4 ms·

I'm cofounder of Lux and one of the engineers. Happy to answer any questions.

dadanda 5y ago
Could you please add a digital zoom option in Halide? I bought the app to have full manual control over the camera and I don’t understand why it cuts out this standard feature. One of my use cases is that I often use my phone with one of those macro lens clip-ons and on pocket microscopes and there you just have to zoom in digitally. And even for everyday shooting I sometimes just want to zoom in slightly. Of course everything is possible in post, but since you are boasting full manual control, I also expect the app to have all features of the default iPhone camera.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Doesn't digital zoom lose information? It's equivalent to cropping and enlarging. Seems antithetical to a camera app meant for professionals.
  - astrange 5y ago
    If you're zooming from the wider lenses it doesn't necessarily lose information, because you can merge it with a tele lens picture.
- sandofsky 5y ago
  Doing digital zoom "right" involves some serious thought. One issue is technical. The iPhone cannot capture a RAW photo with digital zoom enabled. It's restricted at an API level. The reasoning is that it wouldn't make sense to crop a RAW file, and there are privacy concerns around saving data in a photo that the user thought was cropped. Another issue is that digital zooming is awful. You're typically looking at simple interpolation, whereas cropping the photo afterwards in any half-decent editor offers better algorithms. Very smart software can apply super-resolution. Then there's added UI complexity. On hardware that supports optical zoom, you want to clearly surface to the user whether they're engaged digital zoom or optical. Many users are caught by surprise with how the first-party camera app quietly switches between the telephoto lens and cropping the wide-angle lens when it needs to focus on macro shots; the wide-angle lens has a closer minimum focus distance. From talking to users, we found many folks use digital zoom as a focus aid. That's why MkII included a focus loupe, which solved that problem in a much more elegant way. We do have some ideas on how to do digital zoom well. Stay tuned.

Could you please add a digital zoom option in Halide? I bought the app to have full manual control over the camera and I don’t understand why it cuts out this standard feature. One of my use cases is that I often use my phone with one of those macro lens clip-ons and on pocket microscopes and there you just have to zoom in digitally. And even for everyday shooting I sometimes just want to zoom in slightly. Of course everything is possible in post, but since you are boasting full manual control, I also expect the app to have all features of the default iPhone camera.

goldenkey 5y ago
Doesn't digital zoom lose information? It's equivalent to cropping and enlarging. Seems antithetical to a camera app meant for professionals.
- astrange 5y ago
  If you're zooming from the wider lenses it doesn't necessarily lose information, because you can merge it with a tele lens picture.
sandofsky 5y ago
Doing digital zoom "right" involves some serious thought. One issue is technical. The iPhone cannot capture a RAW photo with digital zoom enabled. It's restricted at an API level. The reasoning is that it wouldn't make sense to crop a RAW file, and there are privacy concerns around saving data in a photo that the user thought was cropped. Another issue is that digital zooming is awful. You're typically looking at simple interpolation, whereas cropping the photo afterwards in any half-decent editor offers better algorithms. Very smart software can apply super-resolution. Then there's added UI complexity. On hardware that supports optical zoom, you want to clearly surface to the user whether they're engaged digital zoom or optical. Many users are caught by surprise with how the first-party camera app quietly switches between the telephoto lens and cropping the wide-angle lens when it needs to focus on macro shots; the wide-angle lens has a closer minimum focus distance. From talking to users, we found many folks use digital zoom as a focus aid. That's why MkII included a focus loupe, which solved that problem in a much more elegant way. We do have some ideas on how to do digital zoom well. Stay tuned.