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.
Neat work, but the free tier lets you export 3 images a month and the alternative is a subscription? No thanks.
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?
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".
Charge some number of dollars once. There's no service here, so why would we need a subscription?
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
No way. Subscriptions make sense for services. This is just a regular app.
Thank you, I think I've seen that from reviews for every paid app I've come across - still, happy to take feedback!
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
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.
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
Thank you - this has been my plan
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.
Why do i need a subscription for a camera app?
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.
By that logic they should charge per photo
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)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/206409326865?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%...
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!
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?
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.
If it works, Apple copies it soon enough...
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.
So what's the value add here?
IIUC, it's the ability to export layered PSD files with images from multiple sensors.
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.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avcap...
They might acquire it and have done it in the past.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/06/apple-buy...
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.
subscription camera app seems like peak comedy to me
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.
Metronome apps are paid now or have an 'ad' tier. I took my money and spent it on a real metronome.
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.
A penetrating observation that feels true. Too bad.
Gotta keep up with pitch inflation!
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.
Did you buy it or show them a better way of doing it?
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.
Yeah, at that point it's better to buy an external lens for the Iphone. Single purchase and better pictures.
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)
Interesting. I wonder if this could be extended to take MPO 3D photos.
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
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.
Apple’s MultipeerConnectivity framework -- phones discover and talk over local wifi / bluetooth via MCSession, MCNearbyServiceAdvertiser, and MCNearbyServiceBrowser in PeerSessionManager.
Apple has deprecated all of that now
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.
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"
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.
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.
Some of the photosynthesis zoom-ins have overlays take a bit longer to load at higher resolution.
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.
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?
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!
That's not what's being described here. It's just combining the telephoto and wide angle photos.
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?
Different optical zoom levels.
Many phones already use information from both cameras, too.
Android phones have multiple cameras too.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Isn't quite a lot of modern smartphone photography post-processing? Yes camera SAAS is extremely funny but I can kinda see it maybe
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.
"This site was paused as it reached its usage limits. Please contact the site owner for more information."
It's back now!
FYI you're serving multi-megabyte images on your landing page that could effectively be thumbnails.
Similar idea to the discontinued Light L16 camera https://petapixel.com/2017/12/08/review-light-l16-brilliant-...
Is it just me or do the original photos look better overall?
Not just the app idea … but the WEBSITE — is VERY WELL DONE.
I immediately signed up. (And offered to help bring users to this thing.)
Thank you very much, that's really appreciated! Just added all the new sign-ups to the TestFlight, looking forward to hearing what you all think.
Anything like this for Android or Pixels?
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.
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.
I think it's interesting that the exact same functionality appeared on iPhone in 2019 as well. Google tells me it was the iPhone 11 and iOS 13.
I think this is just Deep Fusion.
This should be easy to check. In these photos, the center of the image has higher detail than the edges.