Halide’s Process Zero feature takes photos without AI processing

It’s harder than ever to know what a photo really is — and when AI and processing are turning a photo into something else entirely. Google, Samsung, Apple, and others are making it easier than ever to tweak photos to your liking, combine several mediocre shots 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 even a photo?

One of the iPhone’s best camera apps is going in a completely different 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 shots back into something similar to what you would have gotten with a digital camera a decade ago.

Halide has for some time now offered the ability to choose which processing pipeline you want to use, be it the iPhone’s standard image processor or the higher-end ProRAW system. It even offers a “reduced” mode that’s similar to Apple’s system but a little less… intensive. (And, in my experience, often much better.) Process Zero may be a different pipeline, but it’s the pipeline without the pipeline.

Lux Optics, maker of Halide and the video app Kino, says that when you press the shutter button with Process Zero enabled, the app will capture a single 12-megapixel image with 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 using Process Zero.) Because so much less processing is required, the app should also shoot much faster, which could be useful with fast-moving subjects.

Lux Optics compares Process Zero output to shooting on film: there may be some color variation or sensor grain, but the shots also 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 shot of a New Mexico mountain peak looks sharper and brighter, but somehow unnatural when fully processed, but Apple’s processing also ensures that low-light images no longer look noisy and dull, but actually look pretty good. Which you like better is mostly a matter of taste.

Halide doesn’t want to put a fork in the eye of image processing, but rather give you more choice. Standard image processing pipelines are becoming more aggressive, AI-driven, and obsessed with capturing a certain kind of image. Process Zero does away with all that and captures the scene as naturally as possible. What you do with it is up to you. But you start with the photo as it really is – or at least much closer to it.