These days it doesn't happen very often that I discover a new app that I'm curious about and want to buy. This is especially true for camera apps on the iPhone. There are so many half baked approaches out there, too many that simply exist to make money without offering additional value. In recent years it became also apparent that the iPhone and probably any smartphone camera in general actually suffers from the industry wide introduction of computational photography. I personally don't enjoy at all the overprocessed look with too much sharpening, too much noise reduction, too heavy contrasts, too vibrant colors and way too much dynamic range. All these photos seem to feel sterile and clean in the end. It seems just about how much to be able to see in the picture and not about how to see it. Not every detail within a picture frame is equally important und must be artificially highlighted and particularly focused on. Sometimes less detail even helps and simplifies the composition. Even if it's often said that computational photography especially helps inexperienced photographers to get proper shots when pointing their cameras literary anywhere, I think the opposite is often true. A camera with a more classic picture pipeline often seems to help avoid common mistakes by producing an overall look of an image that is much more subtle and graceful. There's a reason why vintage film cameras are still alive and even very much en vogue these days again.

I have yet to say that I'm also not particular keen to overprocess my images in another way, in a skeuomorphic way, so to say. What I mean by that is that too much film look, too many lens flares, too many light leaks, too much film grain, too much vignette, too much color aberration can spoil an image even worse. Remember the hay days of the old Hipstamatic app with its extreme lenses and film emulations? Back then it was fun but its success had also a lot to do with incredibly inferior phone cameras of that time.

All that said I think I have found my ideal camera app, my ideal middle ground, for now. It's called mood.camera app and is only available for iOS. Here's another link to their website. For me it's a pretty perfect combination of a rather old approach (photography) and new technical possibilities (smartphone cameras). The app comes with just one major downside which seems to be part of its core philosophy, so I have doubts that this feature will change anytime soon. This app is not a filter app, so it's not suitable for post processing your images after you shot them with another camera app. It's just for shooting images in the moment, the filters or fictional film simulations are applied instantly, there's no way to use or change those emulations after you've already taken your images. Though, in the app settings there is at least an option to save the original, unprocessed version of the image in addition to the processed one. This is still not ideal but better than nothing.

For me personally I'm thrilled that this app uses a completely independent processing engine, that is very different from Apple's own approach. And it's different in a good way. Indeed the images get back that more old school, original film look. Not because there's a lot of artificial grain and light leaks, but because there's no crispy sharpening, no digital process artifacts, no HDR. Bright areas are bright, while dark areas remain dark. A silhouette against a bright sky remains a black silhouette. All that could go wrong 20 years ago is still going wrong with this app today. But you get back very natural, calm and friendly looking images. And all of that comes in a pretty effortless and well rounded package.

Another highlight of this app is that you can create your own filters. And the controls are very well thought through for that. There are not too many settings, but enough settings to achieve the look you prefer. I highly recommend playing with these controls until you achieve a look that you like. It's definitely worth toying around with these settings. In my tests taming down the Dynamic range setting to "low" or even "off" often does the trick. I was never a fan of too much HDR anyway and I'm happy that I found a real switch now to get rid of it.

Alternative processing engines are not new in the Apple AppStore. There are several apps these days that offer alternative methods to Apple's very own approach. Among them are mostly "professional" apps like Halide or ProCamera that offer all their ranges of possibilities only when shooting in the RAW format. And shooting RAW with a phone camera often just feels overkill to me. To me it feels there's just not enough information coming from the sensor to justify these enormous file sizes. What you have to understand, though is that the iPhone's hardware is optimized for using the Apple native image pipeline. It's baked into the hardware of these A iPhone chips. If the app you're using is based on a alternative solution, this solution is only software based and therefore uses slightly more (and in some cases much more) processing and battery power. You can feel that your phone is working hard in those moments because it's getting warm or even hot. Sometimes there's even a brief shutter lag.

Talking about alternative camera apps I want to at least briefly mention the very new Project Indigo app by Adobe. The version you can find in the AppStore these days is more or less a very well developed public beta of some camera app that Adobe might or might not release at some point in the future. For now the app is completely free and there's also no Adobe account necessary. So far I had just a couple of moments to toy around with the app and all I have to say is that everything I saw looks very promising. The app does a lot of processing in the background and my aging iPhone 12 Pro Max got instantly hot. Also it takes quite a while until the final result of all that computation becomes visible to you. But again, this is definitely an app to watch out for. And maybe when it's officially released in a year or so the next generation of phones can handle the demanding processing tasks much more easily.

For now I remain a happy user of the mood.camera app and I'd be keen to know if you enjoy it as well. You can test the app for 7 days for free, after that it is 14,99 USD or 17,99 EUR as a onetime fee. Alternatively there's also a monthly subscription plan for 1,99 EUR per month.