What is a photograph? If your reply is “something you shoot with a camera, you massive idiot”, thanks for taking part in. But additionally: are you certain? Because give it a number of years and I’m not satisfied fashionable smartphone snaps can be pictures in any significant sense. They’ll be some type of monstrous concoction that resembles a photograph but rewrites actuality with all of the subtlety of a Hollywood producer ‘adapting’ a much-loved basic upon realising they don’t just like the lead’s face. Or their locale. Or the complete premise and story that they’re adapting.
Modern smartphones already take numerous liberties with what they see anyway, making an attempt to outdo one another by turning the Uncanny Valley dial as much as 11. Colours are saturated in a way that may even have given my a lot youthful self pause, whereas twiddling dials on a transportable telly to rework the C64’s notoriously uninteresting palette into one thing vaguely vibrant. And all the pieces now must be so sharp. You’re fortunate to not lop off your eyelashes as you scroll by way of your pictures app. But all of that was just the start. It’s set to get a lot worse. Which is why I’m excited about Halide’s Process Zero – however we’ll get to that shortly.
Face swap
First, how did we get to the place we’re in smartphone pictures and the continued encroachment of AI ‘enhancements’? And what’s the issue anyway? It’s fairly clear sooner or later we deserted arguments tech pipelines are all about type – the fashionable incarnation of ‘different film’. And we’re quick forsaking any notion of ‘honest’ captures, of freezing moments in time. Instead, the trade belts alongside, having moved on from ‘let’s sharpen all the pieces up’ and ‘let’s take away that background object that ideally shouldn’t be there’ to ‘let’s create a complete fiction’. Images are stitched collectively. Scenes are swapped. And customers lap it up, in an ongoing quest to concoct a actuality inside a telephone that beats the one earlier than their very eyes.
I completely get it. When indignant clouds ruined your big day, why not swap out the sky? And once you’re finished with that, why not… add in a moon? Or change folks’s faces, if somebody’s wanting sullen or has notably alarming eyebrows? And that daft hat you hate – the one your different half all the time wears? Gone! The very location during which the photograph was taken? Bit uninteresting, so eliminate that too! An AI can be alongside shortly with one thing that considerably appears fairly prefer it would possibly presumably have existed. And… is this nonetheless a photograph? Are all of us simply making collages now? Who cares? Does it even matter?
Zero hour
Your reply to that final query will decide what you consider Process Zero – and whether or not you clamour for it to turn into a motion of its personal. For now, it’s a mode nestled inside iPhone camera app Halide. Its intention: to show a smartphone right into a basic camera. Not within the Hipstamatic ‘make this photo look like 1973’ sense. But in a ‘dispense with fancy modern pipeline gubbins and any semblance of AI’ sense. So you level. You shoot. Halide bypasses Apple’s picture processor, and provides you a single unprocessed 12-megapixel shot. The outcomes are pure and film-like. They have noise and heat. They really feel… actual.
Maybe this is nostalgia speaking, however I like that naturalness. I’m all for readability, however not overly processed output that feels sterile and polished, the place sure tremendous particulars are atomised and smoothed out on the behest of an unavoidable pipeline. And, once more, that’s earlier than you begin even contemplating the AI ‘helpers’ regularly worming their manner into each smartphone shot.
Yet this isn’t a regression. Halide nonetheless leverages the standard {hardware} packed into a contemporary telephone. It’s Process Zero, not Process Party Like It’s 2007. What it’s doing, then, is giving us a much-needed selection – one that allows you to deliver again a bit of of pictures’s previous, earlier than the complete medium is consumed by its current.
For more on Process Zero, together with comparability snaps, learn the Halide ‘Lux’ weblog.