Manual

Taking a photograph

The camera button opens the viewfinder, and the viewfinder already shows the finished photograph. Whatever the four pads are set to is applied live, so what you frame is what gets saved. There is no “apply afterwards” step.

• —Shutter · takes the picture and stays in the viewfinder, so a series is never interrupted
• —Volume buttons · work as a shutter as well, which is steadier on a tripod
• —Thumbnail · opens the last shot in the editor
• —Magnifier · doubles the centre of the viewfinder so you can check focus
• —Timer · waits three or ten seconds; tap the shutter again to cancel a running countdown
• —Eye, or a tap on the picture · hides everything laid over the image for a clean view

Two details about the magnifier are worth knowing. It affects the display only — never the photograph, which is always captured at full width. And the grain stays the size it will be in the finished file, so the magnifier shows you real texture rather than a magnified version of it.

At the moment of capture the viewfinder flashes briefly. That is the only flash MonoVibe has: the lamp on the back stays off, permanently and by design, because this is a camera for the light that is already there. Nothing vibrates at the moment of exposure either — the shake would land exactly where it hurts. The short pulse you feel afterwards means the picture is in your library.

Everything you shoot is saved automatically. You do not have to export it, and the viewfinder does not block the screen from staying awake while you work.

Developing the picture

Four square pads, each controlling two things at once under one finger. Drag, and the picture answers immediately.

• —Tone · flat to hard across, dark to bright up and down
• —Colour · red to green across, blue to yellow up and down — the classic optical lens filters
• —Texture · soft to sharp across, smooth to grainy up and down
• —Frame · thin to wide across, black to white up and down

The Colour pad is the one people misread. The photograph is already black and white, so the pad does not add colour — it decides which colours of the original scene turn bright and which turn dark, exactly as a glass filter in front of the lens once did. Red makes skin smooth and skies dramatic; green does the opposite to both.

On the Frame pad the far left of the width axis means no frame at all, rather than a very thin one. That is why a picture with no border still has a position on that pad.

• —Double-tap a pad · sends that pad alone back to neutral
• —Eye · shows the untouched original while you hold the thought
• —Step back · undoes one movement, not one value — a whole drag is a single step
• —Hold Open · resets everything, including crop and zoom

Looks

A look is the eight values of the four pads, saved together. It is a development instruction, not a picture and not a filter: it describes how a photograph is processed, not what it ends up looking like. The same look on a different photograph gives a different result, and that is the point.

This explains the behaviour people notice first: your look stays when you load the next photograph. It is not forgotten between pictures, because you are supposed to be able to shoot or edit a whole series in one look without setting it up again each time.

• —An empty slot · tap it to save what you have set right now
• —A filled slot · tap it to apply that look
• —Hold a filled slot · overwrites it with your current settings
• —The arrow · returns to neutral — the look only; your crop and zoom stay as they are

Three of the five slots arrive filled, so the app is useful before you have made anything of your own. They are ordinary slots after that: overwrite them whenever you like, nothing is protected.

Two things a look deliberately does not contain: the grain character, which belongs to the app rather than to any single look, and the crop, which belongs to the photograph. Both are explained below.

Grain

Grain is two separate things in MonoVibe, and keeping them apart explains a question that otherwise looks like a bug.

• —Grain strength · the up-and-down axis of the Texture pad — how much. Part of every look
• —Grain character · in Settings — what kind. Applies to every look, like the film in the camera

So a look you saved under one character will look different after you switch the character. That is not the look being lost; it is the same development on a different film. The three characters are Classic, MonoVibe’s original grain; Push, coarse and clumpy like pushed high-ISO material; and Fine, tight and sharp like a classic 400-speed texture.

The grain itself moves from frame to frame the way real film does, rather than sitting on the picture as a fixed pattern. It is scaled to the frame, so the grain in the viewfinder is the grain in the saved file at the same relative size.

Framing and crop

Crop and zoom belong to the photograph in front of you, not to your look. Load a different picture and they start fresh, while the look carries over. If they travelled along, a frame you chose for one image would be imposed on the next one.

• —Pinch · zooms into the picture; drag to reposition it
• —Format button · cycles the viewport: the original proportions, upright, square
• —Pull an edge or a corner · crops freely to any proportion
• —Format button again · with a free crop active, returns to the original proportions

The frame from the fourth pad is drawn around whatever you have cropped to, so the two work together rather than fighting: crop first, then set the border.

Saving and sharing

Pictures taken in the viewfinder are saved by themselves. Pictures you opened from your library are exported with the share button when you are finished with them.

Either way the file is rendered from the original at its full resolution — not from the smaller version used to keep the screen responsive while you drag. What you give away is the full-size photograph, with the data it came with: date, exposure, focal length.

Why the app behaves this way

A few things are missing on purpose, and it is fairer to say so than to let you search for them.

• —No flash · the lamp never comes on. This is a camera for available light, and there is no switch for it
• —No filter list · there are four pads instead. Anything you can reach, you can also save as a look
• —No vibration at the moment of exposure · a camera should be still exactly then
• —No account, no cloud, no tracking · everything is processed on the device and nothing is uploaded

The last one has a consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing leaves the device, nothing can be recovered from anywhere else either. Your looks and your photographs live on your phone.