What is a photograph? If your answer is, “Something you take with a camera, you moron,” then thanks for playing along. But also, are you sure? Because in a few years, I’m no longer convinced that modern smartphone snapshots will be photographs in any meaningful way. They’ll be some kind of monstrous concoction that resembles a photograph but rewrites reality with all the subtlety of a Hollywood producer “adapting” a beloved classic after not liking the main character’s face. Or their setting. Or the entire premise and story he’s adapting.
Modern smartphones already take a lot of liberties with what they see, trying to outdo each other by turning the uncanny valley knob to 11. The colors are saturated in a way that made even my much younger self pause while twiddling the knobs on a portable TV to transform the C64’s notoriously dull palette into something vaguely vibrant. And now everything has to be like this sharp. You’ll be lucky if you don’t cut off your eyelashes while scrolling through your photo app. But that’s just the beginning. It gets much worse. That’s why I’m excited about Halide’s Process Zero – but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Face swap
First, how did we get to where we are today with smartphone photography and the ongoing proliferation of AI “enhancements”? And what’s the problem anyway? It’s pretty clear that somewhere along the line we gave up the argument that technology pipelines are all about style—the modern embodiment of “the other film.” And we’re quickly abandoning any notion of “candid” shots, of freezing moments in time. Instead, the industry is business as usual, having moved from “let’s sharpen everything” and “let’s remove the background object that ideally shouldn’t be there” to “let’s create a total fiction.” Images are stitched together. Scenes are swapped out. And users are soaking it up, in their ongoing quest to create a reality in a phone that exceeds the one before their eyes.
I understand it completely. If nasty clouds have ruined your special day, why not change the sky? And when you’re done with that, why not… add a moon? Or change people’s faces if someone looks grumpy or has particularly disturbing eyebrows? And that silly hat you hate – the one your better half always carries? Gone! The place where the photo was taken? A bit boring, so gone too! An AI will soon come up with something that looks somewhat like it might have existed. And… is it still a photo? Are we all just making collages now? Who cares? Does it even matter?
Zero hour
Your answer to that last question will determine what you think about Process Zero—and whether you’ll clamor for it to become its own movement. Right now, it’s a mode embedded in the iPhone camera app Halide. Its goal: to turn a smartphone into a classic camera. Not in the Hipstamatic “make this photo look 1973” sense. But in the “forego fancy modern pipeline stuff and any semblance of AI” sense. So you aim. You shoot. Halide bypasses Apple’s image processor and gives you a single unedited 12-megapixel shot. The results are natural and film-like. They have noise and warmth. They feel… real.
Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I How that naturalness. I’m all for clarity, but not for overly processed results that look sterile and polished, where certain fine details are atomized and smoothed out at the behest of an inevitable pipeline. And that’s not even before you take into account the AI ”helpers” that are gradually creeping into every smartphone shot.
This is not a step backwards though. Halide still uses the high quality hardware that is in a modern phone. It’s Process Zero, not Process Party Like It’s 2007. So what it does is give us a much needed Selection – a method that allows you to bring back a little of photography’s past before the entire medium is swallowed up by its present.
