Case study

Field

SwiftSwiftUIMetalAVFoundationiOS

A film-inspired camera for iPhone that develops every photo in the camera, with natural color and real focal lengths. Designed and built solo, currently in beta.

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A camera, not a camera app

The iPhone’s Camera app makes every photo bright, sharp and safe. I wanted photos that look like the scene and feel like they came out of a real camera. In Field you pick a film, see it live in the viewfinder, take the photo, and it is finished. There is no editor and nothing to fix afterwards.

Most of what makes Field different is what it leaves out: no video, no Live Photos, no portrait mode, no zoom slider, no account. One screen, good defaults, few controls.

Films, not filters

Most film-look apps lay a filter over Apple’s finished photo. Field’s films are part of developing the photo: each one sets the tone curve, how single colors like skin and greens turn, and tints in shadows and highlights. Contrast acts on brightness only, so a punchier film doesn’t push skin toward orange.

On top of the nine built-in films, you can build your own recipes in the numbers Fuji shooters already use online: highlights, shadows, color, white balance shift, grain.

Field camera screen with the film picker open and the Verdant film selected over a forest scene — The viewfinder runs the selected film live, so you frame and expose for the photo you will get.

Feels like a camera

Real lenses: Each focal length uses the physical lens it names. Field never switches lenses or crops behind your back
Fixed stops: Ultra wide, 24 mm, a few crops from high resolution sensors, and telephoto. Nothing in between
Auto until you set it: Set the shutter and Field becomes shutter priority, set the ISO and it becomes ISO priority, set both and it is manual
Instant shutter: Photos develop in the background, so the camera never makes you wait

Technical decisions

Swift 6 and SwiftUI, no third-party dependencies
Metal viewfinder: Drawn on the frame queue with the same color lookup table as the saved photo, so SwiftUI never redraws per frame
Own development pipeline: With ProRAW, Field develops the photo itself through Core Image with gentle tone mapping, soft highlights and less sharpening. With HEIF it keeps Apple’s multi-frame noise reduction and applies the film on top
Measured, not guessed: Film colors are fitted to reference renderings, and viewfinder and photo are compared on paired real captures with my own scope tools
Lock Screen camera: A capture extension opens Field from the Lock Screen, Control Center and Action button

Field recipe editor with tone and color pads over a market scene with oranges and lemons — Your own film starts from a built-in one. Tone and color pads cover the quick changes, all settings use Fuji's scales.

Where it stands

Field is in beta on TestFlight, in English and German.

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