On the non-professional iPhone, Apple omits the telephoto lens. This means that if you want to take close-up photos with the iPhone 14, you’ll either have to move yourself or live with subpar shots that are artificially zoomed in and blurry in detail. In fact, all the iPhone does is crop the zoomed scene from the larger image, so it hardly qualifies as a zoom. Can machine learning help?
Bringing machine learning to camera apps has been successful with several companies such as Google and Samsung. Both use it to enhance the phone’s telephoto camera, allowing users to zoom up to 100x while improving quality.of google pixel 7For example, the , which does not have a physical zoom lens, has a technology called “Super Res Zoom” that upscales a digitally zoomed photo and produces a result similar to what a dedicated 2x telephoto camera would capture. It has been.
halide (opens in new tab)A paid pro-level camera app wants to bring these features to the iPhone.
What does the Halide app do?
Halide’s latest update offers a “Neural Telephoto” mode. This mode uses machine learning to take sharper, cleaner digital zoom photos for non-professional iPhone users. Works with iPhone SE up to the latest iPhone 14. It relies on Apple’s built-in Neural Engine so you don’t have to wait for Halide apps to apply machine learning algorithms.
According to the Halide team, the new Neural Telephoto feature runs on the same technology that powers another iPhone Pro perk: the app’s ability to replicate macro photos. found to be Very effective for clicking close-up shots on non-professional iPhones.
Halide’s machine learning model has been trained on millions of photos and is taught to learn and identify parts of photos that are of poor quality. After discovering the low-res aspects, you can enhance them without over-manipulating your photos. For example, if you’re trying to zoom in on a flower, it “knows” what its borders look like, and the app uses that information to adjust finer details.
Apple’s digital zoom is very poor, and the difference shows in the results. We’ve been testing Halide’s new neural telephoto mode for several days, and its 2x zoom consistently captured sharper, higher-contrast shots, regardless of lighting conditions. It’s not obvious until you examine it on screen, but it can feel important if you plan to edit the image further or print it.
For example, when I clicked on a 2x magnified photo of a cactus basking in the sun on my desk, the default camera app on my iPhone 13 mini couldn’t handle the hues of sunlight and oversaturated it. In the embedded photo, you can see the cactus greenery showing up on the rim of the blue pot. Likewise, a green haze shines around the rock next to it. Halide shot did not face these problems. It looks a little less bright, but it was faithful to the scene.
Even in low light, 2x shots taken with the iPhone’s native camera app often feature watercolor-like hues with blurred borders, as evidenced by the tuk-tuk photo below. Keeps contours and focus intact. Another highlight of Halide is that when you take a close-up shot, it saves both a 2x enhanced JPEG file and the original 1x zoom RAW file. , that even if the zoomed-in image is substandard, the image remains usable.
Transitioning to Halide’s Neural Telephoto mode is also fairly straightforward. Simply launch the app and touch the “1x” button in the lower right corner to automatically jump directly to 2x mode.
Halide agrees, and I agree, that this is no match for a physical telephoto lens. It outperformed the default camera in some complex scenarios, but in the rest the difference was negligible, and in many cases its enhanced shots looked even more unnatural. Therefore, the app is neither free nor affordable, so better he should decide how important the 2x digital zoom is. He can try Halide for free for a week before paying $2.99/month (or $11.99/year). Alternatively, he can purchase a one-time lifetime license for $59.99.
Halide’s cost is undoubtedly high, but the startup frequently releases major updates such as macro modes that make the package worthwhile. Additionally, you can customize a variety of professional settings not found in the default app, such as shutter speed, RAW files, manual focus, and more.
