Technical Camera: An iOS Camera App with a Simple UI and Serious Features

The Hungarian software company DIRE Studio has just launched Technical Camera, a new iOS camera app that’s designed for serious photographers who want a simple yet advanced tool for capturing still photos.

Developer Laszlo Pusztai says he was inspired to create the app because he was frustrated with clutter screens, unorganized storage, the lack of resolution/size adjustments, and clumsy designs in existing camera apps.

The app lacks many of the bells and whistles found packaged with most cameras apps these days. There’s no video, no selfies with the front camera, no AI, and no fancy modes (e.g. panorama or portrait mode or studio lighting).

What the app does have is a sharp focus on creating still photos. The live view itself doesn’t have information or buttons overlaid on it, providing a clean view of what you’re framing.

There are professional-level controls that include manual exposure and focus, compensation and locks, focus peaking, and adjustable auto ISO. Smart Function Keys allow you to put your most used functions at your fingertips. Functions can also be customized: you can do things like change the direction of the shutter speed dial or choose the sides of the screen used for exposure compensation and manual focusing.

If you’re using the camera to scout locations and plan shots, the visualization aids in the app will come in handy. The Framing Previsor shows the telephoto framing of a scene in the wide-angle live view.

There are different grid overlays to assist with composition.

There’s also highlight and shadow indicators to help with setting exposure.

A real-time wide-angle converter corrects distortion, allowing you to shoot ultra-wide photos with straight lines — useful for things like architectural and real estate photography.

Each photo shoot can be saved to its own album in the app, and you can choose your desired image quality, image size, and geotag settings for each shoot.

Finally, the developers put a great deal of emphasis on standards compliance.

“Standards facilitate workflow integration,” the company says. “So Technical Camera is completely color managed (from capture to display), with support for the frequently used Adobe RGB color space on wide color devices. DNG files adhere to the TIFF/EP specification, complete with a full resolution embedded preview. And metadata included in the photos follow Metadata Working Group recommendations.”

Technical Camera is currently available from the iTunes App Store for $7 (there’s a 30% discount through June 14th). The regular price is $10.