Halide is a groundbreaking app for deliberate and thoughtful photography. With high-end tools, and a beautiful UI designed from scratch for the latest iPhones, Halide is your go-to camera when you want to really take a photo rather than a quick snapshot.
Natural film-like shots that are faster than ProRAW
Process Zero uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce beautiful, film-like natural photos. This innovative mode aims to provide photographers with a more authentic and unprocessed image capture experience.
Super interesting take on a different approach to all the generative AI-based photo "enhancement" efforts coming out of Big Tech lately. Instead of applying AI, Halide is taking a divergent approach with its own RAW-processing Image Lab style, maintaining more grain and producing opinionated images that look more authentic, rather than "generated".
Compare a standard iPhone photo:
With Halide Process Zero:
Or, this image:
Details of ProRAW:
Process Zero:
@chrismessina Thank you for hunting @chrismessina! We’re super excited to get this out in an era of more and more processing and AI in our photography pipeline. Giving you total control over what level of processing you get with every shot is just the beginning for us: this is, after all, our first homegrown process pipeline.
We’d like to offer photographers total creative control, and with processing in your iPhone camera taking increasingly creative choices for you, this puts you back in that editor’s seat. It’s just one more tool — and we hope to expand it to higher resolution captures and a more modular approach to the capture pipeline in the future.
This is a fresh perspective, especially given all the AI-driven enhancements dominating the photography space. I'm curious, how does the lack of AI in Process Zero impact the overall image quality, particularly in low-light situations? Also, will there be an option for those who enjoy some level of post-processing while using this feature?
@renchu_song I like to describe it as ‘film-like’ — and if you recall film, it has a particular ISO. The same kind of goes for raw sensor data and single exposure shots on a tiny iPhone camera. Once it gets dark, the noise goes up — with some manual tweaks (and the magic of your camera stabilization) you can still get some fantastic shots, but the strength of computational photography is that it lets you get shots you can’t otherwise get. This is a great way to remind you of its benefits :)
I shot mostly ProRAW at night before this, opting for that over night mode since it was less processed. I found it surprising how often I still enjoyed the P0 shots near or after sunset. But you’ll want to check and review your shots - the viewfinder on iPhone does do computational processing, so you can’t see the noise in your shot.
Congrats on the launch! This is a really fantastic tool and I love the photos it produces. I'm no photographer but this would be really helpful for me to get some great quality photos
Halide
Epsilla (YC S23)
Halide