Cameratweak HD improves your jailbroken iPad’s camera
Cameratweak is a jailbreak tweak that has been out for quite a while for the iPhone, and now it’s also available in an HD version for the iPad. What it does is augment the stock camera app, adding several new and very useful features.
First off, the photo camera. It does something that I think every camera app should do: it splits the focus and exposure controls. Normally, you tap to focus, and it will both focus and set automatic exposure based on that point. With Cameratweak, that’s still how it works by default, but you can grab and drag an exposure indicator out from inside the focus box, placing it wherever you want. This allows you to set focus and exposure separately, which can make a big difference in many cases. A related new feature is the ability to lock the white balance.
The tweak also adds time lapse, timer, and burst modes to the camera. The functionality is in the names on those, and they’re all very useful. I especially like the burst mode, allowing you to take a bunch of photos very quickly, which can be very useful for actions shots and similar situations.
Then you have a set of composition overlays, allowing you to place various patterns on top of the screen. You have a normal grid, golden ration, tri section, and and a square. These are meant to help you compose the image better. Finally, the photo camera not has a zoom slider. Not overly useful in my opinion, since we’re talking about digital zoom here, but at least it makes more sense than the stock way of zooming.
On the video side, you also have several features. You have separate focus and exposure controls here too, as well as white balance lock. You also have the ability to manually set the video resolution, as well as the frame rate. Finally, you can take snapshots while filming.
I think this is a pretty neat feature set for only $0.99, and having these features added to the stock camera app is a major advantage over third party camera apps, since iOS doesn’t have a way to set default apps to use for various things. Also, even though the iPad isn’t really what most would use for taking photos, I’m very grateful that an iPad version of this was even made, as I find having a camera on my iPad mini quite useful.
As you can expect, Cameratweak HD is available in the Cydia store.
