LibreCam vs AstroPile

LibreCam is a manual RAW camera for iPhone that captures what the sensor sees, and nothing more. Shoot true Bayer DNGs, single-frame HEIFs, or both at once, with no fusion, no aggressive processing, no account, no tracking and no subscription. The stock camera applies Smart HDR, Deep Fusion, noise reduction, sharpening and tone mapping to every shot. LibreCam turns off everything that can be turned off, and is honest about what cannot. DNG: the true Bayer sensor readout. No fusion, no noise reduction, no tone mapping, no distortion correction. One frame, exactly as the sensor read it. HEIF: a single frame developed by the hardware ISP. No fusion, no HDR, no semantic tricks. LOOKS: nine fixed color recipes, applied to the HEIF as you shoot. Build your own with dials in the Look Editor, and import or export standard .cube files. The DNG is never touched. PRINT: share a shot as a framed print. Ink or paper matte, and a label with the exposure, camera, date, place and your name, set like a museum caption. A copy made for sharing; the photo itself stays as it is. LIBRECAM PRO: one purchase, no subscription, and only two things are paid: the Look Editor for your own recipes, and the Apple Watch remote. Everything else is free. FEATURES - Every physical lens on your iPhone. No digital zoom, ever. - The front camera too, with mirrored or true-to-sensor selfies. - An Apple Watch remote: shutter, readouts, framing assist. (LibreCam Pro) - Manual focus, shutter, ISO, exposure bias and white balance. Everything is automatic until touched. - Focus peaking: the sharpest edges glow amber while you focus. - Level: a horizon line that reports the tilt your photo will actually have. It never straightens anything. - Histogram: all three channels live on the glass, with marks for which one is clipping, and at which end. - Nine looks free; build your own with LibreCam Pro. - Print: a framed, captioned copy of any shot, ready to share. - Frame lock: 9:16, 2:3, 4:5 or 1:1 on the glass, the developed copy cropped to match. The DNG keeps the full frame. - Flash: off, auto or on. On auto, the bolt turns amber only when the scene will fire it. - Aperture on iPhone 18 Pro: f/1.48 to f/4 on the 24 mm lens in thirds of a stop, one tap each. Automatic until touched. - Shutter priority and ISO priority metering. - Camera Control on iPhone 16 and later: focus, aperture, shutter, ISO, EV, white balance and the lenses, right on the button. - Hardware shutter on the volume buttons. No shutter sound. - Add-only Photos access. No account, no tracking. - Optional location tagging, written into the photo on your device. A camera, not a computer.

One phone photo of the night sky is mostly noise. Stack a dozen shots of the same scene and the noise averages away while the faint detail stays — that is what astrophotographers call stacking. AstroPile does it on your phone, entirely offline: no network permission, and no photo is ever uploaded. WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT IS THAT IT TELLS YOU WHAT HAPPENED. Most stackers hand you one picture. If it came out smeared, you have no idea which frame ruined it. AstroPile gives every frame a report card: • how many stars were detected • how many matched the reference frame • the alignment residual, in pixels • a 0–100 quality score Frames that could not be aligned say why — too few stars, too bright, no matching star pattern, residual too large, different pixel size — plus one line on what to change. Untick it and stack again. HOW IT WORKS 1. Pick two or more shots of the same scene 2. Choose the reference frame (the first one by default) 3. Start stacking — you can stop at any point 4. Drag black point, brightness and saturation; the preview updates live 5. Save to Photos or Share — the export is full resolution HOW IT ALIGNS Not by corner detection: stars look identical to each other, so feature matching does not work on a star field. AstroPile matches asterisms — the shape of the triangle each star forms with its neighbours — then uses RANSAC to throw out the false pairs and solves for shift, rotation and scale. This is the standard approach for registering star fields with no WCS information. DETAILS THAT MATTER • Reads EXIF on import and flags frames shot with different exposure settings than the rest • Frames with a different pixel size are marked in red instead of quietly ruining the stack • Combines in horizontal bands, so even a few dozen full-resolution frames will not exhaust memory • Scratch files are deleted when the run ends, and swept again on the next launch FREE Up to 6 frames per stack, mean stacking, full-resolution export, and the full per-frame alignment report. No ads, no watermark, no account. ASTROPILE PRO (a one-time purchase, not a subscription) • Up to 32 frames per stack • Median stacking — aircraft, satellite trails and hot pixels drop out on their own • Remembers your stacking mode and working resolution PRIVACY The app requests no network permission and contains no analytics or advertising SDK. Photos are read and processed on this device only; the finished picture leaves the app only when you save or share it. CREDITS Star-field registration follows astroalign (MIT, © 2016 Martin Beroiz), frame stacking follows OpenSkyStacker (MIT, © 2017 Benjamin Schubert), and the star-sharpness check follows the published design of astra_lite (MIT, © 2023 Denis Artyomov). This app is an independent Dart implementation and copies none of their code.