Spectre on an iPhone 11Pro +new shot

[AlanLichty]

I acquired an app for my iPhone called Spectre that makes the phone pretend it's a tripod mounted SLR with an ND filter on. It does this by taking a series of images and then blending the result to smooth out running water or ghost out people in the scene. I played with this a bit out along the coast last month but found a lot of artifacts in hand held shots that left me somewhat unimpressed.

I decided to give it another try with some waterfalls I have been shooting on this trip and used my camera/tripod to steady holding the iPhone for the 3 second set of exposures. This image is the same scene as my Waterfall Wednesday image but taken with my iPhone with the Spectre app:

Not going to replace my DSLR soon but the result was a lot better than I thought it would be....

Edit - here is another shot I got today while bracing both hands on a bridge rail for the 3 second burst:

For the record - neither of these are straight out of the camera images - I have processed them through Lightroom and Photoshop as if they were from my DSLR.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Interesting. There are widgets available that allow a phone be clamped to a tripod. With that combo, perhaps this thing has potential.

 

[JimFox]

It sounds like they are simply replicating the Sony Smooth App that is on some Sony cameras. Which is the same thing you can do on any camera by taking multiple short shots and then using Median Blending to blend them into 1 image.

It is great to see it on an iPhone too. This makes for a great backup camera then. A small iPhone capture of a scene is better then no capture if a camera fails.

So thanks for sharing this, I will download it on my iPhone later when I am on WiFi.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Great results. You could have passed this off as an SLR shot, at least at web sizes.

 

[AlanLichty]

Interesting. There are widgets available that allow a phone be clamped to a tripod. With that combo, perhaps this thing has potential.

Somehow I can't quite imagine myself carrying around a tripod for my iPhone

It sounds like they are simply replicating the Sony Smooth App that is on some Sony cameras. Which is the same thing you can do on any camera by taking multiple short shots and then using Median Blending to blend them into 1 image.

It is great to see it on an iPhone too. This makes for a great backup camera then. A small iPhone capture of a scene is better then no capture if a camera fails.

So thanks for sharing this, I will download it on my iPhone later when I am on WiFi.

When I went to download this into Lightroom it showed up as a 3 second video. I had to go back into the app and tell it to save the image to get it as an image instead of a video. That's a lot of still images to process given how many frames are in a 3 second video.

Great results. You could have passed this off as an SLR shot, at least at web sizes.

Thanks - but somehow that almost feels wrong to me but then again that's just me.

 

[AlanLichty]

New shot added above from today. Two hands braced on a wooden bridge rail.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

New shot added above from today. Two hands braced on a wooden bridge rail.

You have steady hands Alan

 

[AlanLichty]

You have steady hands Alan

In my dreams..... The Spectre is actually trying to compensate for a fully handheld shot so by offering some support to keep things more stable I got the result.