Photo enthusiasts who shoot with the iPhone at times want pictures to be devoid of all automatic processing. It allows more control in the post-processing stages. Award-winning iPhone camera app Halide has a new image processing pipeline called Process Zero, which uses “zero AI, no computational photography whatsoever — offering photographers a counter to the increasingly AI-heavy processing and tooling on smartphones”, according to app developer Lux Optics.

Process Zero gives you as raw an image as possible. It uses a fast process based on a single exposure RAW file, which is a 12MP image plus a RAW DNG file for additional editing.

“Process Zero is fast, capturing at anywhere from 10 — 25× the speed of a ProRAW capture. Much like film, it can feature natural sensor grain, slight colour aberrations, and is much less usable in low light. This makes for its natural look, like taking photos on an older classic digital camera,” mention the developers.

We are living in a time when AI processing has become the talk of the town. “What’s a photo?” — that’s a question we ask in 2024 and the answer is not easy. If you remove unwanted objects from an image does that image remain a photo? What if you use Pixel 9’s new capability to add someone to a shot who wasn’t actually in it?

The iOS app makes your phone a”classic camera”. You set your ISO and shutter speed (or let the app do it automatically), press the capture button, and that’s it. No processing is involved.

According to a blog post: “Noise reduction is just one of those things that gives iPhone photos their look. Because Halide was built on top of the system processing, we had to come along for the ride.”

Halide Process Zero currently can’t capture 48MP Raws on the iPhone 15 Pro. In India, Halide Mark II comes for Rs 1,099 per year after a seven-day trial period. You can also buy the app outright.