This new Android app challenges the whole lot you already know about smartphone images

In 2024, there’s by no means been extra methods to make a picture. If it isn’t the digital camera in your smartphone, it is scribbling on a pill with a stylus, or producing one thing horrendous with an AI image generator. And since it is really easy to make a picture from scratch, the choice round the way you make them has by no means appeared extra pressing.

The default digital camera app is the place most individuals head first, and it is more and more the supply of closely processed photos that look good 95% of the time, but additionally more and more do not mirror the fact pictures are alleged to seize. That AI-powered modifying instruments are built-in into a number of components of the capturing and modifying course of makes issues even stranger. Halide, a premium iPhone digital camera app I’ve coated right here on Pocket-lint earlier than, has tried to handle this pressure by giving customers the choice to skip their telephone’s conventional picture processing pipeline fully. These “Course of Zero” pictures steadily look extra pure than something an iPhone shoots on its own, with shadows and texture that Apple’s need to make issues as straightforward as attainable polishes away. However the place does that go away Android customers searching for one thing related?

Zerocam, a digital camera app that is simply made its option to the Play Retailer, is perhaps the reply. It strips images right down to it is most simple parts — composition and framing — and avoids the steadily dramatic picture processing a Samsung or Google telephone may usually do. However as I discovered utilizing the app, these restrictions can fairly shortly make you query simply what you desire a smartphone digital camera to do, and if there’s even a technique for taking pictures that can work for everybody.

Zerocam turns your smartphone digital camera right into a single button

The naked necessities of taking a photograph

Whereas Halide is all about providing you extra management over how you’re taking your pictures by surfacing data that your smartphone avoids or hides for simplicity’s sake, Zerocam thinks all of that could be a distraction. When you set it up, all of the app is a viewfinder, a yellow shutter button, and toggle to cycle by way of the completely different lens choices in your telephone. There are not any controls for focus or publicity, no further photograph modes if you wish to shoot a time-lapse or a portrait shot, and no option to rotate the app’s interface once you wish to shoot horizontally.

The pictures Zerocam takes are equally barebones. For those who’re used to the saturated colours and excessive dynamic vary of a Pixel 9’s regular output, you is perhaps shocked by what Zerocam captures. Images completely really feel extra candid, however they’re additionally extra washed out and coloured unusually in brilliant direct gentle, and blurry in low-light and nighttime settings. For those who’re not cautious, it is also fairly straightforward to take a photograph that is out of focus, which is perhaps a turn-off for those who’re used to reflexively tapping in your display screen to regulate the main focus of your photograph.

Limitations pressure you to depend on fundamentals

When it comes right down to it, the restrictions the app locations on you by eradicating all the standard smartphone digital camera instruments pressure you to develop images fundamentals. The place ought to particular person parts like a constructing, individual, or flower be positioned in relation to one another? And what must be within the body within the first place? These are the sorts of questions Zerocam naturally will get you to ask. The fashionable smartphone digital camera, which is usually biased in the direction of high quality at a excessive velocity, would not. You take an image as a result of it is one thing you wish to seize and bear in mind, not essentially since you’re attempting to create an attention-grabbing picture.

Within the brief time I used Zerocam I am unable to say it made me develop an “eye,” nevertheless it did pressure me to consider what I appreciated and what appeared good to me. Is {that a} privilege the common individual will wish to pay for? I am not so certain. You possibly can obtain Zerocam at no cost and the app will allow you to seize 5 pictures a day. For those who pay $0.99 per thirty days or $10 per 12 months, you will get limitless pictures. That is fairly cheap so far as cell app subscriptions go, nevertheless it nonetheless stands out once you examine it to the free built-in app in your telephone.

Zerocam is admirable however impractical

A philosophical shift in what your smartphone digital camera ought to do

In precept, I admire how excessive Zerocam’s strategy in the direction of countering the AI extra of the default digital camera app. If you are going to have an concept that runs counter to the norm, you may as effectively decide to it fully. If all present smartphone images is simply too fussy and synthetic, then eradicating the whole lot right down to the studs is perhaps the answer — or a minimum of the beginning of 1.

However I did not have to make use of Zerocam for very lengthy to study that it wasn’t for me. I would like extra management over focus, or a minimum of a grid that I can pull as much as assist with composing a shot. I may not but be on the degree the place a histogram is helpful, however I would love the choice to tweak the brightness or white steadiness, on the very least to see what issues might seem like. Zerocam would not provide any of that. The app’s developer would not really feel like these settings are aligned with its objective of letting you “Seize Moments, Not Megapixels,” per the app’s Play Retailer web page.

If there’s something I’ve realized whereas attempting a dozen or so photograph and video apps over the previous few weeks, is that everybody goes to land someplace otherwise in terms of what they need their smartphone digital camera to do. That is why it is vital that these sorts of third-party apps can be found within the first place. Clearly, there’s some form of need to do issues otherwise than the kitchen-sink-approach telephone maker’s use. Apps like Halide and Zerocam are assembly it.

Your smartphone digital camera is just not impartial

Cellphone makers are pushing a particular look

In addition to forcing me to determine what I wished, utilizing Zerocam additionally pushed me in the direction of acknowledging that the default digital camera app on my telephone is on no account impartial. Google, Samsung, and Apple all have an opinion of how pictures ought to look and what it’s best to be capable of do to them. And if something, these corporations’ views and requirements are quickly altering as they rush to include generative AI into their photograph options. Simply because you may have extra management over how your remaining photograph seems, does not imply Apple would not need you to suppose a sure approach about your pictures. Samsung’s Head of Buyer Expertise advised TechRadar that “there is no such factor as an actual image.” That’s not one thing a impartial get together says.

Zerocam

Zerocam takes Halide’s “Course of Zero” characteristic to the intense by eradicating all of the digital camera options and picture processing aside from the shutter button.

Your smartphone digital camera and pictures are solely going to vary extra as time, software program updates, and {hardware} releases march on. It is extra clear than ever that it is as much as us to determine if and the way we interact with them. For those who do not care, and wish to embrace chaos, there are many photograph modifying options to strive on the Pixel 9, Galaxy S24, and iPhone 16. And you do not even have to have a brand new smartphone to use all of them.