At ThePhoblographer, we’re lovers of Photography, and I am specifically a lover of analog photography. I love the nostalgia behind seeing the grain, colors, and yes, imperfections. In recent years, several companies have tried to capture the magic and transfer it to digital images, and Felix, a photographer and YouTuber (this will be relevant later), and his company, Polychrome, have launched a new app that adds a halation effect to your photos. It’s free to try, but is it worth the download?
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The Big Picture: Does the Halationify App Have the Glow?
At the end of the day, the Halationify App is a filter that adds a feathered effect over the brightest spots in your images. It’s not perfect, and at times, its execution can feel ham-fisted. The halation effect is the only kind of edit this app can do, so you really need to love or want this effect on the go. For most photographers, you’ll be better served with the web/desktop version.
We’re giving the Halation App three out of five stars. Looking to try it for yourself, download the free version in the Apple App Store (in-app purchase available to unlock unlimited exports).
- Pro: Super simple interface
- Pro: Works as advertised: simply add a halation effect to any photo in your Camera Roll
- Con: Limited to iOS devices
- Con: Free version limits you to 10 exports
- Con: Seems to only focus on ALL highlights of an image without the ability to fine-tune or mask a target for the effect
WTF is Halation and Why Do We Want It in Our Photographs?
Before discussing how the Halationify App works, we should understand what it tries to recreate. Halation is an analogue photography effect in which light passes through a film emulsion and is reflected to the light-sensitive layers of the emulsion. This results in a halo effect around bright/hot spots of an image and/or around the edges of the frame. If this sounds like a bug and not a feature, you’d be right. And that’s always been the charm of analogue photography in the digital age – the imperfections become the highlight of a creative composition.
Halationify App Keeps It Simple to Add Some Glow to Your Photos
One of the Halationify App’s greatest strengths is its ease of navigation. Simply tap on the photo icon to pull up your device’s camera roll and albums and select the image you want to glow up. From there, making edits is as simple as manipulating a few sliders and determining the intensity of the effect.
As shown in the screenshots above, if you’re familiar with your iPhone or iPad’s photo editor, you will easily get the hang of making adjustments in the Halationify App.
Was This the Halo You Expected?
Depending on your expectations, simplicity might also be the app’s biggest shortcoming – there aren’t any fine-tuning controls to better manage how the halo effect is applied to images. From my testing, I speculate that the app is applying a filter to the highlights of an image alone, which could be the light from a candle that you want to add some glow to, but it will also add the effect to light bouncing off a white wall. It’s not perfect and could be made better if you could even “brush” on the effect – I often wanted a scalpel but got a butcher’s knife instead. At the end of the day, less is more on this app.
Below are some side-by-side image comparisons:
Highly Specialized or One-Trick Pony?
The Halation App is nothing if not honest. It’s designed to do one thing well and without the need for a subscription. Polychrome gets kudos (and my respect) for keeping true to that plan. That said, if you downloaded the app because you bought into the promise of a free-forever photo app, you may be in for a bit of disappointment. With the Version 1.0 update of the app, Halationify now has a free and “premium” version that is unlocked with an in-app purchase. It’s $7.99 for lifetime access and unlimited exports, but you could always use the browser-based app for free.
Figuring out if any tool is highly specialized or a one-trick pony is often difficult and requires an understanding of the nuances of the craftsperson wielding it. For instance, this app will only allow you to do one thing: add a digital effect over your digital images. You could get far more bang-for-your-buck by simply modifying a cheap lens filter, like our lead image in this article. That being said, if you’re the kind of photographer who prefers the software route and needs to be able to make micro adjustments to your images and want tons of control over how a filter or effect works, you will not be pleased. But for the more casual photographer who simply wants to make a handful of photos glow, it’s tough to be an app that works as advertised and gives you 10 free images to start. At $7.99 USD, though, it feels like I’m overpaying to see a sad horse in a walled-off stable.
Declaration of Journalistic Intent
The Phoblographer is one of the last standing dedicated photography publications that speaks to both art and tech in our articles. We put declarations up front in our reviews to adhere to journalistic standards that several publications abide by. These help you understand a lot more about what we do:
- At the time of publishing this review, Polychrome ISN’T running direct-sold advertising with the Phoblographer. This doesn’t affect our reviews anyway and it never has in our 15 years of publishing our articles. This article is in no way sponsored.
- Note that this isn’t necessarily our final review of the app. It will be updated, and it’s more of an in-progress review than anything. In fact, almost all our reviews are like this.
- None of the reviews on the Phoblographer are sponsored. That’s against FTC laws and we adhere to them just the same way that newspapers, magazines, and corporate publications do.
- Polychrome did not loan, or provide an evaluation code for the app to the Phoblographer for review. There was no money exchange between us or their 3rd party partners and the Phoblographer for this to happen. Manufacturers trust the Phoblographer’s reviews, as they are incredibly blunt.
- Polychrome knows that it cannot influence the site’s reviews. If we don’t like something or if we have issues with it, we’ll let our readers know.
- The Phoblographer’s standards for reviewing products have become much stricter. After having the world’s largest database of real-world lens reviews, we choose not to review anything we don’t find innovative or unique, and in many cases, products that lack weather resistance. Unless something is very unique, we probably won’t touch it.
- In recent years, brands have withheld NDA information from us or stopped working with us because they feel they cannot control our coverage. These days, many brands will not give products to the press unless they get favorable coverage. In other situations, we’ve stopped working with several brands for ethical issues. Either way, we report as honestly and rawly as humanity allows.
- At the time of publishing, the Phoblographer is the only photography publication that is a member of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative. We champion human-made art and are frank with our audience. We are also the only photography publication that labels when an image is edited or not.
More can be found on our Disclaimers page.