A camera that already knows the look.
xMosaique is an iPhone camera app built around one idea: that the look belongs in the viewfinder, not in an editor afterwards.
Why it exists
Every phone camera hands you a photo the manufacturer decided was correct, and every film look you actually want gets added afterwards — in an editor, on a different screen, hours later. By then the framing is fixed, the exposure is fixed, and you are grading around decisions you made blind.
xMosaique moves the look to the front. The preset renders on the live camera feed, so you compose and expose for the finished photograph instead of guessing at it. The shot you frame is the shot you keep.
How it works, briefly
A preset is parsed out of its .xmp file and applied in full: white balance and exposure, tone and curves, HSL, colour grading, then the spatial work — clarity, dehaze, sharpening, masks, vignette and grain.
The viewfinder runs that as a lookup table on the GPU, which is what lets it keep up with a live camera feed; the capture re-runs the same pipeline in floating point over the whole uncompressed sensor frame. One implementation, written in Rust, drives both — which is why the preview and the photograph agree.
What it does not do
There is no account, no sign-up, no analytics, no advertising and no server. Photographs are captured, processed and written to your library entirely on the device — nothing is uploaded, and there is nothing on the other end to upload it to.
Applying a look is not destructive either. A clean copy of the original frame is saved alongside the processed one by default, and RAW capture keeps the untouched sensor data in its own DNG.
Status
Version 1.3.2 is on the App Store now, for iPhone on iOS 18.0 or later. An Android version is in development. The app is free.