Kino 1.4 adds Apple Log 2 support — and explains why it matters

Lux's Kino 1.4 adds Apple Log 2 support — and co-founder Ben Sandofsky has written the clearest explanation of Log video you'll read this year.

Lux, the developer behind the popular Halide and Kino iPhone camera apps, has released Kino 1.4, adding support for Apple Log 2 — the enhanced log video format that launched alongside the iPhone 17 Pro. To mark the update, co-founder Ben Sandofsky has published a detailed explainer on what Log video actually is, why Apple Log 2 is an improvement over its predecessor, and why it took a while to land in the app.

What is Log video, anyway?

Sandofsky explains everything in an engaging video which you can watch at the foot of this page. Skip to the end or read on...

Because he starts at the beginning, we will too. If you already know everything about Log, head on down to the next section. If, however, you want to know what Log is (possibly the worst cover version of a Foreigner song ever recorded), for the uninitiated Log video sits somewhere between a fully processed video file and a raw capture.

A standard MP4 bakes in the camera's creative decisions — contrast, colour rendition, highlight handling — at the point of recording, discarding a lot of data in the process to keep file sizes manageable. Raw video preserves far more of that data but generates enormous files that are slow to read and write, making it impractical for sustained video capture.

Log is the practical middle ground. It retains most of the dynamic range and colour information from the sensor, but encodes it efficiently by exploiting a quirk of human vision: we don't perceive brightness linearly. Log formats apply a logarithmic curve to the image data before writing it to file, allocating more bits to the shadow regions where our eyes are most sensitive, and fewer to the highlights where we're less discriminating.

The result is a flat, desaturated-looking image that needs a LUT or colour grade applied in post. But it's also one that gives a colorist far more to work with than a finished MP4.

Apple Log vs Apple Log 2

Apple Log arrived with the iPhone 15 Pro in 2023 and brought genuine log capture to a mainstream smartphone for the first time. It was a meaningful step forward, but according to Sandofsky it had a notable flaw: rather than defining a color gamut tailored to Apple's own sensors, it borrowed the color space from the Rec. 2020 HDR television standard. That's a wider gamut than an iPhone sensor can actually produce, which meant some of the available bits were being allocated to colors the camera couldn't capture in the first place.

Apple Log 2, which debuted with the iPhone 17 Pro in September 2025, fixes this by defining a gamut matched specifically to Apple's sensor characteristics. It also extends coverage into deep blues and purples — an area where the original format could struggle with neon lighting, colored stage lighting, and similar high-saturation scenarios. In everyday shooting the difference is subtle, but for anyone working in controlled lighting environments or grading for a specific look, the additional headroom is genuinely useful.

Why it took time to add

That all sounds great, so why did it take six months to implement? Lux's explanation for the delay is candid: the team has been largely focused on Halide Mark III, its flagship photography app, which is currently in technical preview. Apple Log 2 isn't simply a matter of toggling a new setting — the app's internals needed to be expanded to handle the wider colour range, and logic had to be added to detect which version of Apple Log a given clip was encoded in.

The update also reflects a longer-term architectural goal. Lux intends to unify the rendering pipeline between Kino and Halide, given that Log video and raw photography share much of the same underlying logic. Both apps now use the Apple Gamut colour space for image processing (the same one that underpins Apple Log 2) meaning improvements made for one will increasingly carry over to the other.

Pricing and availability 

Kino 1.4 (Kino - Pro Video Camera to distinguish it from all the other Kino apps out there) is available now on the App Store for $9.99.