If you’re tired of everything you use having AI in it and need a break, the Halide app for iPhone has a solution for you. It’s called Process Zero and it doesn’t use any AI or computational photography whatsoever.
The – small – team behind the popular photo app Halide for iPhone (unfortunately not available for Android), Spectre, the long exposure app for everyone (with an iPhone), and more recently the movie app Kino (for iPhone users) is also the team behind Orion, a free software that turns your iPad into an HDMI monitor. Now, without prior announcement, the team at Lux Optics is introducing Process Zero, which Ben Sandofsky calls “the anti-smart camera.”
Process Zero is built into Halide and, when activated, turns your iPhone into a classic camera. This means it skips the iPhone’s standard image processing system. It produces photos with more detail and allows the photographer greater control over lighting and exposure. For those who say “oh, another filter,” Ben Sandofsky notes, “This isn’t a photo filter—it actually develops photos at the raw sensor level.”
The app’s developers are aware that with modern smartphones, anyone can just press a button and take a beautiful picture, but are concerned about “swapping faces, inserting stock photos from the moon, or using AI to generate entirely new elements.” Just look at all the wizardry packed into the current Google Pixel 9 Pro smartphones, and if you want more control over your images, you’ll wish there was a way to turn all of that off… sometimes forever.
Process Zero is a single-shot process
As smartphones become increasingly “smarter” and many people seem to be happy with all the features they offer, Halide’s developers feared they would soon be out of business. But as Ben Sandofsky reveals, “As cameras have become more intelligent, Halide has only gained momentum,” because, as he adds, “users want more than the standard manual controls – they want control over algorithms.”
Halide’s developers don’t mind the algorithms used to do all the tricks, but believe that “leaving all the decisions to a machine means giving up some choices as an artist. A machine can only make objective decisions, but many technical decisions are inherently subjective.” So they added Process Zero to Halide.
Just like film, Process Zero photos come with (digital) negatives, which offers incredible control over changing exposure after the fact. The developers say that “just like film, they have graininess. They work best in daylight or mixed lighting, not nighttime shots. Thankfully, unlike film, you don’t need chemicals to develop these negatives. We give you a single dial.”
Modern smartphones take multiple exposures to create a final image, but Halide with Process Zero is a single-shot process, meaning if parts of your image aren’t properly exposed, there are no algorithms to correct that. Ben Sandofsky says that “our single-shot process is the only reliable way to give users complete control over shutter speed and other exposure settings,” but adds, “Be careful what you wish for. Turning off the algorithms has downsides.”
Process Zero + Image Lab
In fact, if you enable “Process Zero: The Anti-Intelligent Camera” you get a less saturated, softer, grainier and very different result than most phones. It’s also a 12MP file even if you have a 48MP resolution model, and you can’t use the 2x zoom as it depends on Apple’s algorithm. What you do get, however, is a true Bayer RAW file that can be used in any full-fledged RAW editor that reads DNG. The developers also introduce Process Zero Image Lab, a one-button solution for developing your negative, for those who want to do everything on their phone.
According to Ben Sandofsky, “Image Lab is not a full-fledged editor. It doesn’t include color or contrast controls. You can’t even crop! Consider Process Zero + Image Lab ‘step zero’ of your workflow.”
Halide with Process Zero is the first step in a journey that will take the app to its Mark III version, which the developers say will be the next generation of Halide. The app is available on a subscription model, and new memberships cost $19.99. If you’d rather have a perpetual license, use the one-time purchase option for $60. Although it’s technically a one-time purchase for Mark II, the developers decided to include Mark III as well.
So if you want your iPhone to work like a traditional camera, where light and shadow really matter, with all the challenges of analog cameras – that’s what photography is all about, after all – then Halide with Process Zero is the app for you. Android users need not apply, as this is an iPhone-only solution.
