with a different focal length range. This lets the camera cover everything from ultra wide angle to telescopic magnification while remaining thin enough to fit in a phone.
anigbrowl 4 hours ago [-]
Neat work, but the free tier lets you export 3 images a month and the alternative is a subscription? No thanks.
sajomes 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you! I'm quite a new dev so honestly I don't know where to pitch the free tier, and I'm not above changing it. Do you have any suggestions for the free tier?
cush 1 hours ago [-]
Charge some number of dollars once. There's no service here, so why would we need a subscription?
hbn 1 hours ago [-]
Maintaining an app isn't free. You let it sit stale for a year or 2 and you'll get kicked from the App Store for non-compliance.
Not to mention the developer account subscription is $99/year
anigbrowl 53 minutes ago [-]
OK? That's just the reality of business. You launch something and then need to do marketing to keep getting it in front of people until word spreads around that your app is a must-have thing for whatever it does and you get a decent number of sales every month.
In general, when I buy something I want to pay for it once and then have it. I don't want to rent or lease it, even if it's consumable. When I eat a restaurant I I pay for the meal when it's over; if it was delicious I might come back again. Even if I like it so much that I eat there every week, that doesn't mean I want a weekly subscription.
hbn 21 minutes ago [-]
You're using a device with an ever-evolving OS that constantly breaks compatibility.
If you paid for it once and only got to keep the version of it as of when you paid for it, in a couple years the platform would remove your ability to use it.
cush 1 hours ago [-]
This is hardly convincing. A $99/yr fee and a once every 2 years update doesn't warrant a monthly subscription fee from every user. Eg a $9.99 app could cover those costs with a few dozen downloads
prmoustache 35 minutes ago [-]
users don't need the app to be maintained, just installed once.
hbn 25 minutes ago [-]
Yes they do need it to be maintained because they update their phone and any apps that don't keep up can no longer be used unless the dev does more work.
vcanales 2 hours ago [-]
I think the less frowned upon way to charge is to just do it once.
If the Apple store supports this, free trial + one time payment sounds like a good way. Don't optimize for freeloaders, as someone else said.
If the app relies only on iPhone hardware and/or is not a live service, an account/subscription should not be required. Even non-devs might justifiably ask "why do I need a subscription for a camera app".
spockz 50 minutes ago [-]
Halide asks for a subscription. Not entirely sure why yet. Yes, it is more advanced than the normal app. Also slower and I haven’t noticed any changes or improvements in the last two years. Maybe support for new features in newer iPhones.
ebbi 42 minutes ago [-]
They just released a major update, but it's not something I would pay a subscription for. I paid the lifetime fee in it's early days, but that doesn't unlock the new updates sadly.
I use Analogue for day to day capture, and NoFusion and Moment apps for things I will want to edit later. All with one-time purchase. I don't mind paying for quality apps, but I do have subscription fatigue now.
LoganDark 33 minutes ago [-]
There is still a lifetime purchase for the new version, IIRC. I can see it in the App Store IAP section. (Which is so useful! Lets me filter for apps that have a lifetime option at all.)
anigbrowl 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think there's anything wrong with charging, even if you vibe coded it. You clearly put a lot of effort into the design and concept.
As I said in more detail below, on a free tier I expect to be able to at least try it out in a normal way. a monthly limit of exporting 3 pictures (eg to look at on my computer or TV) seems like something a normal person would hit in the first 30 minutes of just exploring what it does. Now, I noticed you run it this way for 14 days, but I gotta say that on first view this was massively outweighed by the 3/month limit.
subscription-wise, I just don't like them. If you are doing a ton of server-side processing, I'd rather pay on an as-needed basis. If not, I'd rather just Pay $19.99 (or whatever price you determine to be competitive in the market for photo apps). I see why subscription income would be nice to have for you, but for me it's a financial leaky faucet. In that case, I'd prefer to just go without because the app is a fun thing to have rather than a professional need.
It also bothered me that it was described as a 'reasonably priced' subscription. If I don't see a $ sign and a number, I reflexively classify it as a scam even though rationally I know you're just testing the waters. I close or dismiss 10 or 20 things a day after a cursory glance into whether they're worth my time or money: fear of being ripped off (FOBRO) outweighs the fear of missing out (FOMO).
IncreasePosts 2 hours ago [-]
So what you're saying is that you prompted Claude to produce the app for you and now you're charging for it? A bold move, but I wouldn't expect much returns before there's completely free apps doing the same thing
newbie578 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t listen to him, people like that will always complain, yet will never upgrade or pay for your product. He does not have a problem with your price but the mere fact that you are trying to sell something. Devs are like that.
Just differentiate signal from noise. Listen to your target audience not random internet comments
Angostura 1 hours ago [-]
I quite happily pay quite a lot for apps. The number I subscribe to is tiny
anigbrowl 1 hours ago [-]
Wrong. I would definitely pay for this and was interested in it precisely because I just bought n iPhone. I spend $500-1000/year on software.
But if there's a free tier I want to try out normal use patterns over the course of a week or a month, and I prefer one-time payments or token purchases to subscriptions. I do the latter only for my IDEs, and still don't like it that much.
My objection was to the free tier only allowing one to export 3 images a month. That seems bizarre to me, since in course of trying something for the first time you might make 5, 10, or 20 images in an hour. If I'm running into a monthly limit in the first few minutes of using a tool, my immediate reaction is that it's something I can live without.
sajomes 33 minutes ago [-]
Nothing in the app is gated from day 1, you get 14 days of unlimited use before the choice of free vs paid is even presented, with no need to sign up for an official "free trial", so you have a good amount of time to make your mind up.
I am also considering a lifetime unlock option.
sajomes 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I think I've seen that from reviews for every paid app I've come across - still, happy to take feedback!
cush 1 hours ago [-]
No way. Subscriptions make sense for services. This is just a regular app.
Forgeties79 49 minutes ago [-]
Nah man I’m not paying a subscription for a camera app that runs locally with zero need for cloud/servers/etc. beyond hosting their core product. I have paid as much as $50 for an app before (Artemis).
After I buy it I am zero burden to them beyond occasional updates, which I have very modest expectations of. They are far more likely to get my money if it’s one time. I can’t imagine paying a subscription for a physical camera, let alone a camera app on hardware I already paid a lot for
ajkjk 2 hours ago [-]
My suggestion is be generous and make a bit less money as the cost of making the world a kinder and more pleasant place. There's no rule that says you have to play ruthless capitalist.
groundzeros2015 1 hours ago [-]
We’re talking about an optional phone app.
ajkjk 60 minutes ago [-]
and everyone is suggested milking it for every dollar. it's gross. this attitude is why so many things suck.
beachy 2 hours ago [-]
Make it permissive enough that 80% of potential users don't need to pay for subscription. 20% of a heck of a lot of people is still a lot.
2 hours ago [-]
bdangubic 2 hours ago [-]
do not do this please. if you have a good product, people will pay for it. if you don’t, you don’t. don’t optimize for free-loaders
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
correct. never optimize your product, just wait to see if it's a success or not.
sajomes 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you - this has been my plan
stavros 1 hours ago [-]
I feel like the GP was being sarcastic.
acomjean 3 hours ago [-]
It’s weird, because the center of the image will be more detailed, so how are they dealing with the “grid of pixels” that is on the display. Are they doubling up the wide angle.
“Easy-to-understand framing
The brackets over the viewfinder indicate the area covered by the more detailed lens. Frame your subject inside them to capture the best detail.“
Reminds me of the old 3d cameras that took two photos at once through 2 lenses (on film)
I'm scaling the wider 'outer' image using Core Graphics 'CGInterpolationQuality' to avoid blocky pixellation, then feathering the seam between the two lens outputs so the transition isn't jarring.
I didn't know about those Nishika stereo cameras, that looks incredible!
650REDHAIR 2 hours ago [-]
Why do i need a subscription for a camera app?
charcircuit 1 hours ago [-]
If a user gets value from an app month after month it makes sense for the user to pay for the value month after month.
backscratches 29 minutes ago [-]
Shoes and shirts and hats and bars of soap all should have a monthly subscription as well.
alistairSH 1 hours ago [-]
By that logic, I should be paying Audi and Mazda a subscription for finding utility in the cars that sit in my driveway.
And Nike for the shoes on my feet.
cush 1 hours ago [-]
By that logic they should charge per photo
gurjeet 25 minutes ago [-]
I believe this is something similar to what Lytro aimed to bring to market.
Lytro, Inc. was an American company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng which developed some of the first commercially available light-field cameras.
I'm confused. So this is just producing a single photo that is clearer in a middle rectangle and blurrier outside that rectangle?
Of course the extra detail in the middle is nicer, but won't the edge of the "detail rectangle" be extremely obvious and distracting? Like when you zoom into satellite view on Maps and it's clear that there's a blurry area and a sharp area?
I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image. I can understand why you'd want to snap photos with both lenses simultaneously as save them as separate photos, but I don't understand why you'd combine them.
n2d4 35 minutes ago [-]
> I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image.
An image with the FOV of the wide-angle camera but the quality of the main one in the center? Assuming the border interpolation works well (which tbf is probably hard for close objects), why would anyone not want this?
ebbi 45 minutes ago [-]
> So this is just producing a single photo that is clearer in a middle rectangle and blurrier outside that rectangle?
Yeah that looks to be the case. Not sure what use case this solves with that 'limitation'. I don't think photographers would particularly like this.
swah 4 hours ago [-]
If it works, Apple copies it soon enough...
woadwarrior01 3 hours ago [-]
There's nothing to copy. Apple's iOS Camera app already uses multi-camera image fusion in many cases. This app builds on the Multi-Camera AVCapture feature that Apple opened up in iOS 13.
IIUC, it's the ability to export layered PSD files with images from multiple sensors.
CharlesW 3 hours ago [-]
Apple has done this (multi-camera/spatial fusion) since 2016, in addition to multi-frame/temporal fusion. The OS decides whether these techniques are worthwhile for any given shot based on context.
subscription camera app seems like peak comedy to me
furyofantares 4 hours ago [-]
Definitely not peak, my kid asked for a Rubik's Cube solver app which turned out to be subscription based, then wanted to tune her Ukelele with an app which turned out to be subscription based.
This is why some hardware is still supreme. I've had the same Korg chromatic tuner for 20 years and would not be in the least bit surprised if it goes for another 40.
ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago [-]
That's what makes me sad about the current Tetris game, on iOS.
One of my favorite games ever, and I'd gladly pay for an ad-free version, but they don't have it. I assume there's much more money to be made with ads, over subscriptions.
cloudfudge 45 minutes ago [-]
I think there's money to be made with both, but there's more money to be made by not maintaining two separate models, so ads win.
furyofantares 1 hours ago [-]
Oh, the Rubik's Cube app has both actually - the subscription gets rid of the ads you have to watch to get more solves.
bookofjoe 2 hours ago [-]
A penetrating observation that feels true. Too bad.
pastor_williams 2 hours ago [-]
This sort of nonsense is what I think will drive adoption of AI for personal apps. Tell it to create a ukulele tuning app and you get one without ads without subscription that you can make work exactly how you want. I wonder whether this is something that only privacy and tech oriented folk will do and care about our whether it will be adopted generally.
ironman1478 2 hours ago [-]
Metronome apps are paid now or have an 'ad' tier. I took my money and spent it on a real metronome.
da02 2 hours ago [-]
Did you buy it or show them a better way of doing it?
VladVladikoff 2 hours ago [-]
There was some video on reddit that I saw the other day where a man struggled to take a photo with his camera app because it kept popping full screen ads in front of everything else.
hoppp 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, at that point it's better to buy an external lens for the Iphone. Single purchase and better pictures.
p1necone 35 minutes ago [-]
Apple customers are just built different.
PaulHoule 4 hours ago [-]
There is Halide which I find completely uninteresting because I have a Sony A7iv. (Funny my latest piece of “gear” I am learning to use is a selfie stick because I can do stuff like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/selfie and I don’t see third party apps really improve on the official camera)
xiaoyu2006 42 minutes ago [-]
How is parallax error solved? The two cameras don't share the same optics center.
anthonyskipper 31 minutes ago [-]
Parallax error decreases significantly when lens are close enough and these are mm apart. They are close enough that you can probably just play a perspective trick and hide any artifacts.
roflmaostc 3 hours ago [-]
The principle is similar to foveated imaging [1].
Recently, Samsung introduced the ISOCELL platform which allows to select the area which will be recorded at higher resolution compared to other regions.
There can be all sorts of different applications build around such as extracting higher resolution of text regions, etc [2].
Of course, the lens needs to support this resolution but I think that will be default in the mid-term future.
How can you in good conscience charge a subscription for this? It would be one thing if the app relied on infrastructure, but it's a one and done algorithm that's entirely local on device!
Subscriptions are charged because the developer needs to maintain the upkeep and cost of running the service, but that's not applicable here. It's capable of taking a million photographs fully offline, without any reliance on an online service.
Essentially you're saying your product is so superb that people should pay you indefinitely for the privilege of using it. Even though it costs you nothing to maintain, you somehow need people to perpetually pay you for a local, offline algorithm that you wrote one time. How gross, that's the definition of pointless greed.
Shame on you, honestly. This is exactly what's wrong with modern software nowadays. Just like Adobe and all these other companies, taking advantage of people to milk them dry forever. You'll lease a product, you won't have the right to own anything, and you'll be happy about it.
walrus01 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is actually how oneplus phones have taken 'night' mode photos for a very long time in their default camera app, it takes multiple exposures and uses the movement sensor in the phone to pick several which were taken with the least hand jitter, and then stacks them into the final result.
sajomes 1 hours ago [-]
I believe that's true for most/all night capture, but they take sequential frames from the same lens rather than combining multiple lenses.
megraf 3 hours ago [-]
Pretty cool -- I built see ya' an app which allows you to connect N number of phones locally, and use one phone as the view finder + shutter, and the other(s) as the dedicated camera. I'm just using Apples native API, so it'll connect over bluetooth, wifi, direct, whatever pretty seamlessly. I don't collect any data, and it's 100% free.
That's super handy, thanks! I've been using one of those selfie monitoring screens and opening the camera to record video + turning on the flash, this app seems like a better way of accomplishing this
boaztheostrich 3 hours ago [-]
What API are you using if you don’t mind me asking?
That seems super cool! You could almost strap an iPhone to the back of your phone and see yourself for recordings.
megraf 3 hours ago [-]
Apple’s MultipeerConnectivity framework -- phones discover and talk over local wifi / bluetooth via MCSession, MCNearbyServiceAdvertiser, and MCNearbyServiceBrowser in PeerSessionManager.
gregoriol 3 hours ago [-]
Apple has deprecated all of that now
megraf 3 hours ago [-]
You're right - I have to move them to Network Framework when I have time :)
woadwarrior01 2 hours ago [-]
When you get around to doing that, you might find the Github repo and its accompanying medium article useful.
Please post your own Show HN, or comment in “what are you working on” threads, or pick some other approach.
I also have an app that uses device camera and I don’t write about it in mostly unrelated submissions.
PaulHoule 4 hours ago [-]
Left side and the right side look the same to me except some subtle differences in the color of shadows…. And another waitlist? Nein Danke.
swiftcoder 2 hours ago [-]
This might be a personal preference thing, but in every single example photo on that page, I significantly prefer the colours in the "standard zoom" version of the photo. I wonder if they can figure out how to do this fusion without losing that beautiful contrast the zoom lens brings to the table?
sajomes 1 hours ago [-]
That's really interesting - the colour match attempts to find the best match between the two lens outputs, which frequently results in them 'meeting in the middle'. You can then manually adjust the output of each lens within the app's editing interface. I'll have a think about the weighting of the colour match.
eigenspace 3 days ago [-]
Very cool stuff, I've long thought there must be some fancy ways to get extra information for better image resolution by taking advantage of the other cameras.
That said, I must also say that most of the side-by-side comparison photos shown here are somewhat impressive, and in some cases, the photosynthesis one just looks worse to my untrained eye.
_______________
I'll choose to take this as evidence of the fact that you're tacking a very difficult problem, and you're also being honest in your comparisons and not cherry-picking too aggressively.
sajomes 1 hours ago [-]
As dole alluded to below, I have been going back and forth in balancing the quality of the example pictures with the data load. I've pushed an update to the site now that weighs much more towards quality for this exact reason! But you're right, I don't want to hide the fact that not all results are perfect.
dole 4 hours ago [-]
Some of the photosynthesis zoom-ins have overlays take a bit longer to load at higher resolution.
cantalopes 3 hours ago [-]
I am co fused, 50% of photos look better in standard zoom and 50% of them look better woth photosynthesis. This is like an anti campaign for the app hinting "in the end it doesn't really matter"
sajomes 2 hours ago [-]
I think this may be due to an issue I've had with loading the full res zoom images on the website, I've been going back and forth trying to balance the loading times and stress on the browser with clarity of the images. Working on a new idea now, so hopefully it'll give better demonstrations soon.
niek_pas 27 minutes ago [-]
That is a fantastic name.
sajomes 19 minutes ago [-]
Thank you! I was very happy when I came up with it
gepeake 4 hours ago [-]
This was actually a purported feature of the Pixel 3 camera. Google said it would be constantly taking photos and the different information captured as your hand moved slightly could be used to create higher information density photos. It didn't work very well at that point but the idea was cool!
sajomes 1 hours ago [-]
I believe that's a similar idea to Apple's Deep Fusion which also takes multiple frames from the same lens then intelligently combines them for higher detail. As ipsum2 said below, that's different to Photosynthesis, which captures from different lenses simultaneously.
ipsum2 4 hours ago [-]
That's not what's being described here. It's just combining the telephoto and wide angle photos.
joe-dakroub 3 hours ago [-]
I like the idea of this app and the website is well done. Subscription isn't for me, but for folks who take a lot of photos and need this sort of thing, I can see it. Free tier could offer a few more photos per month.
hnthrowawayacct 4 hours ago [-]
very cool app, a few questions: why does the color "temp" of the image change between traditional iphone photography vs your app? it appears to both warm and cool the images. Also why is the contrast decreased, specifically in the library/book store example?
jnsie 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I wonder if this could be extended to take MPO 3D photos.
sajomes 16 minutes ago [-]
That is something I want to look at post-1.0-launch.
zellyn 3 hours ago [-]
Anyone know if they’re using the native camera resolution for the zoomed part or doing sensor fusion to get better quality than either alone?
bigwheels 4 hours ago [-]
That demo looks like Minority Report level enhancement. Amazing if it really works, but I'll be damned if I'm paying for a SaaS camera app.
alansaber 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't quite a lot of modern smartphone photography post-processing? Yes camera SAAS is extremely funny but I can kinda see it maybe
LoganDark 37 minutes ago [-]
This appears to use a naïve masking approach (using ML to find the edges of the mask) which seems to suffer from slight uncorrected differences in lens distortion. There's a fairly obvious feathering around the edges of the detailed area, objects shift quite dramatically, and overall I feel like I'd do a better job of this manually. It is a cool idea, but flawed execution. I would prefer something like using ML to generate a displacement map between the wide angle and the narrow angle parts. That way you can map the higher details down faithfully without having to feather the edges nearly as much or compute any mask. That would also solve parallax which I see also looks unaccounted for.
AtheistOfFail 49 minutes ago [-]
Weird issue: The iPhone dropdown doesn't include the iPhone XR.
It's not like I expect it to work, I'm just curious what the app does.
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
My hesitations on this are it stores data in a proprietary format that I may not be able to export to another common format if the product disappears in a few years.
For something personal like photos and the memories they capture, that's not ideal for me.
While the app is still with us, I'm not sure how much it will cost me to export to my photos to my photo library each month.
sajomes 48 minutes ago [-]
There is zero lock-in with the files being saved - you can export from the app in HEIC/PNG/JPEG as well as PSD and spatial/SBS 3D. The format the website calls the 'Photosynthesis' file is an HEIC so even if you export that you can still access the data outside of the app.
Unlimited exports of the composite images are part of the subscription (with an option to automatically export to Photos.app and/or a folder of your choosing), but the free tier still offers unlimited saving of the constituent images e.g. the wide & tele shots, just not the composite.
BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago [-]
"This site was paused as it reached its usage limits. Please contact the site owner for more information."
sajomes 2 hours ago [-]
It's back now!
BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago [-]
FYI you're serving multi-megabyte images on your landing page that could effectively be thumbnails.
2 hours ago [-]
teaearlgraycold 2 hours ago [-]
This whole thing feels wrong. OP should be working for a phone manufacturer, not trying to sell this as a subscription. How much is it worth to be able to squeeze a little more visual clarity out of my phone? Maybe $20 maximum? And I feel like I’m on the generous side of the population here. Most people will say $0. But if you’re inside of Apple and you can tell them you can add an average of $1 of perceived value to each of their millions of phones sold each year they’ll be over the moon and you can get a fat salary.
jrm4 2 hours ago [-]
As an Android guy and not an iPhone, or phone pic guy...
What do the multiple lenses do then, if not this? Like,I presumed that was the point.
Are they LITERALLY just decoration for me to make fun of?
tomasphan 1 hours ago [-]
This has to be bait right? They’re different lenses with different focal lengths. Same as on Android phones with more than one lens.
Aurornis 2 hours ago [-]
Different optical zoom levels.
Many phones already use information from both cameras, too.
"There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone"
I bought the Pixel 10 because it said it had great zooming capabilities. After 5X (that means 10X), it's completely stupid. Basically it takes a very blurred photo and then tries to reconstruct it with AI. The final results are completely awful and really distant from reality.
Any advice in how to improve that?
Edited to add: I have a pixel 10 pro which has a better zoom lens, so I could be having a different experience than you...
The result when done outdoors (like, standing in a dark forest at midnight) will be a photo where you can actually see what's around you, and details show up as if it was a brightly full moon lit night.
The reborn Nokia/HMD was also doing multi-sensor image stacking back in 2019 on the Nokia 9 Pureview.
From the authors of Halide.
Because of the limitations of capturing multiple lenses at once through isVirtualDeviceConstituentPhotoDeliveryEnabled, there is a second capture mode in the app for 'Quality' which takes a simultaneous capture then takes sequential shots from each lens which do benefit from Deep Fusion, then uses those for the stitch (as long as the Deep Fusion images outperform the simultaneous capture results). That's also what I do for our Night mode.
Not to mention the developer account subscription is $99/year
In general, when I buy something I want to pay for it once and then have it. I don't want to rent or lease it, even if it's consumable. When I eat a restaurant I I pay for the meal when it's over; if it was delicious I might come back again. Even if I like it so much that I eat there every week, that doesn't mean I want a weekly subscription.
If you paid for it once and only got to keep the version of it as of when you paid for it, in a couple years the platform would remove your ability to use it.
If the Apple store supports this, free trial + one time payment sounds like a good way. Don't optimize for freeloaders, as someone else said.
If the app relies only on iPhone hardware and/or is not a live service, an account/subscription should not be required. Even non-devs might justifiably ask "why do I need a subscription for a camera app".
I use Analogue for day to day capture, and NoFusion and Moment apps for things I will want to edit later. All with one-time purchase. I don't mind paying for quality apps, but I do have subscription fatigue now.
As I said in more detail below, on a free tier I expect to be able to at least try it out in a normal way. a monthly limit of exporting 3 pictures (eg to look at on my computer or TV) seems like something a normal person would hit in the first 30 minutes of just exploring what it does. Now, I noticed you run it this way for 14 days, but I gotta say that on first view this was massively outweighed by the 3/month limit.
subscription-wise, I just don't like them. If you are doing a ton of server-side processing, I'd rather pay on an as-needed basis. If not, I'd rather just Pay $19.99 (or whatever price you determine to be competitive in the market for photo apps). I see why subscription income would be nice to have for you, but for me it's a financial leaky faucet. In that case, I'd prefer to just go without because the app is a fun thing to have rather than a professional need.
It also bothered me that it was described as a 'reasonably priced' subscription. If I don't see a $ sign and a number, I reflexively classify it as a scam even though rationally I know you're just testing the waters. I close or dismiss 10 or 20 things a day after a cursory glance into whether they're worth my time or money: fear of being ripped off (FOBRO) outweighs the fear of missing out (FOMO).
Just differentiate signal from noise. Listen to your target audience not random internet comments
But if there's a free tier I want to try out normal use patterns over the course of a week or a month, and I prefer one-time payments or token purchases to subscriptions. I do the latter only for my IDEs, and still don't like it that much.
My objection was to the free tier only allowing one to export 3 images a month. That seems bizarre to me, since in course of trying something for the first time you might make 5, 10, or 20 images in an hour. If I'm running into a monthly limit in the first few minutes of using a tool, my immediate reaction is that it's something I can live without.
I am also considering a lifetime unlock option.
After I buy it I am zero burden to them beyond occasional updates, which I have very modest expectations of. They are far more likely to get my money if it’s one time. I can’t imagine paying a subscription for a physical camera, let alone a camera app on hardware I already paid a lot for
“Easy-to-understand framing The brackets over the viewfinder indicate the area covered by the more detailed lens. Frame your subject inside them to capture the best detail.“
Reminds me of the old 3d cameras that took two photos at once through 2 lenses (on film)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/206409326865?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%...
I didn't know about those Nishika stereo cameras, that looks incredible!
And Nike for the shoes on my feet.
Lytro, Inc. was an American company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng which developed some of the first commercially available light-field cameras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro
Of course the extra detail in the middle is nicer, but won't the edge of the "detail rectangle" be extremely obvious and distracting? Like when you zoom into satellite view on Maps and it's clear that there's a blurry area and a sharp area?
I don't understand why you'd ever want these two things combined into a single image. I can understand why you'd want to snap photos with both lenses simultaneously as save them as separate photos, but I don't understand why you'd combine them.
An image with the FOV of the wide-angle camera but the quality of the main one in the center? Assuming the border interpolation works well (which tbf is probably hard for close objects), why would anyone not want this?
Yeah that looks to be the case. Not sure what use case this solves with that 'limitation'. I don't think photographers would particularly like this.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/249/
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avcap...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/06/apple-buy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch
One of my favorite games ever, and I'd gladly pay for an ad-free version, but they don't have it. I assume there's much more money to be made with ads, over subscriptions.
Recently, Samsung introduced the ISOCELL platform which allows to select the area which will be recorded at higher resolution compared to other regions.
There can be all sorts of different applications build around such as extracting higher resolution of text regions, etc [2].
Of course, the lens needs to support this resolution but I think that will be default in the mid-term future.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging
[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3799902.3811218
Subscriptions are charged because the developer needs to maintain the upkeep and cost of running the service, but that's not applicable here. It's capable of taking a million photographs fully offline, without any reliance on an online service.
Essentially you're saying your product is so superb that people should pay you indefinitely for the privilege of using it. Even though it costs you nothing to maintain, you somehow need people to perpetually pay you for a local, offline algorithm that you wrote one time. How gross, that's the definition of pointless greed.
Shame on you, honestly. This is exactly what's wrong with modern software nowadays. Just like Adobe and all these other companies, taking advantage of people to milk them dry forever. You'll lease a product, you won't have the right to own anything, and you'll be happy about it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/see-ya/id6792367530
That seems super cool! You could almost strap an iPhone to the back of your phone and see yourself for recordings.
https://github.com/0Itsuki0/SwiftUI_P2PWithNetwork
I also have an app that uses device camera and I don’t write about it in mostly unrelated submissions.
That said, I must also say that most of the side-by-side comparison photos shown here are somewhat impressive, and in some cases, the photosynthesis one just looks worse to my untrained eye.
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I'll choose to take this as evidence of the fact that you're tacking a very difficult problem, and you're also being honest in your comparisons and not cherry-picking too aggressively.
For something personal like photos and the memories they capture, that's not ideal for me.
While the app is still with us, I'm not sure how much it will cost me to export to my photos to my photo library each month.
Unlimited exports of the composite images are part of the subscription (with an option to automatically export to Photos.app and/or a folder of your choosing), but the free tier still offers unlimited saving of the constituent images e.g. the wide & tele shots, just not the composite.
What do the multiple lenses do then, if not this? Like,I presumed that was the point.
Are they LITERALLY just decoration for me to make fun of?
Many phones already use information from both cameras, too.
Android phones have multiple cameras too.
I immediately signed up. (And offered to help bring users to this thing.)