Halide’s Process Zero feature captures photos without AI processing

It’s more complicated than ever to know what a photo actually is – and when AI and processing transform a photo into something entirely different. Google, Samsung, Apple and others are making it easier than ever to adjust photos to your liking, combine several mediocre photos into one great one, or add or remove things – including yourself – in your photos. Many of these features are cool, but is the resulting file actually a photo?

One of the best iPhone camera apps is going completely in the opposite direction. Halide is getting an update today with a new feature called “Process Zero,” which takes all the AI ​​and processing out of photography and tries to turn your captures into something like what you’d get with a digital camera from a decade ago.

For some time now, Halide has offered the ability to choose which processing pipeline you want to use, whether it’s the iPhone’s default 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… intense. (And in my experience, often much better.) Process Zero is, yes, another pipeline, but it’s the pipeline without the 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 captures 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 photo with Process Zero.) Because it does much less processing, it should also capture much faster, which can be useful for fast-moving subjects.

Lux Optics compares Process Zero’s output to shooting on film: you might get color aberration or sensor grain, but you’ll also get photos that look more natural. The company’s examples are a useful reminder of how much processing your phone does every time you take a photo — and how useful that can be. A photo of a New Mexico hill looks sharper and brighter but somehow unnatural when fully processed, but Apple’s processing also transforms low-light images from 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 into image processing, but rather gives you more options. Standard imaging pipelines are becoming increasingly aggressive, AI-powered, and obsessive about capturing a certain type of image. Process Zero does away with all that and captures the scene in the most natural way possible. What you do with it, well, that’s up to you. But you’re starting with the photo as it really is – or at least much closer to it.