Comparing macro shots from default Camera and Halide, I found there was a lot of noise and ugly sharpening in the Halide ones, and after doing some controlled tests with a tripod and remote shutter, it seems to confirm my hunch.
The Halide versions of these are worse, right? Less detail and oversharpened, with chunky noise in the background despite a lower ISO.
Any chance Halide could “use default macro" and just add the manual focus/exposure options?
@halide The thing is that I absolutely need Halide in order to do macro, because the default camera’s lens switching makes it almost impossible to get focus. Halide's manual focus tools, and even just the ability to force it to not switch to the main lens, are required.
But if I use the default Halide mode with 0.5x, I lose too much resolution, and if I turn on Halide Macro, it gives such worse results than default macro. It's a real dilemma.
AFAIK Halide Macro in RAW kind of defeats the purpose because it no longer crops and upscales, right? What I get is a full 0.5x view that’s super washed out.
Testing a default camera RAW gives a teensy bit more detail than default HEIF.
Attached is another HEIF example of a more natural subject. The central abdomen really shows off the effect.
@jerclarke thanks for the feedback — if shooting without macro on, at minimum focus distance, it will give you the same image as the stock camera without macro enhancements :)
@halide Ok I see what you’re saying, I can get the pixels I’m looking for by just skipping macro mode entirely.
But then I miss out on the ergonomics. When focusing on something small, the macro mode is way better for focusing. And seeing the final framing is also better.
The sharpening in macro mode feels completely against the ethos of Halide 🤷🏻♀️
@halide Looking at the original files, I see that the Halide HEIF files have the full 0.5 format, so I guess the app saves the full 0.5, then applies a crop afterward?
Manually cropping from 0.5 seems to give the same detail as the Halide “Macro”, just looking blurry instead of over-sharpened. I guess it's an inevitable tradeoff for the app. Personally I think less sharpening would be better.
🧐 Apple should let you access their "macro” image pipeline so you can add focus tools on top of it!
@jerclarke indeed, the crop is a factor you select in Macro mode. You can see a little 'neural zoom' icon with 2x or 3x active in Macro - the RAW file stays the same. Detail enhancement quality varies per subject matter but in our testing was superior to regular scaling.
@halide Ok so my request would be to review the tradeoffs in “enhancement quality”, honestly. I'm having a hard time finding any scenarios where that sharpening is an improvement, and the way it adds huge chunky noise in the bokeh is disturbing to look at. Better to just have a smaller picture.
Maybe it could be a setting, like the one for disabling default processing, but for the Halide Macro processing?
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