I have an emotional connection to shooting black & white photography. When I was a kid, my dad and I would roll and process our own 35mm film. Most often it was fairly slow Kodak Plus-X Pan. Black & white photography adds many new elements to consider, including keeping in mind how the colors you shoot are going to change for the film.
I love Hueless for shooting black & white photography. Throughout its evolution, it has maintained an excellent balance between functionality, features and user experience. The new 2.0 update streets later today. Not only does it add several new features to this excellent camera app, but the new user interface is one of the better ones optimized for the new iPhone 5.
Again, I got to play with a beta copy! Keep reading to find out what’s new. >>>
All of the new features build on Hueless’ core strength of having an excellent and powerful toolset to shoot great black & white photographs. Many of the new features are for the new iPhone 5 and iPod Touch cameras. Here are some of my favorites and how they work.
I absolutely love the new user interface. Hueless is perfectly suited for the larger screen of the iPhone 5. While many popular camera apps have chosen to simply stretch the viewfinder creating an inaccurate viewfinder, Hueless preserves the correct aspect ratio of the mode you are shooting in, whether its 4:3, 3:2, 1:1 or the new 2:39:1 Cinema mode.
The new larger screen allows for the control bar of Hueless to be moved off of the viewfinder, maintaining functionality and improving visibility. The new shutter release button is larger, easier to use, and just cool looking, too.
Another new supported hardware feature is the new High ISO mode option which toggles access to the iPhone 5’s Low Light mode and lets you shoot with a very fast ISO 3200 speed. It’s similar to shooting with a very fast film and adds some nice, chunky lo-fi grain to the image. The grain is a byproduct of the low-light mode on the iPhone 5 camera. See the sample below, which was shot in my living room using only one, distant 25 watt bulb.
The new Hueless update supports Volume Shutter where you can use the device’s Volume + button as a handy hardware shutter release.
Hueless now adds Geotagging to the EXIF data it supports. In the app’s preferences, you can tell it to save the geo-location of where the image was shot.
The Presets tool has gotten an upgrade as well. You can now easily share and import your settings with press-and-hold of the preset button. The app will share the preset by copy, email or social networks. The recipe just needs to be in message. Hueless seems to be pretty intelligent about separating it from the surrounding content.
All this and Hueless still takes great black & white photographs.
Hueless continues to evolve. One of the things that I love about this app is that as it gains more tools, feature and power, the developers haven’t lost sight of the fact that one of the things that make Hueless such a delight to use is the simplicity in which they continue to tie it all together.
The Hueless 2.0 update should be available in the App Store sometime today. Hueless is normally $1.99. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation), iPad 2 Wi-Fi, iPad 2 Wi-Fi + 3G, iPad (3rd generation) and iPad Wi-Fi + 4G. Requires iOS 5.0 or later.
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