This new Android app challenges all the things you already know about smartphone images

In 2024, there’s by no means been extra methods to make a picture. If it is not the digicam 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 digicam 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 in addition more and more do not replicate the fact images are imagined to seize. That AI-powered enhancing instruments are built-in into a number of elements of the taking pictures and enhancing course of makes issues even stranger. Halide, a premium iPhone digicam app I’ve lined right here on Pocket-lint earlier than, has tried to deal with this pressure by giving customers the choice to skip their telephone’s conventional picture processing pipeline fully. These “Course of Zero” images incessantly look extra pure than something an iPhone shoots on its own, with shadows and texture that Apple’s want to make issues as simple as potential polishes away. However the place does that go away Android customers in search of one thing related?

Zerocam, a digicam app that is simply made its solution to the Play Retailer, may be the reply. It strips images right down to it is most simple elements — composition and framing — and avoids the incessantly dramatic picture processing a Samsung or Google telephone would possibly usually do. However as I discovered utilizing the app, these restrictions can fairly shortly make you query simply what you desire a smartphone digicam to do, and if there may be even a method for taking images that can work for everybody.

Zerocam turns your smartphone digicam right into a single button

The naked necessities of taking a photograph

Whereas Halide is all about providing you extra management over how you are taking your images by surfacing info that your smartphone avoids or hides for simplicity’s sake, Zerocam thinks all of that may be a distraction. When you set it up, all of the app is a viewfinder, a yellow shutter button, and toggle to cycle via the totally 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 solution to rotate the app’s interface while you wish to shoot horizontally.

The images Zerocam takes are equally barebones. In case you’re used to the saturated colours and excessive dynamic vary of a Pixel 9’s regular output, you may be shocked by what Zerocam captures. Photographs completely really feel extra candid, however they’re additionally extra washed out and coloured unusually in brilliant direct mild, and blurry in low-light and nighttime settings. In case you’re not cautious, it is also fairly simple to take a photograph that is out of focus, which may be a turn-off if you happen to’re used to reflexively tapping in your display 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 same old smartphone digicam instruments pressure you to develop images fundamentals. The place ought to particular person elements 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 digicam, 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 keep in mind, not essentially since you’re attempting to create an attention-grabbing picture.

Within the brief time I used Zerocam I can not say it made me develop an “eye,” but it surely did pressure me to consider what I favored and what regarded good to me. Is {that a} privilege the common individual will wish to pay for? I am not so positive. You may obtain Zerocam totally free and the app will allow you to seize 5 images a day. In case you pay $0.99 per thirty days or $10 per yr, you may get limitless images. That is fairly cheap so far as cell app subscriptions go, but it surely nonetheless stands out while you examine it to the free built-in app in your telephone.

Zerocam is admirable however impractical

A philosophical shift in what your smartphone digicam ought to do

In precept, I respect how excessive Zerocam’s method in the direction of countering the AI extra of the default digicam app. If you are going to have an concept that runs counter to the norm, you would possibly as nicely decide to it utterly. If all present smartphone images is just too fussy and synthetic, then eradicating all the things right down to the studs may be the answer — or not less than 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 need extra management over focus, or not less than a grid that I can pull as much as assist with composing a shot. I won’t but be on the degree the place taking a look at a histogram is helpful, however I would love the choice to tweak the brightness or white stability, 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 goal 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 couple of weeks, is that everybody goes to land someplace in another way in terms of what they need their smartphone digicam to do. That is why it’s vital that these sorts of third-party apps can be found within the first place. Clearly, there’s some form of want to do issues in another way than the kitchen-sink-approach telephone maker’s use. Apps like Halide and Zerocam are assembly it.

Your smartphone digicam will not be impartial

Telephone makers are pushing a selected look

In addition to forcing me to determine what I wished, utilizing Zerocam additionally pushed me in the direction of acknowledging that the default digicam app on my telephone is by no means impartial. Google, Samsung, and Apple all have an opinion of how images ought to look and what it is best to be capable of do to them. And if something, these firms’ views and requirements are quickly altering as they rush to include generative AI into their photograph options. Simply because you’ve extra management over how your closing photograph seems to be, does not imply Apple would not need you to assume a sure manner about your images. Samsung’s Head of Buyer Expertise instructed TechRadar that “there isn’t any such factor as an actual image.” That’s not one thing a impartial celebration says.

Zerocam

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

Your smartphone digicam and images 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 have interaction with them. In case you do not care, and wish to embrace chaos, there are many photograph enhancing options to attempt 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.