Halide is one of the best camera alternatives for iPhone, a lovingly designed app that gives users a lot of manual control over the pictures they take. And today, they just released a big update with an interesting proposition: an “anti-intellectual” camera.
Of course, more advanced digital photographers will be familiar with the RAW format that Halide (and basically all digital camera manufacturers) have been offering for years now. RAW simply means you get every bit of information straight from the camera’s sensor, with few changes or enhancements. The iPhone (and indeed other digital cameras) usually saves photos in a compressed format with various enhancements applied to save space and make the image look good as soon as you press the shutter button.
So Halide’s new format, which they call Process Zero, is the app’s attempt to make RAW a little more user-friendly. When you open the program, you can choose from three settings: ProRAW (Apple’s proprietary RAW format that applies some of the company’s image modifications), Apple Processed (applies the same computational photography tricks you’ll get when shooting with Apple’s default camera software) and Process Zero.
Process Zero provides you with a RAW file to which you can then quickly apply brightness adjustments to the image. One of the great advantages of shooting RAW is that you have a lot of latitude to lighten up a dark image or tone down a blown out image. Once you’ve made this adjustment, Halide saves the RAW plus brightness adjustment to a new JPEG file, which you can then easily export to other apps like Instagram, VSCO, Lightroom, or your image editing tool of choice.
The idea is to allow photographers to take RAW images without the computational and algorithmic changes that Apple does, and then easily do something with those photos. So when you shoot in Process Zero mode, the phone just takes one photo — unlike Apple’s camera, which takes multiple photos and combines them for a more balanced result. So, while this may result in an image that’s noisier and has some darker or lighter areas, it can get significantly sharper and more detail from Apple’s process. Halide posted a detailed blog it’s complete with tons of information on how it all works, examples, and I recommend checking it out if you’re interested.
Halide’s team also noted that the company’s app is working on the Mark III. But unlike the Mark II, which came with a ton of new features, they plan to release some Mark III features early to gather feedback; Process Zero is just the first of these. If you’d like to check out these RAW shooting updates along with everything else in the works, you can get an annual subscription to Halide now for $12, down from its regular price of $20. (If you hate subscriptions, you can buy Halide Mark II and eventually III for $60.)
