Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo

ssajomes 3 days ago 48 commentsRead Article on photosynthesis.camera

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Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

anigbrowl•about 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•20 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?

beachy•17 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•11 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

newbie578•3 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

IncreasePosts•12 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

acomjean•about 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%...

swah•about 2 hours ago

If it works, Apple copies it soon enough...

woadwarrior01•about 1 hour ago

There's nothing to copy. Apple's iOS Camera app already uses multi-camera image fusion in many cases. This app builds on the Multi-Camera AVCapture feature that Apple opened up in iOS 13.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/249/

copperx•16 minutes ago

So what's the value add here?

woadwarrior01•4 minutes ago

IIUC, it's the ability to export layered PSD files with images from multiple sensors.

CharlesW•about 1 hour ago

Apple has done this (multi-camera/spatial fusion) since 2016, in addition to multi-frame/temporal fusion. The OS decides whether these techniques are worthwhile for any given shot based on context.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avcap...

mandeepj•about 1 hour ago

They might acquire it and have done it in the past.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/06/apple-buy...

trashcan2137•about 2 hours ago

subscription camera app seems like peak comedy to me

furyofantares•about 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.

ChrisMarshallNY•23 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•11 minutes ago

A penetrating observation that feels true. Too bad.

da02•21 minutes ago

Did you buy it or show them a better way of doing it?

pastor_williams•14 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.

dxdm•about 1 hour ago

Gotta keep up with pitch inflation!

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

VladVladikoff•25 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•24 minutes ago

Yeah, at that point it's better to buy an external lens for the Iphone. Single purchase and better pictures.

PaulHoule•about 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)

cantalopes•about 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•11 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.

roflmaostc•about 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

megraf•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour ago

Apple’s MultipeerConnectivity framework -- phones discover and talk over local wifi / bluetooth via MCSession, MCNearbyServiceAdvertiser, and MCNearbyServiceBrowser in PeerSessionManager.

gregoriol•about 1 hour ago

Apple has deprecated all of that now

thih9•42 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.

eigenspace•3 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•about 2 hours ago

Some of the photosynthesis zoom-ins have overlays take a bit longer to load at higher resolution.

zellyn•about 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•about 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•about 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•about 2 hours ago

That's not what's being described here. It's just combining the telephoto and wide angle photos.

joe-dakroub•about 2 hours 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•about 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?

BugsJustFindMe•36 minutes ago

"This site was paused as it reached its usage limits. Please contact the site owner for more information."

sajomes•33 minutes ago

It's back now!

BugsJustFindMe•25 minutes ago

FYI you're serving multi-megabyte images on your landing page that could effectively be thumbnails.

alansaber•about 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

bigwheels•about 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.

lattalayta•about 2 hours ago

Similar idea to the discontinued Light L16 camera https://petapixel.com/2017/12/08/review-light-l16-brilliant-...

EGreg•about 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•21 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•about 2 hours ago

Anything like this for Android or Pixels?