What is a photograph? If your answer is “something taken with a camera, you idiot,” then thanks for joining us. But is that really the case? Because I doubt that in a few years a photo taken with a modern smartphone will be a photograph in any meaningful sense. It will be some kind of monstrous concoction that resembles a photograph but rewrites reality with the same subtlety that a Hollywood producer might “adapt” a wildly popular classic movie because he realized he didn't like the face of the lead actor. Or the location. Or the whole premise or story he's adapting.
Modern smartphones already take a lot of liberties with what we see, competing with each other by turning up the uncanny valley dial to 11. Colors are so saturated that even when I was younger, I hesitated, turning the dial on my portable TV to turn the C64's notoriously dull tones into vaguely vibrant colors. And now everything has to be so crisp that I'm lucky to not even break an eyelash while scrolling through a photo app. But that was just the beginning. It gets even worse. That's why I'm excited about Halide's Process Zero. But more on that in a moment.
Face Swap
Wow, it's beautiful! And it's shot in a sort of hyper-realistic default setting, or at least more saturated.
First, how did we get here with the constant infiltration of smartphone photography and AI “enhancements”? What’s the problem in the first place? It’s clear that at some point, the tech pipeline abandoned the argument that it was all about style and a modern version of “different films.” And we are rapidly abandoning the notion of “honest” capture, or capturing the moment. Instead, the industry has moved from “let’s make everything sharp” and “let’s remove background objects that ideally shouldn’t be there” to “let’s create a complete fiction” and is marching ahead. Images are stitched together, scenes are swapped, and users are having a blast with it in a constant quest to create a reality in their phone that is better than what’s in front of them.
We get it. If angry clouds are ruining your special day, why not swap out the sky? Once you've done that, why not add the moon? Or change the person's face if they have a sulky look or are particularly bothered by their eyebrows. And that silly hat you hate – the one your partner wears all the time? Gone! And the place where the photo was taken? Throw that out too, because that's kind of boring! AI will quickly create something that looks like it actually existed. And… is this still a photo? Are we just making a collage now? Who cares? Does it even matter in the first place?
Zero Hour
Process Zero isn't about turning back time, it's about giving control back to the photographer.
Your answer to that last question will determine how you feel about Process Zero, and whether you clamor for it to become its own movement. For now, it's a mode built into the iPhone camera app Halide. Its purpose is to turn your smartphone into a classic camera. Not in the Hipstamatic “make this photo look like it's 1973” sense; but in the “no fancy modern pipeline parts or AI kind of sense” sense. In other words, you just point the camera and shoot. Halide bypasses Apple's image processor and gives you a single, unprocessed 12-megapixel shot. The result is natural and film-like. It's noisy and warm. It feels real.
Maybe this is a nostalgic thing to say, but I like that naturalness. I'm all for clarity, but hate overly processed output that feels sterile and polished, where certain small details are chopped up and smoothed out at the behest of an inevitable pipeline. And, again, this is before you consider the AI ”helpers” that are slowly creeping into smartphone photos.
But this isn't a regression. Halide takes advantage of the high-quality hardware found in modern phones. It's process zero, not a process party like it's 2007. So what Halide is doing is giving us a much-needed option to recapture a bit of photography's past, before the medium as a whole is swallowed up by its present.
