App that pushes the conservative limits of the iOS camera app – Hydra › Amazing Photography Review

The iOS camera app is limited and conservative, without allowing any experimentation: it provides excellent pictures in most situations, but doesn’t dare when conditions are tough. Namely low light, strong HDR lighting conditions and digital zoom. Hydra overcomes this in all 3 situations. The enhanced zoom is fantastic. HDR is more aggressive than Apple’s own version and can generate some tone mapping issues vs more conservative Apple’s approach, but can help when all else fails. Low light brings out detail where the iPhone can’t as the Apple’s camera app doesn’t do more aggressive averaging. The only 2 issues I have with the Hydra app (hence 4 stars), hopefully coming in a new release, are: 1) the app doesn’t save in HEIC format, only JPG and not even RAW. So those 32 MPix pictures are taking a lot of space, that is where HEIC would help a lot (also for regular pics); JPG also loses more detail than HEIC does; saving RAW would allow to convert a pic in HEIC on a Mac once a picture is reviewed and saved in case the developer doesn’t want or cannot support saving in HEIC format ; (Halide app allows saving in RAW so the data is available to the developers); 2) in HDR mode a slider would be better instead of only 2 possible effect settings, and I’d like to save both “strong” and “medium” effect images rather than just one version, since I might decide later on a bigger screen which pic is best for me. I don’t understand the B/W option. I could convert the pic to BW myself later in photos...
Review by Pakitt on Hydra › Amazing Photography.