The goal is lightweight, composable tools with clean interfaces that respect user agency and privacy, provide technical clarity, and make you a better photographer by encouraging mastery over your tools and offering new ways to approach picture making. Also broadly honoring the (almost) 2 century old history of the craft and drawing inspiration from pre-digital processes and approaches.
Got a number of updates to existing apps and new ones in the works, I’m excited for the full long term vision I have that I plan to sum up in an essay at some point.
Currently Apple platforms only but the plan is also to break out of that down the line.
If you’ve gone all the way to shooting medium format and learning how to develop film, I can’t help but encourage you to get into printing black and white as well.
(color is IMO less interesting - more finicky, less creative latitude)
It’s a minimal investment of time & money (even simpler if you have a community darkroom near you - there are more than you might think!), and it’s both more creatively rewarding as a process than what you get working digitally, and for IMO a better result (you need a really high quality printer to match what standard b&w printing gives you).
Prints also make for great gifts - people just aren’t used to seeing 8x10 printed portraits anymore, and I’ve had friends/family members moved to tears when presented with a framed print of their family.
Oh, for sure I shoot B&W. I think I do prefer it to color. I just don't make prints any more. I think I am too spoiled by the tweaks you can do with levels/curves in the digital domain.
And then I have also dabbled this year in dye-sub prints on metal — and that also begins with a digitized image. (I have found friends and relatives really like the dye-sub prints.)
Large format is still in my future. I do have a few pieces of hardware is all (a Copal shutter, etc.).
> I'm quite aware that doing things my way isn't commercially viable
Depends what you mean by “commercially viable”. I’ve been making high quality products as an independent software developer in the photography space for a bit over 2 years now, and while I’m nowhere near my former big tech company salary, I still make more than needed to pay for life every month (not living an extravagant lifestyle somewhere with ridiculous cost of living does help).
And I still feel like I’m far from having reached full potential in my addressable market and the kind of products I want to build - I have indie developer friends who are pretty close to their former big tech salary, after 5+ years.
Cheers! Got an update coming out soon for that one, it's actually the one that makes the least money haha. I think it's way too nerdy and weird to ever hope to reach a broad audience even amongst photographers, unlike the others that are more approachable.
But I still use it on a weekly basis myself so I just can't stop refining it. I've been obsessed with the trichromatic process for 10+ years, ever since I discovered the work of Prokudin Gorsky (even built a website about the process and history: https://trichromy.com, due for a refresh some time). Such a clever approach to color photography that results in such a unique aesthetic.
I also love Gorsky’s pictures! When I first saw his picture of the power turbines in Budapest I thought I must be looking at some ML-colorized daguerreotype, but nope it’s in true color.
I see you’re in Tokyo. If you ever end up in Taipei or if I’m in Tokyo I’d love to talk photography over coffee.
Yes! As a software developer in the photography space, we are deeply in need of projects like this.
The photography world is mired in proprietary software/ formats, and locked down hardware; and while it has always been true that a digital camera is “just” a computer, now more than ever it is painful just how limited and archaic on-board camera software is when compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to in the mobile phone era.
If I compare photography to another creative discipline I am somewhat familiar with, music production - the latter has way more open software/hardware initiatives, and freedom of not having to tether yourself to large, slow, user-abusing companies when choosing gear to work with.
Yes, that matches my observations. I develop photography software and in early versions of iOS 18, sometimes saving a large image to the camera roll would fail because the daemon in charge of carrying out the photo library transactions would get killed due to low memory. This only happened on devices that ran Apple intelligence. Fortunately they seemed to have fixed that bug around 18.1 or 18.2 if I recall.
My most recent release is a camera app dedicated to RAW photography, which focuses on being fast & lightweight & technically precise - I wrote the website to be both a user’s manual and a crash course in photography concepts: https://bayercam.app
I’m working on my next app release, which I’m pretty excited about!
Yes, making money on iOS is an uphill climb, many times more so if you’re not playing the TikTok ads and subscription model.
I’ve been making iOS software independently for almost 2 years now (https://heliographe.studio) and am about ramen profitable.
A few notes in case OP (or anyone interested in making some money in the App Store) is reading:
- you have to make the app free to download, and quickly demonstrate value then show a paywall if you want any purchases. Paid upfront just does not work unless you’re an already recognized product.
I had some apps that were paid upfront, and would mostly get $0 days. Switching to free to download immediately brought me to a slow but steady trickle of daily downloads, and from there you just have to work on your conversion rate.
- but that's still going to be pretty low, if you want any meaningful user acquisition, you're going to have to go look for the kind of people who might be interested in your product. The broader your potential audience is, the harder that's going to be (but that's why TikTok ads can work so well). In my case, choosing to focus on a somewhat niche area (tools for photography) is helpful; there's a strong photography community going on Threads and regularly posting on there yields good results (for now...)
- $2.99 is dramatically underselling yourself, especially if you offer a quality product that you put time to craft to your standards and has no tracking, no subscription, no ads, etc. You should play with pricing to see what the sweet spot in terms of conversion is, but in my experience it's always worth it to start at least at $4.99/$7.99 for these sort of utility apps. Of course, the design of your funnel/paywall will make a huge difference (ie you'll likely sell more of an app marked as $4.99 at 50% off, than just $4.99)
- learn about what makes for good App Store screenshots, descriptions, how keywords work, etc. Ariel from App Figures has some good videos on YouTube about what they see and what seems to work based on their data.
The days where you could make a little app, chuck it on the App Store for $.99, and have it just blow up are well over. If you want to make any money on the App Store (even if to just pay back for your Apple Developer membership), you have to put as much effort, if not more, in the marketing and promotion of your product than you put in the design & development of it. It's a grind for sure — and don't count on Apple to help you in any way (by and large they seemed more interested to promote games and dating apps with $49.99/mo subscriptions than small indies doing interesting things).
> but apparently recent iPhones capture them for standard photos as well.
Yes, they will capture them from the main photo mode if there’s a subject (human or pet) in the scene.
> I made an app that used the depth maps and portrait effects mattes from Portraits for some creative filters. It was pretty fun, but it's no longer available
What was your app called? Is there any video of it available anywhere? Would be curious to see it!
I also made a little tool, Matte Viewer, as part of my photo tool series - but it’s just for viewing/exporting them, no effects bundled:
I'm sorry for neglecting to respond until now. The app was called Portrait Effects Studio and later Portrait Effects Playground; I took it down because it didn't meet my quality standards. I don't have any public videos anymore, but it supported background replacement and filters like duotone, outline, difference-of-Gaussians, etc., all applied based on depth or the portrait effects matte. I can send you a TestFlight link if you're curious.
I looked at your apps, and it turns out I'm already familiar with some, like 65x24. I had to laugh -- internally, anyway -- at the unfortunate one-star review you received on Matte Viewer from a user that didn't appear to understand the purpose of the app.
One that really surprised me was Trichromy, because I independently came up with and prototyped the same concept! And, even more surprisingly, there's at least one other such app on the App Store. And I thought I was so creative coming up with the idea. I tried Trichromy; it's quite elegant, and fast.
Actually, I feel we have a similar spirit in terms of our approach to creative photography, though your development skills apparently surpass mine. I'm impressed by the polish on your websites, too. Cheers.
> Yes, they will capture them from the main photo mode if there’s a subject (human or pet) in the scene.
One of the example pictures on TFA is a plant. Given that, are you sure iOS is still only taking depth maps for photos that get the "portrait" icon in the gallery? (Or have they maybe expanded the types of possible portrait subjects?)
It will capture the depth map and generate the semantic mattes (except in some edge cases) no matter the subject if you explicitly set the camera in Portrait mode, which is how I would guess the plant photo from the article was captured.
My previous comment was about the default Photo mode.
If you have a recent iPhone (iPhone 15 or above iirc) try it yourself - taking a photo of a regular object in the standard Photo mode won’t yield a depth map, but one of a person or pet will. Any photo taken from the Portrait mode will yield a depth map.
You can find out more about this feature by googling “iPhone auto portrait mode”.
Apple’s documentation is less helpful with the terminology; they call it “Apply the portrait effect to photos taken in Photo mode”
Probably a pretty light classifier on the NPU. Doesn’t even have to care about what particular object it is, just if it matches training data for “capture depth map”.
Yes, those depth maps + semantic maps are pretty fun to look at - and if you load them into a program like TouchDesigner (or Blender or Cinema 4D whatever else you want) you can make some cool little depth effects with your photos. Or you can use them for photographic processing (which is what Apple uses them for, ultimately)
As another commenter pointed out, they used to be captured only in Portrait mode, but on recent iPhones they get captured automatically pretty much whenever a subject (human or pet) is detected in the scene.
I just shipped a camera app for iPhone dedicated to Bayer RAW capture (that's the true, unprocessed sensor output of your device - not Apple's ProRAW which is already demosaic'd and has noise reduction, etc).
I had fun with the interface - it's themeable, and inspired by classic cameras: lets you quickly switch between full auto/half auto/full manual modes with dedicated dials.
Going to add more features in the coming months, but the #1 focus is keeping it super simple and blazing fast.
Given that virtually all processing pipelines these days stack multiple shots to create a photo, as far as I'm aware this is the only way of getting a "traditional" single-exposure photo on iPhone, where the shutter speed is actually meaningful.
There are other camera apps that support Bayer RAW capture, but those support a bunch of other formats, and you probably don't want Bayer RAW for most of your shots anyways, so for my own workflow it's better to have a dedicated app that I can launch really quickly rather than tap around in menus.
https://heliographe.studio
The goal is lightweight, composable tools with clean interfaces that respect user agency and privacy, provide technical clarity, and make you a better photographer by encouraging mastery over your tools and offering new ways to approach picture making. Also broadly honoring the (almost) 2 century old history of the craft and drawing inspiration from pre-digital processes and approaches.
Got a number of updates to existing apps and new ones in the works, I’m excited for the full long term vision I have that I plan to sum up in an essay at some point.
Currently Apple platforms only but the plan is also to break out of that down the line.