Halide’s new ‘Process Zero’ feature takes photos with no AI, no processing, no nothing

It’s trickier than ever to cognize what a photograph truly is — and erstwhile AI and processing crook a photograph into thing other entirely. Google, Samsung, Apple, and others are making it easier than ever to tweak photos to your liking, harvester respective mediocre shots into 1 large one, oregon add oregon region things — including yourself — in your photos. Many of these features are cool, but is the resulting record truly adjacent a photo?

One of the iPhone’s champion camera apps is going wholly the different way. Halide is getting an update contiguous with a caller diagnostic called “Process Zero,” which takes each of the AI and processing retired of photography and tries to crook your captures backmost into thing similar what you’d get retired of a integer camera from a decennary ago.

Halide has, for a while, offered the quality to prime which processing pipeline you privation to use, whether it’s the modular iPhone representation processor oregon the higher-end ProRAW system. It adjacent offers a “Reduced” mode, which is akin to Apple’s strategy but a small less... intense. (And successful my experience, often overmuch better.) Process Zero is, yes, different pipeline, but it’s the no-pipeline pipeline.

Lux Optics, which makes Halide and the video app Kino, says that erstwhile you deed the shutter fastener with Process Zero enabled, the app volition seizure a azygous 12-megapixel representation with a RAW DNG record you tin usage for editing later. (You tin besides unfastened the caller Image Lab successful the app and reprocess an aged RAW changeable with Process Zero.) Since it’s doing truthful overmuch little processing, it should besides seizure overmuch faster, which could beryllium utile for quick-moving subjects.

Lux Optics compares the Process Zero output to shooting connected film: you mightiness get colour aberration oregon sensor grain, but you’ll besides get shots that look much natural. The company’s examples are a utile reminder of precisely however overmuch processing your telephone is doing each clip you drawback a photograph — and however utile it tin be. A changeable of a New Mexico butte looks sharper and brighter but someway unnatural erstwhile afloat processed, but Apple’s processing besides takes low-light images from noisy and dull to really looking beauteous good. Most of the time, which you similar amended is simply a substance of taste.

Halide doesn’t privation to instrumentality a fork successful the oculus of representation processing but, rather, to springiness you much choice. The default representation pipelines are getting much and much aggressive, AI-powered, and obsessive astir capturing a definite benignant of image. Process Zero does distant with each of that and captures the country arsenic people arsenic possible. What you bash with it, well, that’s up to you. But you’re starting with the photograph arsenic it truly is — oregon astatine slightest overmuch person to it.