Sick of AI-enhanced everything? ‘Process Zero’ might be just what your photos need

Halide goes very 'less is more' with its minimalist Process Zero raw mode.

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.