“Anti-intelligent” photo app turns your iPhone into a classic camera

While iPhone cameras have become increasingly more powerful over the past decade, growing from one to three lenses, there are some who find the on-device processing a bit intrusive. It’s hard to avoid the computational editing that Apple automatically implements, such as brightening – but one of the most popular iPhone photo apps wants to strip things back to basics.

Described as “the anti-intelligent” camera, Halide’s new Process Zero uses no AI or computational photography to capture images. In short, it turns your iPhone into a simple camera – one that captures light and doesn’t do much else. But how can the best camera phones function without all their elaborate on-device editing capabilities?

“Process Zero is a new mode in Halide that skips the iPhone’s standard image processing system. It produces photos with more detail and gives the photographer greater control over lighting and exposure. This is not a photo filter – it develops photos at the raw level of sensor data,” announces Lux, the team behind Halide. “Just like film, Process Zero photos come with (digital) negatives, which offers incredible control over changing exposure after the fact. Much like film, it has graininess. It works best in daylight or mixed lighting, not nighttime shots.”

The feature, which the team says has been “years in development,” is available on any iPhone running Halide and iOS 17—it’s not limited to “Pro” devices. One of the most welcome visual additions it brings is noise. “The iPhone’s image processing pipeline doesn’t like noise at all,” explains Lux. “Noise reduction is just one of the things that gives iPhone photos their look. Since Halide was built on top of system processing, we had to get in on the action. So our love of noise led us to develop our own process.”

While traditional iPhone photos today are made up of multiple images stitched together to bring out the best parts of each one, Process Zero takes just one shot. That means there’s a lot of room for imperfections, like under- or over-exposure. But as any experienced photographer knows, that’s not necessarily a bad thing—when an algorithm smooths out imperfections, the user has much less control over the final image.