It’s harder than ever to know what a photo actually is, and when ai and processing turn a photo into something else entirely. Google, Samsung, Apple, and others are making it easier than ever to touch up photos to your liking, combine several mediocre shots into one great one, or add or remove things — including yourself — from your photos. Many of these features are great, but is the resulting file actually a photo?
One of the best camera apps on the iPhone goes in the opposite direction. Halide is updated today with a new feature called “Process Zero,” which removes all artificial intelligence and processing from photography and attempts to turn your shots into something similar to what you would get from a digital camera from a decade ago.
Halide has long offered the ability to choose which processing pipeline you want to use, whether it's the iPhone's standard image processor or the high-end ProRAW system. It even offers a “Reduced” mode, which is similar to Apple's system, but a little less… intensive. (And in my experience, often much better.) Process Zero is, yes, another processing pipeline, but it's the processing pipeline without a processing pipeline.
Lux Optics, which makes Halide and the Kino video app, says that when you press the shutter button with Process Zero enabled, the app will capture a single 12-megapixel image as a RAW DNG file that you can use for editing later. (You can also open the new Image Lab in the app and reprocess an old RAW shot with Process Zero.) Because it does far less processing, it should also capture much faster, which could be helpful for fast-moving subjects.
Lux Optics compares the result of Process Zero to that of film photography: you might get some chromatic aberrations or grain on the sensor, but you'll also get photos that look more natural. The company's examples are a helpful reminder of exactly how much processing your phone does every time you take a photo, and how useful it can be. A photo of a New Mexico hillside looks sharper and brighter but somehow unnatural when fully processed, but Apple's processing also takes low-light images from being noisy and dull to actually looking pretty good. Most of the time, what you like best is a matter of taste.
Halide doesn’t want to stick a fork in the eye of image processing, but rather give you more options. Default image processing pipelines are increasingly aggressive, ai-driven, and obsessed with capturing a certain type of image. Process Zero strips all that away and captures the scene as naturally as possible. What you do with it, well, that’s up to you. But you’re starting with the photo as it actually is — or at least a lot closer to it.
