Senko

Main App Area
Settings
Photo lab Editing area
Fun Icons I created
Main app icon, but look in the app under custom icons, so many to choose from <3

Inspiration

I love taking photos, I wanted to build a photo application that allowed me to have live custom color graded filters, (e.g. custom Mono filtering or film grain type stuff) as well as natural gestures along side a very simple and intuitive UI - the unique portion about this app is that the filtering, noise, and saturation is dynamically driven by location and light intensity.

I also wanted pro level features like RAW processing with the simplest interface possible.

What it does

The application takes photos using a custom RAW processing pipeline similar to how Halide's does their process ZERO, the app also takes JPEGs and HEIC as well as ProRAW. You can apply color graded effects to non RAW files and I wanted I wanted to easily edit photos in post in app.

Filters, saturation and noise grain of the processed pipeline (JPEG/HEIC) are driven dynamically off the censors in your phone (location data, movement, and light sensor data)

You can edit the photos within photo lab from the individual images, and you can do a bunch more white taking the photo like choose white balance, zoom levels, adjust exposure etc very intuitively. e.g. adjusting exposure is done simply by dragging up and down anywhere. You can also take photos in different aspect ratios, use a grid for photo taking.

Theres a lot of custom features and views built out for this. (photo feed, support pipeline, members area (stickers), etc.

How we built it

I build the entire application using AI, I've been a cursor junkie for about a year now. I've learned a lot, I used AI to help me code as well as my own understanding of swift/code in general (im a web dev/designer).

It uses SwiftUI and I mostly built out custom components for sheets, buttons, and different views.

Challenges we ran into

Hard challenges were getting the live filtering up and running initially, getting the custom RAW processing pipeline perfected ( had to create my own algo to demosaicing. Also fixing performance issues and getting the feed working well was a challenge too, still a little buggy but functions as one would expect.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Im really proud of the entire application, its a pretty full featured app with about 90% of the work done in the last month. the RAW processing pipeline was my favorite last addition i made after seeing Halide launch it.

I think it makes for a unique feature actually, currently the only camera applications that offer this are Halide and zerocam. ZERO AI in the photo processing pipeline while everyone drives inthe aI direction the photos taken in SENKO are the most natural to the censors possible with minimal processing done to get a good photo printed.

What we learned

AI is such a powerful tool you can legitimately build many businesses from utilizing it in the right ways. I don't think folks realize the power yet.

If you have some vision and understand the code you can build alot quickly. As a Designer/web designer this is my first production application for mobile, it feels good, and the receptions i've received in Testflight has been nice.

Over 200+ testers :) <3

What's next for Senko

I want to continue building out the feature set, simplifying the experience and iterating on the app, to me I wanted to add more custom color graded filters and even have them apply in different ways. I'll keep building this out.

I currently have a versions 1.1 building locally and have already added more filters, and a new improved processing pipeline.

feels good to in prod.