If you’re the owner of an iPhone and just want the images you capture with the powerful camera on your phone to look natural, this app is for you.
Halide has released a new and significant update today that opens a new image-processing pipeline for stripping away all typical iPhone computational photography through AI or other mechanisms.
The new pipeline inside the Halide app is called Process Zero and its emphasis is on zero artificial intelligence and zero computational photography in the images it helps you process.
The company behind the Halide app, Lux Optics, states that Process Zero, “photographers a counter to the increasingly AI-heavy processing and tooling on smartphones.”
The company emphasizes that the Process Zero app cuts away “all standard image processing altogether.”
Well, that’s refreshing. In today’s era of heavy AI processing and generative “editing” of camera and phone photos, the camera systems used in smartphones like the iPhone are especially notable for their use of computational reprocessing, much of it by default.
Halide with its Process Zero workflow counters this trend, even if it’s only available for the iPhone.
The ironic part of computational photography in many modern smartphones is that they often actually decrease the quality of photos from what it would more naturally be.
We’ve even covered this tendency before, in the case of the iPhone 14.
Halide offers its users a range of manual controls for processing the images they take and its “anti-intelligent” camera adds to this toolkit.
With Process Zero, users of the app can edit the RAW photos they capture with their iPhone in a more user-friendly way. The app offers three different settings for taking and editing RAW photos.
The first of these is ProRAW, which lets you apply Apple’s custom RAW format with moderate image modifications to a photo.
The second option is Apple Processed, which applies the full range of computational photography tricks that you’d get from shooting with Apple’s own default camera app.
The third option is Process Zero, which strips away all the AI junk and computational tricks, leaving your RAW photo in its most visually natural state. You can then apply your preferred extra editing to this photo.
Left-side image captured with automatic settings and ProRAW. Right image uses Native RAW with Manual Settings. Source: Lux
The editing you apply might include something as simple as a quick brightness and contrast change, or a tweak to color settings.
Process Zero via Halide then saves your edited photo as a JPEG file with edits included, which you can export for further editing in apps like Lightroom, Instagram, or whatever image editing tool you prefer.
The key idea behind all of the above is that Halide works to let users see and edit their images without all the computational, algorithmic, and AI bells and whistles that the iPhone applies to them.
For example, a user shooting photos through Process Zero can take a photo that’s just one single photo and not the multi-photo composition that the iPhone’s native Apple camera creates when taking a shot.
The resulting image might be noisier or darker, but it can also offer sharper detail and a much more realistic look, which many smartphone photographers would appreciate.
Left image captured and processed with Apple’s ProRAW format. Right image captured with Halide Process Zero. Source: Lux
Halide’s own image processing uses a fast process based on editing a single RAW Process Zero 12MP image plus a RAW DNG file for flexible editing.
According to Lux Optics, its editing process is extremely lean too, being able to capture images at between 10 and 25 times the speed of ProRAW via your iPhone’s camera app.
According to the company,
“Much like film, it can feature natural sensor grain, slight color aberrations, and is much less usable in low light. This makes for its natural look, like taking photos on an older classic digital camera,”
A very important detail you should keep in mind about Process Zero is that it’s not placing a whole new filter or data add-on to your images.
Instead, it takes the unique step of doing all the opposite: completely eliminating the entire chain of typical AI, algorithmic and computational photo processing that your iPhone wants to apply to your photos.
Essentially, Process Zero develops raw photographic data right from your phone’s sensor and shows it to you.
In the company’s own words,
“Many of Apple’s groundbreaking steps in image processing benefit users tremendously, and with Process Zero, you can see exactly what it does when you take it all away,”
Lux Optics adds, “Just like film, Process Zero photos come with (digital) negatives, affording incredible control to change exposure after the fact. Much like film, it has grain,”
However, the developer elaborates,
“It works best in daytime or mixed lighting, rather than nighttime shots. Thankfully, unlike film, you don’t need any chemicals to develop these negatives. We give you one dial.”
Lux Optics’ own blog post on its Process Zero update goes into detail about how the app handles image editing and offers a bunch of photos of the photographic results. It’s worth taking a look at.
Honestly, for many of the images showcased by Halide in its blog post for the app, the Process Zero version does indeed look more natural and often better detailed. This effect is magnified by it being compared side by side with its iPhone-processed variant.
Considering how pervasive, and sometimes even cloying, AI-driven computational photography has started to become, seeing more natural photos without a pile of filters stacked on top of them is a refreshing thing.
Halide isn’t a free app, in case you were hoping for that. It is pretty cheap though at $12 for an annual subscription to Halide 2.15. As of August 21, this price will increase to $19.99.
The app does however offer a one-week free trial run for new users.
Image credit: Halide/Lux Optics
