Halide Mark II - Pro Camera Reviews

I'm so very fed up and very, very tired of greedy and unethical developers like these two. Who make all they can from selling an app as a premium, one-time purchase. Then they succumb to greed and avarice and change their initially premium app into another filthy subscription. It's truly unethical, immoral and abhorrent behavior and very fitting of the lowest of the low crooks. This type of scummy and low rent behavior is sadly quite commonplace now among App Store developers.

Then they offer a new one-time purchase of $35 dollars! Gee, how very generous, thank you so very much... I already paid for HalideMarkII as a premium program. But, sure, let me give you even more money or pay you forever via the subscription plan for an app I already owned and paid good money for, just so I can continue to receive updates. Developers like you two make HalideMarkII Store such an unpleasant and shady place to do business.

I don't care for your dishonest remarks about why you pulled such a massive bait-and-switch by changing HalideMarkII from premium to another disgusting subscription plan. Because it's simply just lies and is just saying the exact same tired, pathetic line as all the other crooked developers and businesses that pull this underhanded scam on their once trusting and once loyal customers. You should be ashamed of your seriously unethical and immoral actions. I wouldn't give you the lint in my pockets now. I hope you two enjoy all your ill gotten gains.

I’m new to IPhone photography and I have an IPhone XR “yes I know the 12 is out “ but that’s not an option for me right now lol. I poured over review after review on which camera app was best for me as a beginner and was instantly drawn to Halide even though I was Nervous I wouldn’t understand how to use it. I went back-and-forth for about a week and all of a sudden the mark two announcement was made. I took that as a sign since Halide had already been out for a bit. With only a couple days using HalideMarkII I have to say I feel like it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made on HalideMarkII Store. The ability have the raw, JPEG and the mixed image is amazing Because it gives beginners the ability to actually see the difference side-by-side. The UI is very clean elegant and calm and very much appreciated by a noob like myself. I’m still in my Trial period but my photos look amazing and I cannot stop taking pictures lol. Super excited to edit some of my raw photos this evening. To all my newbies out there who may be in a position like I was where you want the best quality but you also need it to be cost effective and future proof you will not regret Halide . Ben, Sebastiaan,Rebecca,
Thank you for a beautiful product and Cheers to you all.

Phone being used: iPhone 11 Pro
Length spent with application: 1.5 years

I first started using this application on my iPhone X, over a year ago. It was probably my favorite camera go to app. It really used to feel like the company was thriving on a great idea that had never been seen on an iPhone before and they took the time to fine tune it. A lot has changed and here is its current state. It has now turned into a very hit or miss application. HalideMarkII crashes from taking a depth photo and from that, the photo taken is never saved. Most of the features will crash HalideMarkII as well. Even switching from different camera lenses will crash the thing. I feel like the company has realized they are at a loss for innovation. They are no longer spending resources on R&D let alone basic maintenance hours. I’m sure we will start to notice less and less updates, until it eventually gets lost among the rest. Please do not waste your money. Wait for them to prove me wrong and make the necessary bug fixes. FYI, A typical active company has two week sprints. At the end of each sprint, an update is pushed to insure continued application maintenance. Feature releases take a lot longer and are usually multiple sprints but bug fixes are not.

First thing first; I have been a user from day one. I started taking pictures on my iPhone as a hobby, but I had no idea what I was doing. I took a photography class in college and someone told me about HalideMarkII and it’s been magic and great times ever since!!!!

It’s frustrating to see people get on her and bash these people about their own misunderstandings of what Mark 2 means for mark 1. As someone who purchased HalideMarkII early I still get to enjoy the features of this new app for no extra charge!!!! Most devs try and force you into buying the new app because they drop support for the old on, not these Devs. Updates until Dec 21 is fair.

The functionality and ease of shooting has allowed me to take some breath taking shots, I have even started making picture books for my friends. I love the tutorials within HalideMarkII , would be cool to have a section were you offer classes on how to shot with a mobile camera, It would make the subscription model more appealing to those who may not want to go pay more than the original cost and help to bring in Mobile users who may feel intimidated by all the features or just want to learn mobile photography, you could even offer a subscription for the classes alone if advertised correctly(worked in sales for a few years now, I know how to sell a product especially one this cool).

Anyway 5 stars!!!! Amazing app and I’m looking forward to your future. Keep killing!!!!

Halide is easily the best pro camera app on iOS hands down. There’s a lot to like for enthusiasts and pros like myself. I subscribed in the past but didn’t feel I was getting enough to justify the sub. What I’d like to see is wireless tethering with iPad, better stability and faster operating speed. I’m on a 1TB iPhone 13 Pro (I upgrade yearly) and even with apples top iPhone HalideMarkII is slow to launch. I’ve lost more images than I can count and often have to rely on the default camera app. I have a feeling iOS 15 is somewhat to blame here.

If I could wirelessly tether, that alone would be worth the price of subscription. As one who’s helped major camera companies move into mirrorless I’ll tell you that the iPhone is good enough for pro shoots. I sold my pro gear a few years ago and have been fully on board with iPhone. Just need tethering to complete the what I need for pro studio shoots.

I’m a designer and DSLR photographer, so the camera features on my phone is a big deal to me. When I upgraded from a 6, I was torn between the XS and XR. I’d been gravitating toward the XR due to the colors, battery life, price, and better lowlight photos, but was devastated it only had portrait mode for people. I heard about Halide finding a solution to this problem, so I went with the XR and bought HalideMarkII. I took a photo of my dog and I’m in love with its ability to pretty accurately map out data for bokeh shots. My photo went straight to the default apple photos app, and reads it as a portrait photo now so I can adjust the blur like I can on people portraits. The only setback is not seeing bokeh in live mode, but it’s no biggie and who knows what exciting features future updates will bring.

Thank you Ben & Sebastiaan for using your intelligence, skills, and talent to make a camera like this for the iPhone XR. Buying HalideMarkII finally made me 100% happy with my decision to get the phone I did.

I want to start by saying this is my go-to camera app. I’ve used Halide almost exclusively ever since I first discovered it around two years ago, and have achieved great results with it thus far.

However, I’m writing this review because I recently upgraded from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 13 and haven’t been getting any detail in the highlights whatsoever ever since making the change to the 13. I mean the highlights are completely and literally white.

If I were to take a picture of the same sunny scene, one with the Halide app and one with the native camera app, I’d still get good detail in the highlights using the native camera app as opposed to the same shot taken using Halide. I’m assuming it’s just a temporary issue due to the release of the new 13 and I’m also hoping an update can fix the problem soon. Just wanted to bring it to their attention by writing this, in case it hasn’t been brought up already. Otherwise love this camera app.

If it weren’t for the article I read on medium I wouldn’t have stumbled upon HalideMarkII hearing about its journey in design to truly be tailored to this new iPhone X is what not only sparked my interest but it’s what made me willing to spend the money on it. It was no longer a random app on the AppStore. I had insight on its origins and an understanding of the detail put into place for it.

As far as my usage goes I love it. It brings powerful features and a one handed UI to the iPhone X. Every interaction seems to have been thought of and much like the X you have to familiarize yourself with the gestures and icons. There are however a few bugs with HalideMarkII one of them being landscape mode. Yes it orients the photo correctly but the UI does not shift. I’m sure this will be and can be fixed in a future update. But for now this is the best app to take advantage off both the camera technology in the iPhone X and it’s design. Bravo, 5 stars.

Issue with raw files not being handled properly was an system wide issue with iOS 13.0. It has been fixed on iOS 13.1. All in all I am happy with Halide. Now that I can save photos in both raw and jpeg formats, I have the flexibility of either playing with raw files or use jpeg as it is. Generally the results I get buy editing raw files are superior (better colors.) Darkroom integrates nicely with Halide, I with premium upgrade on darkroom was little cheaper than $10. Anyone with iPhone should have an option for capturing raw files. Until Apple integrates that in built in camera app, Halide is an excellent option. I like its smart raw capture more than other manual camera apps. It doesn’t offer lot of granular controls, but I like it for keeping it simple. ProCam 7 offers more manual camera controls, but it can get little overwhelming. Halide over any other manual camera apps any day.

Has anyone else had the same problem I have on my iPad pro 11” when going into ‘customize’ on settings? I see how I can move the icons around in order to choose which are visible and which are hidden. The problem is that I cannot get out of that mode. The broken circles and icons keep dancing around. Even when somehow they stop, I can’t get back to the basic camera mode unless I shut down the device and start over.

The other thing I wish I could do was have more flexibility with the white balance. My main purpose for using the camera on this device is to photograph my paintings. It seems that the red is off. And when I change white balance to cloudy day, the colors all look the same as in Automatic white bal. The subtle grayish purple hues in a distant mountain, for ex., are being captured as grayish or bluish gray, lacking warmth. Yes I can edit later, only with varying success so far though, on the Photos App. Well, maybe I’ll learn more about editing a raw photo, but I personally would prefer take an accurate picture rather than take a flawed one that needs to be edited later.

Halide’s camera is far superior to the Camera App on this iPad, and I’m a brand new user to both. Working my way through the 10 day program and learning a lot, but thought I’d write a review while these things were on my mind.

Thank you for reading. A reply would be great!

I am a Chef and Take pictures of my food constantly. When Apple released the iPhone XR, it wasn’t a well known fact that the Portrait Mode on this phones camera only worked on humans. I was not aware until after I upgraded. I felt that Apple was making a huge mistake. Now I had to scramble and find an App that would bring back the unlimited potential of Portrait Mode. Halide does just this and more. HalideMarkII takes beautiful pictures. It is so far above Apples camera App that I hid that one and use Halide for all of my pictures. However, one note to everyone considering purchasing HalideMarkII. Research HalideMarkII before buying. Go on their website and read everything. If you buy it and start snapping away, chances are you won’t understand what this robust App is doing and your photos will NOT look like you want them to. So read up on it. Highly recommended App! Thanks!

I like the intuitive control of different parameters when taking photos. HalideMarkII focuses on just taking photos without bloated features like filters and editing tools, which keeps the interface very simple and clean. I prefer editing my photos on Snapseed or Lightroom. The Smart RAW feature works quite nicely as well.

However, it would be even better if exposure time feature can be fine tuned. First of all, when the shutter speed is low, the preview becomes so laggy. Second, the max exposure time can be further increased. Currently on iPhone XS, the max is 1 sec. But sometimes when taking photos for light painting or moving scenes like waterfall, it’s necessary to have even longer exposure time, possibly with a help of a ND filter for mobile phone lens. If such improvement is done, I would have no excuse not to give 5 stars.

Love HalideMarkII and the thoughtful gesture based approach to adjustments. A couple of suggestions that would make this even more awesome. In landscape mode the slide up to adjust exposure compensation doesn’t work. Instead it took me a while to figure out that the gesture has to go left to right. The last image thumbnail from the camera roll is seriously distracting from the rest of the beautiful interface and also when I want to only ‘see’ the scene in front of me. Maybe a button to access my roll would be better. I don’t know about others but my thumb naturally sits at either corners of the screen irrespective of orientation or which hand I use (I am ambidextrous:) would be cool to allow customizing placement of the shutter release button like we can customize the quick bar. Just my wishful thinking!

I am a professional photographer and usually have some very nice gear with me whenever I am out. But, whenever I am shooting with my LUMIX S1R, my iPhone 12 Pro Max with Halide is also right there as well. Surprisingly, the iPhone will more often than not get the shots that I keep most often as people let their guard down in a way they don’t when a large lens is looking. Halide gives the quality and control to let me match the color and tone of my other cameras with RAW shooting, combined with features missing on my other cameras like zebra bars, color meters, and a customizable UI so I can hide stuff I won’t use behind a collapsible menu.

Very happy to have such a great camera app available, and this my replacement for the built-in camera.

Now this means ads, locked features and updates/downloads to tools you can’t use.

:( I wish you had created a completely new app and left version 1 alone for us who bought it.

RESPONSE: *completely optional* subscription that takes you beyond the “core” features. Which you can only subscribe to within HalideMarkII through ads you use to self promote. Or is it locked out features we have to bypass? Either way not upgrading. Subscriptions are dealbreakers. I already bought HalideMarkII . I’m sticking with it and not upgrading just to be exposed to promoted features I can’t use unless I pay a monthly rental fee. 👎🏽

RESPONSE 2: I’m not asking for added features or continued updates. I’m fine with HalideMarkII as it was. I paid for it and I’ll stick with it even without updates. I appreciate you taking efforts to keep yourselves employed. I was looking to purchase a product, not a service. No refund necessary and no membership needed thank you and good luck. If you create a new dramatically different ONE TIME PURCHASE APP I’d be happy to support you. Memberships are gross. Camera+ did it without memberships. So can you if you really wanted to. Changing from one time to membership without giving customers the option to choose any way you phrase it is shady. I see many apps going the membership route and I see myself purchasing less apps DIRECTLY because of it. Guess that’s just the way of things.

EDIT: I’m increasing the stars, not because of HalideMarkII , I never tried it. I still think the pricing is too high for what it is. However, I gave a poor rating because I thought they were hiding the price. Apparently there is a way to see the pricing in HalideMarkII store that I was unaware of. I increased the stars because I didn’t want to leave a negative review with a false premise. I’m also guessing they have decent customer service.

$50 for a lifetime purchase of this is ridiculous. If you just put the pricing out I could have saved the time trying to figure it out. Eventually I downloaded it to get the pricing and deleted immediately after seeing the price. This isn’t even the top rated camera app and the other’s are all under $10.

Update #3: Zero sale periods in sight, easily replicable with ProRAW in native camera app. Come on folks!
Update #2: After being completely flabbergasted by me for following up on their request of showing them old marketing materials where they still listed the old price, they moved the goalposts and said they "kept true to their word". Best they could come up with, instead of honoring their old price. New Year's Resolution: list when your promotions end with a date? 🤔🤔🤔 Just a thought! You'll do well by your customers. $30 waiting for you on the next sale! 💸 Update: As requested, I took the developer up on their offer and linked an article by Ben Sendofsky where they list the old (launch) pric e. Apparently price since then increased to $36, and now $40. Ah, they did the subscription thing. Then they did the "raise price and show the lower price in marketing materials" thing. Ugh 🤦‍♂️. Worst of all it's Christmas and they raised the price, Merry Christmas folks!

From a perspective of having almost every feature a photographer would need, HalideMarkII does nail it. From complete control over focus mapping and shutter speed control, to 2 types of exposure levels (including automatic) and RAW capture, Halide’s got it.
However, I have been Extremely disappointed in the depth (portrait) feature. With HalideMarkII boasting amazing portrait photo capturing and support for my iPhone 11, I thought HalideMarkII could outperform the standard iOS camera app - I was gravely mistaken. Portrait photos taken with HalideMarkII come out with a clear outline of where HalideMarkII tried to blur the background but before it even gets to that it often fails to even recognize the background of any object (including humans)!
I feel I shouldn’t have to use the standard camera app after purchasing Halide for it other great features yet, I find myself opening iOS’s stock camera app Half of the time. Not a great situation for an app which I paid $7 for :(

HalideMarkII has it ALL. It NAILS the user interface, allowing you not just manual control, but it makes that manual control intuitive and quick to use. HalideMarkII has FOCUS PEAKING!! This is one of the best things anyone could add to an app like this. For those of us with not the sharpest eyes, this helps a LOT. My only gripe is how long it takes to process each shot before you can look at it. I’m not sure if it’s HalideMarkII or iOS so we’ll see if it gets fixed soon. Still worth five stars. HalideMarkII makes my phone feel more like my pro-level camera that’s laid out and designed for people to make quick decisions about their shots on the fly. Recommended for any serious photographer wanting their phone to do more.

I’ve had Halide since the day they launched 1.0 and it’s always stood out as one of the few apps that cared about craft and design. From the onboarding manual to the way they’ve thoughtfully laid out the interface and made it feel like a true pro tool. It would also be amiss not to mention the advances they’ve made in getting the absolute most out of your iPhone camera has also been unbeatable. It is *the* app for people wanting to push their phone photography even further, with more precision, especially those coming from a film/DSLR background.

Lastly, love these people that make HalideMarkII what it is and will continue supporting their every photography related endeavor 🥰

I love he fact that I can make use of the depth of field portrait mode even on the iPhone XR which has only one lens. And of course that I can take photos in raw format.
Buttons and adjustments are intuitive and comfortable to handle.
However, in a camera app that lets me set ISO and shutter speed manually, I’m really missing to see the automatically applied values in auto exposure mode. I want to see if the camera has chosen a shutter speed that will most likely result in a blurred photo, or an ISO value that might create too much noise. I need this information to decide if I should switch into manual mode before taking the shot, not just after.
Also, the complete lack of video recording (I know your main focus is photography) makes it impossible to substitute the native camera app. There are many situations when an iPhone shooter wants to quickly switch between photo and video, preferably staying in the same app.
These shortcomings considered, I’m a little on the edge if it’s worth the $9 I paid for it. I would have expected more.

I like HalideMarkII and the controls it gives for manual focus and the new best processing and deep fusion. What I don’t like is the lean or almost non existent documentation. I realize this is supposed to be an intuitive app one learns but doing and testing. To be honest HalideMarkII is complex and what it does is complex. Only 5 opening pages and a pretty lean blog and support that often does not answer basic questions is a problem for an app that does what this does. You make exciting advances to iPhone photography but they are hardly explained and the settings menu seems contradictory at times. If I turn off RAW to use best processing I would like consistent menu choices in settings. Most of all the basic usability for someone wanting to experiment or take better photos is just not there. TBH I deleted HalideMarkII more than a few times because it’s intimidating to use at times. A confusion of quick and gesture changes, no accompanying support doc. Some type of community would help as well. What if we don’t use twitter? Support forums may be nice. Answering support emails would be nice. The functionality explained in a downloadable manual would be wonderful.

As someone who’s been taking photographs for the past 50 years I have been frustrated by a lack of a coherent camera application for the iPhone. That is, until I discovered Halide! With version 1.9 they have a limited a few minor UI issues and made a vastly superior camera app for the iPhone. I use it daily, I enjoy it, it works so much better than the native app. One of the most brilliant features is the histogram. It sounds like a small thing but it is critical to getting grade exposures on an iPhone. Limiting loss of highlights by using the histogram on every photo is absolutely the best reason I can think of to use this application. I also find it integration with Darkroom to be very helpful. I highly recommend you give this a try. I think you’ll enjoy it

The new version has some nice features, but I’m getting almost as many errors - each one different - as I am getting photos. I wish this was a new, separate app so that the original one was still available.

Hoping this is not the beginning of the end now that a subscription has been introduced (whatever they want to call it, it’s still a subscription - you don’t get updates or new features once you stop paying). It’s a free update for previous Halide users which is a plus and a nice gesture. But after a year we get no more updates unless we subscribe.

A much better subscription system than the majority of apps, but still a subscription. I’ve never subscribed to any app and never will, but as long as they don’t take core features away before the year is up I’ll be fine with it being “frozen” at that point.

Everything you need that gives you control over the camera that you wish you had, now you do. I’ve deleted all of my other paid and free photo apps. None have the functionality and control nor the display that HalideMarkII gives you in such a neat and tidy display that just works 100% of the time. Plus the Devs are constantly working on making it better, how I don’t know, but an update comes around every once in a while and it just makes it a little bit sweeter to use. Thank you guys and gals. Even though my iPhone 6 Plus may be old at least my pictures look great. It’s lightweight, but it packs a hell of a punch! I’ve had this since version 1.0.1 and have loved it since day one. I love HalideMarkII is my favorite photo app!

This review pertains not to the features and benefits of Halide, which many others have covered. It is a warning about a serious problem. I downloaded HalideMarkII a month or two ago and use it on an iPhone Xs using up to date software. Three times now I have used it to take photos of important events and at the end of the day discovered that none of the photos were saved to my phone. They just weren’t there and were permanently lost. To clarify - at other times, HalideMarkII has worked fine. The problem seems to occur intermittently and without warning. The only way to avoid it is to constantly check my photo roll to make sure photos are being saved, which obviously is not practical. I like HalideMarkII but cannot use it for this reason - It is a fatal flaw.

I did contact support about this issue and they were aware that it has been a problem in beta versions of iOS. But I am not running a beta version.

Update: About a day after leaving my initially unhappy review, an update was released. More than that, though, is that I recurved a response to my review to personally let me know about the update. First: Brilliant customer service that they would reach out to let me know about the update. Second: The update fixed the issue I was experiencing; I now see what all the fuss is about with HalideMarkII!

I submitted my info for help via HalideMarkII regarding errors I keep getting and got an undeliverable message back so at this point I’m incredibly disappointed with this purchase. HalideMarkII gets great reviews but when I take a portrait photo, it can’t be recalled because of an error. I’m just gonna get the purchase refunded.