DepthGaze

See into the water from a boat, jetty or shore

Android

iOS

Photography

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Hi Product Hunt 👋 I built DepthGaze because I kept standing on a jetty seeing nothing but sky reflected back at me. The physics is unglamorous and well understood. Two things wreck the view into water. First, specular reflection: the sun's white sheen sitting on the surface, which is why polarised sunglasses work at all. Second, wavelength-dependent absorption: water eats red light within the first couple of metres, which is why everything under the surface looks cyan-blue and flat. DepthGaze attacks both on the live viewfinder. It attenuates the specular component without crushing the rest of the highlights, and it reverses the absorption curve to pull colours back toward what they actually are. There's no machine learning in it. It's classical computer vision, running on the phone's GPU, on every frame. Nothing is uploaded, and there's no account. It's been on the App Store and Google Play since July, so this isn't a day-one launch. It's two months of real people pointing it at real water, and the app has changed because of them. It now holds up at the largest system text sizes on both iPhone and Android, because a camera app should work for people who need bigger text too. And we reworked Local Contrast after seeing how people actually use it on the water. What it is NOT, and I'd rather be blunt: it is not a depth gauge and it doesn't measure anything. It doesn't see through muddy water either. It enhances what light can already reach, so if you can't make out the bottom with your own eyes, DepthGaze can't either. The core app is free. Pro adds the specialised modes and tools as a one-time purchase. There's no subscription and there won't be one. I'm Chris, from Sorte, a small app studio in Australia. Keen to hear where it falls over, especially from anyone who works on the water for a living. 🎣