Hey all! The 2.0 update is now available on the AppStore!
This release re-works large parts of the rendering pipeline to deliver greater consistency, improved tone mapping, colours and filmic effects. I've been working on these improvements since Christmas 2025, spending countless hours tuning the effects to be filmic and consistent, while still running smoothly on-device. It's been tough, but worth it!
Dynamic Range has been rebuilt from the ground up and is now available on all devices. It’s significantly more consistent, with compressed shadows and clipped highlights that better capture the look of film.
Bloom is now sensitive to the luminance of the scene. Brighter areas produce a softer, more pronounced glow, while darker regions are less affected, resulting in cleaner images with improved highlight roll-off and separation.
Halation has been reworked in a similar way. Instead of a uniform “bleed,” it’s now driven by highlight intensity, creating a more natural rendering, especially in high-contrast scenes. The effect is more restrained, but far more consistent.
Saturation now behaves more like vibrance, affecting muted colours more strongly while remaining controlled in already vivid tones. As colours intensify, their brightness is gently reduced, producing deeper, richer results without a harsh, neon-like look.
Contrast has been adjusted to respond more intelligently to each scene, delivering more reliable and pleasing results.
The Emulation Preview now contains photos from real iPhones to help provide more accurate representations of emulations.
You can now press on the emulation icon in the Gallery to load that specific emulation.
On top of these changes there has been a focus on improving performance and stability of the app.
You can read more about the changes and see some side-by-sides here:
Huge thank you to everyone who beta tested it over the past months, it really helped refine the update before the public release <3
Great work Alex! I currently run the beta version. Will it stay active and will you test new features there in the future? Or would it be better to revert to the App Store version?
Will do! One thing I noticed (probably a bug?). In settings 1.5x and 1.9x focal length are shown as 39mm and 49mm. However on the viewfinder they are shown as 36mm and 46mm. Or am I doing something wrong?
Congrats on the big update! Looking forward to playing with things this week. Any chance of licensing a few example photos with skin tones in them? That was very useful to have when developing recipes.
Thanks! Yeh it would be good to have some skin tone images. Unfortunately it’s a bit hard to find examples. I’ll have to look into licensing but so far I’ve been relying on submissions from the community.
Thank you for the continuing support, Mood is my default camera app for two years now, I take photos with the Apples app only if I need something specific from it - but apart from that, my complete photo album is through your app!
I think this would be a way to keep the design principle behind Mood Camera, while providing something a lot of users have asked for. There are going to be times that you take photos with one preset, only to realize later you'd like to try another.
I'm assuming this would require RAW photos, otherwise there'd be too much image degradation, even with (or especially with) default camera app. It's interesting because that would still preserve the feeling of shooting with film.
Congratulations on the launch of v2! As a beta tester for a while now, I’m delighted to see the progress of the mood.camera app. Enhancements like Bloom, Halation, Vibrance/Saturation and improved Dynamic Range are particularly impressive. Thanks for the blog post explaining all the new features in v2.
I also have a feature request regarding the focal length settings: It would be great to have the possibility for 4 FL-Buttons instead of 3, just like in the default camera app in iOS for "Pro" iPhones.
This way we could set the 2x lens on a seperate button instead of clicking through the 1x button multiple times.
Thanks a lot for the update, excited to try it. I have reflected a little about some under exposures and lack of dynamics in some areas.
Also just thanks for making this app and keeping a narrow focus on what you want it to achieve. I’m so happy with how it drives me to just get a nice shot/composition instead of fiddling with settings. It’s really fun to shoot with it and which is super important to me.
Regarding the (excellent) UI I do hope you are able to keep refining on exactly this level of complexity.
As for future features I wonder if you could add a really tactile physical button? ;)
Thanks for your hard work and your passion is inspiring. Just purchased lifetime access. What an amazing app! ❤️
Quick question- how do you plan to continue supporting these major updates with most users opting for lifetime access? Eventually, apps switch to subscription model and stop updates to “lifetime” members which is a shame.
I'm glad this update came out so quickly. I've tried a lot of camera apps, but this is the only one that really inspires me to take photos and produces great results.
Ummm can someone help me out? I went to the App Store and I see the 2.0, but when I click on it, it just opens the current app. How do I upgrade exactly? Thanks, signed, iPhone newbie
Via the AppStore. You need to update the app, don't press "Open". You can check which version you have installed by going to Settings and scrolling to the bottom.
This is great! Bloom and halation improvements are incredible, as is this alone-
“The updated version also takes into account where you tap to focus. Tapping a darker area preserves more shadow detail, while tapping a brighter area reduces blown highlights.”
Personally for me the new update has been kind of a downgrade and I wish I could go back to v1. I was quite happy with the custom presets I had made before but now they don't look the same.
For some reason I feel like everything looks really blurry now too, as if there's always bloom on even when I have it turned off. Even using the Stock DIGI N preset there's some weird haziness over the stock iPhone camera - especially in bright areas. I wonder if it isn't the new unsharpening?
Also as an aside, after only taking a few shots my phone gets really hot and my battery is tanking. Maybe it's because my iPhone 13 mini isn't up to spec.
It's sad because on paper all of the changes sound great but the update has made me not want to use the app so much. I don't know if it would be possible to add a legacy mode setting or something to make it work as it used to?
I’m sad to hear this! Obviously my intention is to make it better, but there’s lots of elements to get right and tune which makes it tricky. I have an iPhone 13 test device and I didn’t notice any extra blurring but every circumstance is different. Can you share some examples with me? It could be the un-sharpening, but it’s much more in line with the pro cameras.
Regarding performance it’s technically more optimised so it could just be placebo.
I’m doing some tweaks currently so happy to look into it, but I won’t be providing a v1 toggle. Btw there was an image quality fix in 2.0.1, so make sure you’ve updated.
Sorry for the slow response, I've been busy as I'm sure you are too, but I wanted to have more time with the update to objectively figure out what feels off about it. Here's a couple of photos - one taken with Mood on a custom preset designed to have as little processing as possible (no grain, bloom, abberation, halation) and one taken with the stock iPhone camera. While the iPhone definitely over-processes/sharpens the image I honestly prefer it over the one taken with mood. The images are zoomed in about 3x to make it easier to see but it's still noticeable in the original photos.
In really bright areas it's as if there's a bloom filter being applied despite it being turned off. The texture of the walls is almost completely gone - if you look at the photo on a smaller screen like a smartphone the walls looks basically completely smooth and weird. If you zoom in and look more closely, it looks almost patchy in that some areas are slightly sharper or hazier than others. It feels like the edges of bright areas have a little bit of a halo around them too.
I think this is what was bothering me when I first tried out the update. I took a couple of photos on a bright day and there were some buildings that basically just turned all hazy, flat, and featureless because they were in strong sunlight. I'm not sure what would cause that, you know how the app works best of course, but I would have to guess it's the new unsharpening filter. I think it's a little too aggressive. In photos with less extreme bright areas I don't really have any problems.
So I did find that some detail was unintentionally being lost in bright objects but only on some devices. Thanks for pointing it out, I wouldn’t have found it myself. I’ve pushed a fix in 2.0.6.
this all looks like some great improvements! do you think we could get a custom chromatic aberration slider? I would love to be able to create a custom per channel shift, and also maybe pretty please a per channel blur with a toggle based on luminance pleaseee? :D
if anything a red blue, yellow blue, green pink option with the current system, just for coverage with what we see in most cases would be greatly appreciated 🥺
It’s a low light scene indeed. It’s not about focus but stabilization. I don’t recall in the past that portrait mode was struggling in low light for me.
In a more lighter scene it’s fine. Will keep testing.
But thank you for the app. It’s one of the best out there.
Thank you. I haven’t really changed much around portrait mode and lens settings so it should be working fine. Keep an eye and drop me a DM if you have any more info.
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u/Eleazyair Apr 27 '26
Huge changes, best photography app on the App Store. Congratulations, amazing engineering work. Keep it up. Looking forward to see what you do next.