By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
- Halide Mark III
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Ben Sandofsky, writing on the Lux Camera blog:
After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better to have a handful of amazing choices rather than photo-editor with thousands of presets. We owe that to film engineers who spent years developing versatile film stocks that work in a variety of situations.
Inspired by “Less, but better,” we partnered with the renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly to develop a succinct set of gorgeous, physically accurate processes exclusive to Halide. Each look was engineered with a specific intent. We verified every look thousands of times on real-world reference photos.
Put another way: every look is a banger.
Halide has always been a great — maybe the great — iPhone camera app for shooting RAW, with the intention of developing your images by hand in post. It’s a great camera technically and a great app UI-wise. Mark II introduced Process Zero, which, in their own description, “uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce beautiful, film-like natural photos”. Process Zero was the first step toward the new built-in “looks” in Halide Mark III. I’ve been shooting with Mark III for a few weeks now, and they are, indeed, all bangers. And I really like that there aren’t that many of them. I wanted more looks than just Process Zero (which remains available, of course), but I feel a bit overwhelmed when faced with a dozen (or worse, dozens) of choices for processing. I feel conflicted enough having to choose between a handful of really good third-party camera apps with which to shoot in the first place — it’s worse when I have to make too many choices within the camera app itself.
What I want is to just point and shoot and be able to instantly share images with the look I want already applied. I’m picky but I’m also really lazy, and don’t want to do any editing in post on most of the shots I keep. But I do want to be able to edit in post if I want to, including changing the look losslessly. This mixture of point-and-shoot ease and pro-level control didn’t use to be possible. Now, though, it is, with apps like Not Boring Camera, Analogue, and, now, Halide Mark III.
It’s been a turbulent couple of months for Lux (to say the least), so I’m glad to see Sandofsky and team get Mark III out the door. If you, like me, had previously been impressed by Halide but didn’t use it because it required too much work in post, you should check out Mark III.
★ Saturday, 6 June 2026