Halide creators launch Spectre, an AI-powered long exposure camera app for iPhone

Nearly two years ago former Twitter for iOS tech lead Ben Sandofsky and ex-Apple designer Sebastiaan de With launched Halide, the beautiful pro camera app for iPhone that’s proven both popular and powerful. Today the duo is launching their second app, a companion camera called Spectre that focuses on intelligent long exposure photography.

Spectre lets you erase moving tourists from busy locations or capture light trails and water movements from the camera on your iPhone:

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 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. 

Spectre includes a visual indicator of how stable you’re holding the iPhone while capturing a long exposure shot to help you steady your hand. If you shoot with an iPhone 8 or later, Spectre uses Apple’s Neural Engine to drive AI-based stabilization features to improve shots.

The app is very approachable too with few settings to tweak. Just aim, hold steady, and shoot from your iPhone. A slider toggle on the bottom right of the app lets you select between 3-, 5-, and 9-second capture durations.

You can also tap to change the focal point, see and adjust brightness with a vertical slider by tapping the top right corner, and adjust light trail capture mode between auto/on/off.

Check out some sample shots from Spectre:

Spectre also supports Live Photos for long exposure shots so you can capture motion and not just still shots. You can also use Siri Shortcuts to create voice commands for capturing long exposure shots with Spectre hands-free.

Find out more about Spectre at spectre.cam and download the new camera from the App Store. Spectre is available for $1.99 as a limited time launch price, but the price will increase after the launch.