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

It’s trickier than ever to know what a photo really is — and when AI and processing turn 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 really even a photo?

One of the iPhone’s best camera apps is going completely the other way. Halide is getting an update today with a new feature called “Process Zero,” which takes all of the AI and processing out of photography and tries to turn your captures back into something like what you’d get out of a digital camera from a decade ago.

Halide has, for a while, offered the ability to pick which processing pipeline you want to use, whether it’s the standard iPhone image processor or the higher-end ProRAW system. It even offers a “Reduced” mode, which is similar to Apple’s system but a little less… intense. (And in my experience, often much better.) Process Zero is, yes, another pipeline, but it’s the no-pipeline pipeline.

Lux Optics, which makes Halide and the video app Kino, says that when you hit the shutter button with Process Zero enabled, the app will capture a single 12-megapixel image with a RAW DNG file you can use for editing later. (You can also open the new Image Lab in the app and reprocess an old RAW shot with Process Zero.) Since it’s doing so much less processing, it should also capture much faster, which could be useful for quick-moving subjects.

Lux Optics compares the Process Zero output to shooting on film: you might get color aberration or sensor grain, but you’ll also get shots that look more natural. The company’s examples are a useful reminder of exactly how much processing your phone is doing every time you snap a photo — and how useful it can be. A shot of a New Mexico butte looks sharper and brighter but somehow unnatural when fully processed, but Apple’s processing also takes low-light images from noisy and dull to actually looking pretty good. Most of the time, which you like better is a matter of taste.

Halide doesn’t want to stick a fork in the eye of image processing but, rather, to give you more choice. The default image pipelines are getting more and more aggressive, AI-powered, and obsessive about capturing a certain kind of image. Process Zero does away with all of that and captures the scene as naturally as possible. What you do with it, well, that’s up to you. But you’re starting with the photo as it really is — or at least much closer to it.