Field Guide
DepthGaze is a real-time visibility tool. It works above the water, looking down, on a phone you already own. This guide covers how to position yourself, when to use which mode, and how to get useful results in real-world water conditions.
First launch
The very first time you open DepthGaze (and again after any update to our legal text), a one-time "Important — Read Before Use" screen appears before the camera. It states plainly that the app is a visibility aid, not a depth or safety instrument, and it links to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy. Tapping Agree & Continue records your acceptance and opens the camera. You only see it once unless those documents change.
How to think about it
DepthGaze is a viewer, not a camera filter. The processed image appears live in the camera viewfinder, in real time, before you've taken anything. Treat it like a pair of polarised glasses with a colour-correction layer baked in: you point it where you want to look, and what you see is the enhanced view of the actual water in front of you.
Important: DepthGaze is not a depth gauge, sonar, or measurement tool. The Structure feature visualises relative depth as banded zones, but no number it shows is a real distance. Never make safety decisions (entering water, diving, anchoring, navigating) based on what the app shows. See our Terms of Service section 5 for the full disclaimer.
Best positioning
- Hold the phone above the water surface, looking down. The closer the lens is to the water, the better — but stay dry; the phone is not designed to be submerged.
- Tilt matters more than you'd think. Vertical (looking straight down) gives the cleanest view; angles up to about 30° from vertical are the "green zone" where the app is at its best.
- Steady the phone. The multi-frame stacking that reduces noise and ripple needs a few stable frames to settle. Resting your wrist on something rigid — a railing, a knee, a rock — helps.
- Watch the sun position. Direct sun-axis shots (sun behind the camera and the surface acting as a mirror) are the hardest condition. DeGlare mode helps; positioning yourself with the sun behind your back also helps.
Best conditions
- Calm water surface. Wind chop and ripples scatter light unpredictably. The flatter the surface, the deeper you can see.
- Mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Strong overhead sun penetrates water best. Dawn and dusk work in Low Light mode, but visibility is reduced.
- Lower turbidity is better. Clear salt and brackish water gives the best results. Heavily silted, peat-stained, or post-storm water limits how deep DepthGaze can usefully process.
- Polarised sunglasses help you, the user. They cut surface reflection on what your eyes see — DepthGaze is doing the same thing for the camera. The two together stack.
Picking a mode
Six specialist modes plus an auto-pick option (Smart Mode, in the Pro panel). If you're not sure, start with Standard and switch when you see a problem.
Standard
The default. Balanced colour correction for most conditions — daytime, salt or brackish water, moderate clarity. The mode most users live in 80% of the time.
DeGlare
For when surface specular reflection is washing out the scene. Bright midday sun on calm water, shooting toward the sun, mirror-like surface. DeGlare suppresses the white sheen without crushing other highlights.
Deep Boost
Maximum colour and contrast lift — the mode anglers reach for first. Best in clear water with good light when you want to read structure at the deeper end of visible range. Can over-saturate highlights in already-bright shallow shots.
Edge Reveal
Strips colour and tone, leaving only edges. The fastest way to know something is there when colour fails you — silhouettes of fish, weed lines, rock outlines. Useful in low-contrast water where Standard just looks flat.
Spectral
Shifts the visible spectrum to expose patterns the eye misses. The view looks alien — that's the point. Best for reading bottom texture, weed beds, and sand banding in colour-cast water (estuary, tannin-stained lake). Not for everyday use.
Low Light Beta
For dawn, dusk, and heavy overcast. Lifts the darkest tonal range while protecting highlights. Hold the phone steady — the algorithm is doing more work and motion blur shows up more easily. Does not work at full night with no ambient light. Beta: this mode works but we're still refining it — low-light scenes are the hardest to validate, so expect ongoing improvements.
Pro features
Smart Mode
Reads scene brightness, turbidity, and colour cast and picks the right mode automatically. Switches as conditions change. Useful when you're moving through varied water and don't want to fiddle with mode selection.
Structure
Visualises relative depth as warm banded zones, like a nautical chart of the bottom you're looking at. The technique reads the red channel — water absorbs red light first, so areas where less red reaches the camera fall in one band, areas with more red in another. Structure auto-anchors to the brightest visible water surface every few seconds, so it adapts on its own as you move between scenes — no calibration needed. Use it to read creek beds, rock bars, weed lines, sand bars, and channel cuts at a glance. Works less well over white-sand shallows (the bottom is reflective enough that the red signal stays strong) and in genuinely deep water past the limit of natural visibility (no red signal left to read). Bands are illustrative only — never a numeric depth measurement.
Spot Score
A live qualitative reading of how readable the current scene is to the app. Higher is clearer. Useful for finding the best window in changing light — point the phone at a few candidate spots and pick the one that scores highest.
Image Tools
Per-scene controls for when the defaults don't match your conditions:
- Auto-Calibrate Colour — locks the colour-correction strength based on the current scene's water properties.
- White Balance Calibration — tap to arm, then long-press a neutral surface (white wall, hand, concrete pier) to lock white balance from a known reference.
- Red Synthesis — for green-dominant water (algal blooms, late summer estuaries) where the red channel has been absorbed; reconstructs a plausible red signal so colour correction has something to work with.
- Focus Peaking — amber outlines on edges that are in sharp focus. Helps confirm the camera is focused on the subject before you tap to capture.
- Local Contrast — per-tile detail boost that lifts subtle texture in flat scenes (overcast water, smooth surface, midday). Off by default. Leave it off — or turn it off — at sunrise and sunset, in changing light, or with bright sun on water; in those conditions it can produce soft bright patches in the image. Turn it on when conditions are steady and you want a punchier look.
Multi-frame Smooth
Smooth is a separate setting (not a mode) that reduces noise by averaging multiple frames. Off by default; the higher strengths (Strong, Max) take more processing power and are most useful in dim, low-light, or noisy conditions where a single frame is too noisy. Strong and Max are Pro-tier features.
Saving photos and videos
- Photos save to your device's gallery as standard JPEG files.
- Videos save as standard MP4. Audio recording is optional via the microphone toggle in Settings (off by default).
- Large Photos (Settings → Capture) saves at full sensor resolution instead of the 1080p preview-equivalent. Slightly slower shutter, larger files.
- Save Location With Photos (Settings → Capture, off by default) writes a GPS tag to the saved photo's EXIF metadata so your gallery app can show the spot on a map. The precision (Precise or Approximate) is determined by your Android permission choice — Android 12 and later show a dual prompt when you grant location access, and DepthGaze honours whichever you pick. While the toggle is on, the app makes one network call per save (Google geocoder) to add a suburb-level place name to the photo's metadata.
Practical tips
- Tide timing matters. Slack water on a low tide gives the calmest surface and the lowest turbidity. The hour around low tide is often the best window of the day.
- Shadows help. A pier, a tree, the boat itself — anything that breaks the surface reflection lets you see deeper directly under the shaded patch.
- Slow down. Multi-frame Smooth and the auto-exposure adapter both need a few seconds to settle on a steady scene. Hold the phone still and wait two or three seconds for the view to clarify before evaluating.
- The screen brightness matters. If you're outdoors in full sun, set the screen brightness to maximum and turn on Outdoor Mode in Settings — the on-screen UI gets thicker, higher-contrast, and easier to read with polarised sunglasses on.
- Battery and heat. Sustained DepthGaze use is comparable to recording video — phone gets warm, battery drains faster than usual. Take breaks if the phone gets uncomfortable to hold; allow it to cool between sessions.
Limits — things DepthGaze can't do
- Submerged photography. The phone stays above the surface. Submerging changes optics dramatically and DepthGaze isn't designed or tested for it.
- True night. Low Light mode amplifies dim ambient light; it can't see in pure darkness.
- Heavily silted or post-storm water. If your eye can't see anything in the water, DepthGaze can't either. It enhances what's there — it doesn't conjure visibility from nothing.
- Numeric depth or distance. Structure visualises relative depth zones; it does not produce metres or feet, ever. Treat the bands as a chart, not a measurement.
- Replacing a fish finder or sonar. Different physics, different tool. DepthGaze sees the visible-light range; sonar sees acoustic echoes. They complement each other on a boat; neither replaces the other.
Want to learn more?
The full in-app help (Settings → Help) covers every screen and control in detail. This page is the high-level field reference. If you've spotted a use case we haven't documented or a tip you'd like included, mention it in the waitlist signup form.