Of all of the camera apps on the App Store, probably none has been around longer or been used as much as Camera+ ($2.99). The app, which boasts over 10 million users, has been developed by LateNiteSoft for a while, and the company has now taken over marketing of Camera+ from Taptaptap. Camera+ 10 is a major update that was released today, adding a pile of features to what was already a powerful app.
To begin with, Camera+ now takes advantage of the depth information that’s available from dual-lens iPhones like the iPhone 7 and 8. The developer has added support for that depth information to most of the editing tools in “The Lab”. A photo taken in Depth Mode — what LateNiteSoft calls Apple’s “Portrait Mode” — can be edited based on depth. For example, a foreground item can be saturated with color, with the background being desaturated. The result? More emphasis on the foreground item. Another example would be applying exposure compensation to a distant part of the image. The editing tools work with Portrait photos taken by the Apple Camera app as well.
The camera has been redesigned from scratch. With a tap on a + sign next to the shutter button, it’s possible to easily toggle a number of features — grid, level, geotagging, RAW format, stabilization, timer, burst mode, or the new smile detection — on or off. Tap the “x” next to the shutter button and all of those buttons disappear.
TechCrunch, which spilled the news today, notes that no intellectual property (i.e., patents, research, etc…) has been included in the deal, and the main reason for Apple’s acquisition was to get the Init.ai team to work on Siri.
It’s also thought that the Init.ai team may be tasked with building out Business Chat, a feature of Messages that was announced at WWDC 2017 but not actually included in iOS 11. Business Chat apparently allows users to chat with businesses for customer support, information like location and business hours, and more.
