Halide unveils Spectre that uses AI to let iPhone users take brilliant long exposures

“We’re excited to announce Spectre, our second app for iPhone,” Sebastiaan de With writes via the official halide blog.
“Spectre is a computational shutter for iPhone that allows everyone to take brilliant long exposures,” de With explains. “A regular photo captures only a fraction of a second. Taking a photo over several seconds — a long exposure — unlocks all sorts of practical and artistic effects.”
“Long exposures are kind of rocket science. You have to stabilize your camera with a tripod, take several shots to confirm a composition, guess the correct exposure over a long period of time, and hope for the best,” de With writes. “Spectre solves all of that, with the help of machine learning and computer vision.”
“A traditional shutter takes a single photo over a long period of time, collecting light to create a singular final image,” de With writes. “Spectre reimagines long exposures: its intelligent shutter takes hundreds of photos during the exposure time and merges the result. That means you don’t just get a final still image, but also a video of the entire exposure as it happened.”
What You Can Do
Make Crowds Disappear: Spectre helps take photos of crowded, touristy places. Simply set a medium or long duration and take a shot to erase the crowd from a location. Capture the those special moments like you remember them.
Rivers Of Light: At night, AI scene detection automatically switches modes to draw beautiful light trails, for stunning nighttime city photography or light painting.
Gorgeous Water: Capture waterfalls, ocean waves, fountains and more with beautiful ghostly water.
“You can now share your long exposure as a video or a photo — it’s entirely up to you,” de With explains. “Best of all, we save your capture as one shot: the images Spectre captures are stored as a Live Photo.”

 
“We wanted to build an app where anyone could press a button and magically get an incredible shot,” de With writes. “To get that kind of magic, we turned to AI”
Scene Recognition
By default, Spectre uses AI to analyze the scene and automatically pick the appropriate mode. If you’re shooting a beach scene, it will blend shots for great smooth water. A lively cityscape triggers light trails blending.
Image Stabilization
Long exposures typically requires setting up a tripod and meticulously stabilizing your camera: but don’t fret, Spectre requires no extra equipment. Spectre’s AI stabilizes your shot for you, allowing up to 9-second long handheld long exposures.
Full article, with examples, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Spectre is just $1.99 for a limited time to celebrate the app’s launch. We already bought ours! Highly recommended.