28 comments

  • jrflo 22 minutes ago
    To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple isn't already doing this and just doesn't say so explicitly. There is a crazy amount of image processing going on behind the scenes in each smartphone photo. Would be interesting to compare a photo taken with the native camera app and photosynthesis to compare. I'm assuming your demo images on your site are the raw and processed images from your app that don't go through Apple's "secret sauce" processing pipeline.
    • selectodude 18 minutes ago
      I think this is just Deep Fusion.
  • jnsie 2 minutes ago
    Interesting. I wonder if this could be extended to take MPO 3D photos.
  • swiftcoder 4 minutes ago
    This might be a personal preference thing, but in every single example photo on that page, I significantly prefer the colours in the "standard zoom" version of the photo. I wonder if they can figure out how to do this fusion without losing that beautiful contrast the zoom lens brings to the table?
  • anigbrowl 2 hours ago
    Neat work, but the free tier lets you export 3 images a month and the alternative is a subscription? No thanks.
    • sajomes 36 minutes ago
      Thank you! I'm quite a new dev so honestly I don't know where to pitch the free tier, and I'm not above changing it. Do you have any suggestions for the free tier?
      • newbie578 19 minutes ago
        Don’t listen to him, people like that will always complain, yet will never upgrade or pay for your product. He does not have a problem with your price but the mere fact that you are trying to sell something. Devs are like that.

        Just differentiate signal from noise. Listen to your target audience not random internet comments

        • sajomes 11 minutes ago
          Thank you, I think I've seen that from reviews for every paid app I've come across - still, happy to take feedback!
      • IncreasePosts 28 minutes ago
        So what you're saying is that you prompted Claude to produce the app for you and now you're charging for it? A bold move, but I wouldn't expect much returns before there's completely free apps doing the same thing
      • beachy 33 minutes ago
        Make it permissive enough that 80% of potential users don't need to pay for subscription. 20% of a heck of a lot of people is still a lot.
        • bdangubic 27 minutes ago
          do not do this please. if you have a good product, people will pay for it. if you don’t, you don’t. don’t optimize for free-loaders
          • iAMkenough 22 minutes ago
            correct. never optimize your product, just wait to see if it's a success or not.
            • sajomes 12 minutes ago
              Thank you - this has been my plan
  • 650REDHAIR 26 minutes ago
    Why do i need a subscription for a camera app?
  • acomjean 1 hour ago
    It’s weird, because the center of the image will be more detailed, so how are they dealing with the “grid of pixels” that is on the display. Are they doubling up the wide angle.

    “Easy-to-understand framing The brackets over the viewfinder indicate the area covered by the more detailed lens. Frame your subject inside them to capture the best detail.“

    Reminds me of the old 3d cameras that took two photos at once through 2 lenses (on film)

    https://www.ebay.com/itm/206409326865?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%...

    • sajomes 18 minutes ago
      I'm scaling the wider 'outer' image using Core Graphics 'CGInterpolationQuality' to avoid blocky pixellation, then feathering the seam between the two lens outputs so the transition isn't jarring.

      I didn't know about those Nishika stereo cameras, that looks incredible!

  • walrus01 22 minutes ago
    I think this is actually how oneplus phones have taken 'night' mode photos for a very long time in their default camera app, it takes multiple exposures and uses the movement sensor in the phone to pick several which were taken with the least hand jitter, and then stacks them into the final result.
  • swah 2 hours ago
    If it works, Apple copies it soon enough...
  • roflmaostc 1 hour ago
    The principle is similar to foveated imaging [1].

    Recently, Samsung introduced the ISOCELL platform which allows to select the area which will be recorded at higher resolution compared to other regions.

    There can be all sorts of different applications build around such as extracting higher resolution of text regions, etc [2].

    Of course, the lens needs to support this resolution but I think that will be default in the mid-term future.

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging

    [2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3799902.3811218

  • trashcan2137 2 hours ago
    subscription camera app seems like peak comedy to me
    • furyofantares 2 hours ago
      Definitely not peak, my kid asked for a Rubik's Cube solver app which turned out to be subscription based, then wanted to tune her Ukelele with an app which turned out to be subscription based.
      • ironman1478 2 minutes ago
        Metronome apps are paid now or have an 'ad' tier. I took my money and spent it on a real metronome.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 38 minutes ago
        That's what makes me sad about the current Tetris game, on iOS.

        One of my favorite games ever, and I'd gladly pay for an ad-free version, but they don't have it. I assume there's much more money to be made with ads, over subscriptions.

        • bookofjoe 27 minutes ago
          A penetrating observation that feels true. Too bad.
      • dxdm 1 hour ago
        Gotta keep up with pitch inflation!

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch

      • pastor_williams 30 minutes ago
        This sort of nonsense is what I think will drive adoption of AI for personal apps. Tell it to create a ukulele tuning app and you get one without ads without subscription that you can make work exactly how you want. I wonder whether this is something that only privacy and tech oriented folk will do and care about our whether it will be adopted generally.
      • da02 37 minutes ago
        Did you buy it or show them a better way of doing it?
    • VladVladikoff 40 minutes ago
      There was some video on reddit that I saw the other day where a man struggled to take a photo with his camera app because it kept popping full screen ads in front of everything else.
    • hoppp 40 minutes ago
      Yeah, at that point it's better to buy an external lens for the Iphone. Single purchase and better pictures.
    • PaulHoule 2 hours ago
      There is Halide which I find completely uninteresting because I have a Sony A7iv. (Funny my latest piece of “gear” I am learning to use is a selfie stick because I can do stuff like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/selfie and I don’t see third party apps really improve on the official camera)
  • teaearlgraycold 4 minutes ago
    This whole thing feels wrong. OP should be working for a phone manufacturer, not trying to sell this as a subscription. How much is it worth to be able to squeeze a little more visual clarity out of my phone? Maybe $20 maximum? And I feel like I’m on the generous side of the population here. Most people will say $0. But if you’re inside of Apple and you can tell them you can add an average of $1 of perceived value to each of their millions of phones sold each year they’ll be over the moon and you can get a fat salary.
  • megraf 1 hour ago
    Pretty cool -- I built see ya' an app which allows you to connect N number of phones locally, and use one phone as the view finder + shutter, and the other(s) as the dedicated camera. I'm just using Apples native API, so it'll connect over bluetooth, wifi, direct, whatever pretty seamlessly. I don't collect any data, and it's 100% free.

    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/see-ya/id6792367530

    • forsalebypwner 1 hour ago
      That's super handy, thanks! I've been using one of those selfie monitoring screens and opening the camera to record video + turning on the flash, this app seems like a better way of accomplishing this
    • boaztheostrich 1 hour ago
      What API are you using if you don’t mind me asking?

      That seems super cool! You could almost strap an iPhone to the back of your phone and see yourself for recordings.

      • megraf 1 hour ago
        Apple’s MultipeerConnectivity framework -- phones discover and talk over local wifi / bluetooth via MCSession, MCNearbyServiceAdvertiser, and MCNearbyServiceBrowser in PeerSessionManager.
    • thih9 58 minutes ago
      Please post your own Show HN, or comment in “what are you working on” threads, or pick some other approach.

      I also have an app that uses device camera and I don’t write about it in mostly unrelated submissions.

  • cantalopes 1 hour ago
    I am co fused, 50% of photos look better in standard zoom and 50% of them look better woth photosynthesis. This is like an anti campaign for the app hinting "in the end it doesn't really matter"
    • sajomes 27 minutes ago
      I think this may be due to an issue I've had with loading the full res zoom images on the website, I've been going back and forth trying to balance the loading times and stress on the browser with clarity of the images. Working on a new idea now, so hopefully it'll give better demonstrations soon.
  • eigenspace 2 days ago
    Very cool stuff, I've long thought there must be some fancy ways to get extra information for better image resolution by taking advantage of the other cameras.

    That said, I must also say that most of the side-by-side comparison photos shown here are somewhat impressive, and in some cases, the photosynthesis one just looks worse to my untrained eye.

    _______________

    I'll choose to take this as evidence of the fact that you're tacking a very difficult problem, and you're also being honest in your comparisons and not cherry-picking too aggressively.

    • dole 2 hours ago
      Some of the photosynthesis zoom-ins have overlays take a bit longer to load at higher resolution.
  • zellyn 1 hour ago
    Anyone know if they’re using the native camera resolution for the zoomed part or doing sensor fusion to get better quality than either alone?
  • PaulHoule 2 hours ago
    Left side and the right side look the same to me except some subtle differences in the color of shadows…. And another waitlist? Nein Danke.
  • gepeake 2 hours ago
    This was actually a purported feature of the Pixel 3 camera. Google said it would be constantly taking photos and the different information captured as your hand moved slightly could be used to create higher information density photos. It didn't work very well at that point but the idea was cool!
    • ipsum2 2 hours ago
      That's not what's being described here. It's just combining the telephoto and wide angle photos.
  • jrm4 13 minutes ago
    As an Android guy and not an iPhone, or phone pic guy...

    What do the multiple lenses do then, if not this? Like,I presumed that was the point.

    Are they LITERALLY just decoration for me to make fun of?

    • Aurornis 5 minutes ago
      Different optical zoom levels.

      Many phones already use information from both cameras, too.

      Android phones have multiple cameras too.

  • joe-dakroub 1 hour ago
    I like the idea of this app and the website is well done. Subscription isn't for me, but for folks who take a lot of photos and need this sort of thing, I can see it. Free tier could offer a few more photos per month.
  • hnthrowawayacct 2 hours ago
    very cool app, a few questions: why does the color "temp" of the image change between traditional iphone photography vs your app? it appears to both warm and cool the images. Also why is the contrast decreased, specifically in the library/book store example?
  • iAMkenough 18 minutes ago
    My hesitations on this are it stores data in a proprietary format that I may not be able to export to another common format if the product disappears in a few years.

    For something personal like photos and the memories they capture, that's not ideal for me.

    While the app is still with us, I'm not sure how much it will cost me to export to my photos to my photo library each month.

  • bigwheels 2 hours ago
    That demo looks like Minority Report level enhancement. Amazing if it really works, but I'll be damned if I'm paying for a SaaS camera app.
  • alansaber 2 hours ago
    Isn't quite a lot of modern smartphone photography post-processing? Yes camera SAAS is extremely funny but I can kinda see it maybe
  • BugsJustFindMe 52 minutes ago
    "This site was paused as it reached its usage limits. Please contact the site owner for more information."
    • sajomes 49 minutes ago
      It's back now!
      • BugsJustFindMe 41 minutes ago
        FYI you're serving multi-megabyte images on your landing page that could effectively be thumbnails.
  • Noaidi 6 minutes ago
    Is it just me or do the original photos look better overall?
  • lattalayta 2 hours ago
    Similar idea to the discontinued Light L16 camera https://petapixel.com/2017/12/08/review-light-l16-brilliant-...
  • EGreg 2 hours ago
    Not just the app idea … but the WEBSITE — is VERY WELL DONE.

    I immediately signed up. (And offered to help bring users to this thing.)

    • sajomes 37 minutes ago
      Thank you very much, that's really appreciated! Just added all the new sign-ups to the TestFlight, looking forward to hearing what you all think.
  • iamcoder18 2 hours ago
    Anything like this for Android or Pixels?