Mood Camera for iPhone

P
hotography has seen an interesting pushback against computational photography in recent years. For those not up on the technical jargon, computational photography is when your smart device (typically a smartphone) augments photos with automatic denoising, sharpening, and artificial lighting.

When you’re snapping family pics at your nana’s 60th wedding anniversary celebration, computational photography is brilliant. You want everyone’s faces well-lit and sharp, and you’ll happily ignore that processed look if it means getting a decent family keepsake.

But for artistic or creative photography? That computational wizardry isn’t always welcome.

That’s why we’ve seen apps emerge across Apple and Android platforms that try to escape the computational realm and return to a more analogue aesthetic. One such app is Mood Camera, an iPhone-only offering that I’ve been putting through its paces in various conditions.

The app uses a custom ProRAW image processing pipeline on iPhone 12 Pro models or newer to recreate the look and feel of film, while ‘non-pro’ and older devices use a custom JPEG pipeline instead. The goal is simple: no more over-sharpened, artificial-looking ‘phone camera’ photos.