It’s straight-forward enough to tweak the lighting and focus of a photo using the iPhone’s camera – just a few on-screen taps and you can lock it down – but what about those situations when you don’t have time to line it up, or simply forget?
Enter Microsoft Pix. The software giant has decided to brush aside its Windows Mobile ecosystem in the development of this new app to give iOS users a bit of camera tech they might find useful.
The app works both as a post-shot editor, with filters and cropping tools all as standard, but also an intelligent camera.
This means that rather than heading straight for the Camera app on your device, if you were to take photos via Microsoft Pix’s camera, the resulting image would have already been processed by the app to show you the best result.
So how does it work? Microsoft says that it is “people-first” meaning the app will recognize the presence of humans in the photo and ensure they look their best. It does this through smart settings, which automatically checks scene and lighting between each shot, and uses facial recognition to decide on the optimum settings. Furthermore, it takes a burst of photos to ensure it gets the best one.
In reality, it does a lot of what the iPhone Camera app already does, but automates it to take out a lot of the work.
After you take a shot, it automatically selects the three best images from the burst and deletes the rest to save space. Then, if it senses motion in the image, it’ll stitch those three burst images together to create a looping live image similar to the iPhone’s Live Photos.
Read more: Get more out of Live Photos with these 3 great apps
It also syncs to the device’s Camera Roll allowing it to act pretty much as a replacement for the regular iPhone camera.
Check out how it works in the video below:
If you want to give it a go yourself it’s available for free right now on the App Store: