Hydra 2 › AI Camera (RAW/HDR‪)‬ 4+

Not a good app for novice photographers

Unless you have photography as a hobby / job etc., I would not recommend this app. I have an iPhone 13 pro — I got the 13 pro because I liked the idea of being able to take really high quality photos with my phone. I am by no means even an entry level photographer / have 0 photography background. I am an outdoorsman, among other things & wanted the convenience of taking nice photos with my phone, but am unlikely to buy a ‘nice’ camera outside of whatever my phone can do. I downloaded this app on a whim specifically to take some off road shots of my vehicle, & felt like the standard camera app had been lackluster recently. Needless to say, the app is going to get my $11 bc I took a bunch of photos with it, & did not realize they had a huge water mark on them, if you only have the free version. All of that being said, unless you have a photography background this app has a lot of features that a ‘rookie’ would not be aware of (ie., myself) — hence, I only see this app being worth the money if you ~really~ know what you’re doing, then I’m sure it could be useful. Overall it is not an ‘intuitive’ learn as you go type camera, & that’s my opinion as a ‘gen Z college student’.

Developer Response ,

Hi. Thank you for your feedback. The free app lets you shoot in Normal mode including JPEG, HEIC, RAW, and ProRAW without a watermark, and gives you auto and manual camera control for free, which basically corresponds to a free, full-featured camera app. The AI modes can be tested with a watermark and a purchase is needed to unlock them. /RS

Looks to have some useful new features

Longtime user of original.
While I appreciate power features there was a flow state in original letting one focus on capturing great moments. The update loses some of that and is a little jittery. That is taking a picture goes to editor but had to learn how best to get to other controls. Also the image seems to tile in inconsistently. Do like having control of amount of compression. Taking a photo in hdr seems faster but then spends more time processing. Finally I consistently crash in zoom and sometimes macro. Happy to revise rating when issues are resolved. Til then will continue using legacy version for expediency. Also sad to lose hdr video.

Developer Response ,

Hi. We take note of your feedback. About crashes, we are aware of iPhone XR related ones (is it the phone you have?), and a fix is on its way (2.0.2) with also file format corrections. Photo editor can be discarded altogether if you want it that way (there's a setting for that), but you have to know that instant editing gives you more room for changes as the image is more accurate (dynamic range) before encoding. The processing time is mostly linked to artificial intelligence and can vary greatly across devices. Apple Neural Engine was introduced in XS/XR and gives a strong speed-up. Also, Hydra has 2 neural computation modes (Fast, High Quality) that also affect speed & which you could try. The capture time itself (that is, before AI processing) has been greatly reduced from Hydra 1 (about 0.5s vs over 10s, 20x speedup), and that in turn makes it more comfortable to shoot and creates fewer artefacts (number one issue reported on Hydra 1). Feel free to contact support@creaceed.com if you want us to look into specific issues. Thanks /RS

Great app. Nice addition to photo workflow

This review is based on using the app on a 13 pro Max. This app has some very nice features. I love the Hi-Res mode. Beside the obvious processing to get to the resolution, photos do not look as over processed as it may happen in native app. One little are of improvement would be low-light. I have encountered a few cases where the low-light (equivalent to night mode as far as I can tell) would not capture a photo while the native night move would in similar conditions. I am not sure if this has to do with low light conditions as it was in every case involving extremely dark scenes. I like the simplicity of the macro mode compared to native app. Just pick the mode. Great! No wondering whether it’s “on” or not. One of my favorite feature is the ability to save in .dng I can now skip the so-so camera app in Lightroom, use this superior app instead and still have my DNGs in Lightroom. I do recommend this app.