Tired of Overprocessed Photos? This App Has the Solution

Halide Process Zero hero Credit: Lux Optics
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Although there’s little doubt that today’s smartphone cameras produce great-looking results, many have observed that these come at the expense of accuracy. Whether that’s Samsung’s fake moon shots or Apple’s overly bright night photos, computational photography sometimes goes too far.

While you may not care if capturing great photos is more important than accuracy, the iPhone’s results can still be slightly off-putting sometimes. For instance, shots I take during late evening walks may show more detail, but it still feels odd when they don’t match the actual dusk light, making them feel taken an hour or two earlier than they actually were.

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The good news for photographic purists is that there’s another option, thanks to Halide. This is already one of the most full-featured and versatile camera apps on the App Store; the developers are remarkably quick to support all the latest iPhone features and frequently expand upon what’s already there to offer even more photographic control. They also have an excellent understanding of photography and the iPhone’s camera technology and often share deep dives into it to explain how it all works.

This week, Halide introduced another useful feature for iPhone users who want to experience a more true-to-life look in their photos.

Dubbed “Process Zero,” this photo feature eschews the computational photography and AI features of nearly every other modern smartphone camera app, bypassing the processing entirely to deliver exactly what the sensor captured — raw and uncut.

With its wealth of advanced photography settings, Halide has allowed users to choose between different processing pipelines for a while, including the standard iPhone version, the higher-end ProRAW system, and a reduced mode that dials back the image processing to a more tolerable level. However, “Process Zero” takes this a step further, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

Writing in the Lux blog, Halide developer and co-founder Ben Sandofsky shares how Process Zero “turns your iPhone into a classic camera.”

Process Zero is a new mode in Halide that skips over the standard iPhone image processing system. It produces photos with more detail and allows the photographer greater control over lighting and exposure. This is not a photo filter— it really develops photos at the raw, sensor-data level.Ben Sandofsky

With all of the AI processing turned entirely off, serious photographers can enjoy playing with manual controls for things like exposure and see the direct results. Plus, since Process Zero still produces raw digital negatives, many of these things can be tweaked after the fact, just like working in a digital darkroom.

To summarize: Process Zero gives you a single 12-megapixel shot. It will be less saturated, softer, grainier, and quite different than what you see from most phones. Each shot includes a true Bayer RAW file, if you want to use it in a full-fledged RAW editor, but we designed Halide so you don’t need one.Ben Sandofsky

While Sandofsky calls the iPhone “downright conservative” compared to most other smartphones, it still hinders serious photographers who want accurate results and complete control. That’s not to say most casual users won’t get great results most of the time, but there’s always that one shot that doesn’t come out quite right.

Halide’s developers once feared that more sophisticated algorithms like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion would render their app obsolete, but they’ve been pleased to discover that not only do folks want manual controls over traditional photo settings like exposure, shutter speed, aperture, and white balance, but they also want control over the algorithms used for post-processing. A single toggle that turns off “Smartest Processing” has turned out to be one of Halide’s most popular features.

The tricky part about computational photography algorithms is that they no longer take a single shot and try to apply AI filters to it. Every time you press the button in your iPhone’s built-in Camera app, it takes a dozen or more shots at different shutter speeds and then combines them to produce the best-looking results. By contrast, Halide’s Process Zero only takes one shot and doesn’t try to do anything clever to fix it. What you see is what you get.

Process Zero isn’t for everyone; it has a few tradeoffs. Apple relies on its algorithms to clean quite a few things up. You won’t get nearly the same dynamic range since it’s a pure sensor shot, and lower-light shots will get noisier and may need some manual cleanup (although Sandofsky adds that the newer iPhones have “incredible” low-light performance — it’s nowhere close to night mode, but it’s surprisingly good).

Some iPhone features are “deeply integrated with algorithms.” For instance, Process Zero can’t capture full 48-megapixel photos or the virtual 2x telephoto shots taken from the cropped center pixels on the 48MP sensor.

As cameras make more and more creative choices on your behalf, we think the photographer should retain the agency to cast aside algorithms and do their own thing. Just as a photographer expresses themselves in their choice of lens, exposure settings, and film stock, Halide now lets you choose the process that works for you.Ben Sandofsky

Fortunately, Process Zero is entirely optional, and Halide makes it really easy to switch between processing modes with just a single tap. Whether to use Process Zero or another image pipeline will depend on the situation, but it’s another valuable tool for serious artistic photographers to have at their disposal.



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