Update to the Halide Camera app removes AI and computer processing from your photos

As Apple, Google and Samsung all try to add more AI features to their camera apps, the third-party camera app Halide has added a new ‘zero processing mode’ to give users full control over their photos.

The company is the first to admit that this doesn’t make the camera better, but it does give photographers the maximum amount of control without having to worry about any computational photography effects or AI enhancements. If you often get annoyed that your iPhone ruins photos by trying to make them ‘better,’ this app is for you.

During a brief test on my iPhone 15 Pro, you can see that these photos have a lot more grain compared to regular iPhone photos, but in bright sunlight, things get a little closer.

When it comes to sharpness, the Halide camera’s process zero doesn’t add much to still photographs, but if you’re taking pictures of something moving, it can help you snap a sharp still frame of that single moment in time. By default, the iPhone will take an array of photos every time you hit the shutter button and combines them into the final image. These photos are usually great, but the new single-shot focused Halide update can capture a single moment with pretty great sharpness.

If you haven’t caught on yet, this photo mode really harkens back to film photography. To take that further, the company has even developed a new one-slider processing mode to help photographers ‘push’ or ‘pull’ their photos’ highlights and shadows, similarly to how you would process film. It’s not perfect in my tests, but since the Process Zero mode takes DNG RAW files by default, you can edit a decent amount in post to really nail the look you’re going for.

Photos marked DNG are from Halide, and the HEIC photos are taken from the Apple Camera app.

I was only able to snap a few photos to test, and to my eyes, the Process Zero mode looks a lot more natural. In the example above, when you look at the fake leaves on the iPhone shot (HEIC), you see every fibre threaded together, and both the OnePlus Open and the orange USB cable almost look made of clay in a weird way. Comparing that to the photo that was processed with the new Halide feature, you can see that both the phone and cable look a lot more realistic, and the leaves haven’t been oversharpened, giving them a softer look that mimics how my eyes see them in real life.

Overall, I think this is a really cool camera update, and the Halide team has shared that it’s going to hold a sale on its in-app purchases, so you can get the camera app for a bit of a discount soon. Will this be for everyone? No, definitely not, but for anyone who’s been frustrated as year-over-year we move further and further from the root of photography this app is a godsend.

Source: Lux.camera