Apple / photo_and_video / HALIDE MARK II - PRO CAMERA
REVIEW
Halide is the iPhone camera app that disagrees with Apple.
Process Zero strips out every AI shortcut Apple has added since the iPhone 11. The photos look stranger, sometimes worse — and the photographers it's for have started caring again.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 7, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
Halide Mark II - Pro Camera
LUX OPTICS INCORPORATED
OUR SCORE
8.6
APPLE
★ 4.4
PRICE
Free
The iPhone has the best camera most people will ever own. It is also the most opinionated. Apple’s image pipeline decides — quietly, billions of times a day — what a photo of your kid in a backlit kitchen should look like, what skin tone reads as “right”, how much detail to scrub from a noisy night sky. For most of us, that’s a feature. For some of us, it’s the problem.
Halide Mark II is the camera app for the second group. Lux Optics has spent a decade making pro tools for the iPhone, and the headline feature added in 2024 made the stance explicit: a single-shot RAW mode called Process Zero that strips out every AI shortcut Apple has added since the iPhone 11. No HDR fusion, no Smart HDR, no Photonic Engine, no Deep Fusion, no overzealous tone mapping. Just a digital negative.
It’s an editorial position dressed up as a feature. That’s why it works.
For every shot that looks more like film, you'll capture one that just looks broken. The point is that you took it.
FEATURES
The pro toolkit is the most thorough in the App Store. 14-bit RAW capture with XDR support, customisable histograms, colour zebras, waveform monitor, focus peaking, a focus loupe, and an adaptive level grid are all available and can be toggled per-shot via a Tactile Touch gesture on the live image. Edge gestures swap shooting modes without lifting your thumb.
Process Zero ships as a separate mode rather than a setting, because the look is too different to silently substitute for the default. Each frame produces a paired digital negative — the actual sensor data before any computation — so you can re-expose later in Halide's own viewer or in Lightroom. Halide's Depth mode captures portrait-style background separation on subjects Apple's stock Camera refuses to recognise, including pets.
The iPad build shares everything with the iPhone version except the gesture vocabulary, plus a Pro View that floats the live image clean of UI while pro readouts cluster to one side. iOS 18 Lock Screen Capture works as a single tap to Halide instead of Apple Camera, if you want it.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Halide's pro tools are the rare case of "more options" that adds rather than subtracts confidence. The waveform alone — which most pro photographers consider non-negotiable and Apple's Camera ignores entirely — turns guesswork about exposure into reading a chart. Tactile Touch means the readouts vanish when you don't want them.
Process Zero is the bigger achievement. Whether or not "zero" is technically possible (it isn't — there's still demosaicing), the photos genuinely look different. Light has direction and texture. Shadows resolve to black instead of being lifted into mid-grey. Skin shows skin. It's the first time in years that a major iPhone camera app has taken a position about what photos should look like and stuck to it.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Process Zero earns its name in low light by collapsing. There's no multi-frame averaging, no neural noise reduction, no five-second night mode pulling shadow detail out of nothing — and on a sensor this small, that means grainy, sometimes unusable shots after sunset. For every photo that reads like film, you'll capture one that just looks broken.
The mode also can't access the iPhone's 2x telephoto crop, which on Pro phones is one of the most-used focal lengths. And the pricing structure — $11.99 a year with a $36 one-time option still available — sits awkwardly: cheap enough to feel reasonable as a subscription, but $36 is real money for an app many users will only reach for on holiday. There's no monthly plan for the tourist.
CONCLUSION
If you photograph more than you scroll, and the iPhone's defaults have started to feel like they're flattening your eye, Halide is what you wanted. If you photograph in low light, keep Apple's Camera one tap away as a backup. And if you've never wondered why your iPhone photos look the way they do, this app isn't speaking to you — and that's fine.