Halide Mark II is one of the most powerful camera apps available on iPhones, enabling RAW photography and fine-tuned details. With the release of version 2.2, Halide has now arrived on the iPad.
While your iPad might not be the first device you reach for to snap a quick photo, its large screen presents a great opportunity to explore focus, lighting, and other more advanced aspects of photography using the Halide app.
Here are eight tips for using Halide to take incredible photos on your iPad.
What’s Special About Halide for iPad
While the Apple’s Camera app has gained features like exposure control and a helpful grid view over the years, Halide aims to put you fully in control of your device’s cameras with pro-level features. It’s also a great tool for beginners trying to improve their photography skills.
Now, on iPad, it’s gaining a few new features that are exclusive to the big screen. They’re thoughtfully designed to take advantage of the big display without making the app harder to use or sacrificing reachability.
These are the best features to try on Halide Mark II for iPad.
1. Frame Your Shot With Pro View
The Camera app on iPad (and Halide by default) normally fills the entire screen with the image your lens is capturing. But it can be tricky to frame a shot when your eyes have to move across such a large canvas. A lot of thought went into solving this challenge, as one of the app’s developers describes in a blog post on Lux.
The solution is Pro View: Halide’s special viewfinder mode for iPad that shrinks the viewfinder to a smaller, distraction-free window in the center of the screen. To enable Pro View, tap the inward-facing arrow in the bottom-left corner.
Pro View has two benefits:
- It lets you see the image without any UI elements covering parts of it.
- It puts the entire image in the center of your vision, so you can more easily see the full picture.
Pro View is a great way to explore the feeling of a scene—it helps you see the shot as if you’ve already taken the photo.
2. Customize the Split Controls
The developers of Halide completely redesigned the app’s control scheme to work on the iPad’s larger screen. To make all of the controls easily reachable while you’re holding the device with two hands, the app splits the controls and places them in the middle of the left and right edges.
When you’re using more advanced features, such as manual focus and exposure controls, those appear in the corners and along the other edges. And when you’re not using them, they disappear.
You can customize the locations of these buttons by tapping Settings and choosing Customize. Then, simply drag and drop the icons to the places you want them.
3. Enable Right- or Left-Handed Mode
Sometimes, the most important part of getting the best shot is taking it as quickly as possible. When it’s crunch time, having the controls near your dominant hand can make all the difference.
You can switch Halide’s Quick Bar controls between left- and right-handed orientations by long-pressing the Settings button and tapping the context menu item that appears.
4. Enter Depth Mode
Halide’s Depth Mode is similar to the built-in Portrait Mode on compatible iPads. It uses multiple lenses and sensors to capture depth data and enable you to take photos with greater depth of field.
But Depth Mode in Halide includes a few features that go beyond what you’ll find in the Camera app.
When you enter Depth Mode, you’ll see an animation sweep repeatedly from front to back across the scene in your viewfinder that shows the depth it detects in the image.
To focus even more on the depth in frame, tap the hexagon button to show the Depth Map—a grayscale 3D map of what you’re aiming your camera at.
5. Shoot RAW With Coverage
RAW photos pack all of the information from the sensor into the image file with no adjustments from the iPad’s software.
Apple offers a proprietary version of this, called ProRAW, that captures a RAW photo and applies Apple’s software edits while letting you tweak and remove some of those edits later.
Halide lets you shoot full RAW photography on your iPad. That’s great for the pros, who know how they want to edit a photo later. For those who are still learning how to shoot and edit great photos, Halide performs a clever trick.
It takes both a standard, fully processed photo and a RAW photo when you press the shutter button. That way, you can quickly share a JPEG image in all its glory or start digging into the details of the RAW file in your favorite photo-editing software.
6. Develop Photos With One-Tap Instant RAW
There’s even a middle ground that lets you shoot in RAW but takes some of the complexity out of editing a pure RAW file for beginners. In Halide, it’s called Instant RAW, and it can “develop” your RAW photo in one tap by applying intelligent adjustments.
You might love the way your photo looks after you’ve tapped the Instant button, but you don’t have to stop there. You can adjust and add to those edits in a photo editing app to get exactly the shot you want.
It’s another great feature for beginners who want to learn how to edit RAW.
7. Dive Into Full Manual Mode
If you know what you’re doing with a camera, Halide’s fully manual mode is for you. When you turn it on, you’re in charge of the shutter speed, ISO, and focus.
This gives you the greatest control over the composition of your photo—much more than the built-in Camera app offers.
8. Learn Photography Fundamentals With an Email Course
If you don’t know what shutter speed does or how ISO affects the noise in your photos, you’re not alone.
That’s why Halide also offers a 10-day email photography course. It’ll help you learn the fundamentals of photography and how to use the app’s features to put them into practice.
From shooting and editing RAW photos to using the histogram and adjusting the white balance, Halide’s course is designed to help you get the most out of the app while learning how to take better photos.
Upgrade Your Photography on the Big Screen
iPads are great for creative work, including photo and video editing. And Halide packs enough professional-grade tools into one app to turn your iPad into an incredible photography device, too.
As you hone your photography skills using Halide on iPad, start exploring great photo-editing software to make your photos look their best.
Image Credit: Lux