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Sick of AI-enhanced everything? 'Process Zero' might be just what your photos need
- Halide’s new Process Zero mode aims to give iPhone users photos untouched by Apple’s processing algorithms.
- Process Zero works on a single exposure, and reveals all the grain and detail that might otherwise be lost.
- The bare-bones system leaves the photographer fully in control of the quality they get — for better or worse.
It almost feels like an inevitability — any time a new technology becomes sufficiently popular, you’re going to start seeing pushback against it. That’s not necessarily people just being stubborn for the sake of it, either, and we’ve seen some clear missteps with the recent trend of companies to make everything, everywhere about AI — remember how well that worked for Google Search results? In an era where it seems like everyone is using AI and machine learning to make the pictures we take look “better,” at least one company has finally had enough.
Lux is the team behind Halide, a popular photography app for iOS. With the release of version 2.15 of the app, it’s introducing a mode it calls “Process Zero” that aims to render photos as your camera captured them, with absolute minimal processing and nothing even coming close to computational photography enhancement.
Process Zero starts with the raw data from the camera sensor, and gives you just a single control to adjust, which effectively functions as exposure time during film development would. There’s no HDR combining multiple exposures and helping you compensate for complicated scene lighting. There’s no noise reduction to smooth things out, either, and all those photons that randomly hit one pixel over another are going to result in a noticeable grain look. For the developers at Lux, that’s exactly the alternative to Apple’s heavy processing that they wanted.
That said, they’re also clear about the sacrifices you make with Process Zero, and a lot of the “magic” we’ve come to expect from smartphone photography goes right out the window when you’re only taking a single, unprocessed shot. Shooting high-quality pics at night is likely to be difficult — but for a certain kind of photographer, that’s absolutely part of the charm. If you don’t get things right the first time, the app saves your digital negative and the included Image Lab lets you further tweak development prior to exporting.
There are also some technical limitations that impact Process Zero, and going out of the way to avoid Apple processing results in a maximum image resolution of 12MP. But considering some of the results we’re seeing here, that doesn’t seem to be hurting Halide any.
Finally, Lux shares that this is all just its first step towards a major new Mark III release of Halide — and a few more Mark III features like Process Zero could trickle out in the time before the app’s ready to make that leap.