Many of us will agree that photography can be a form of art. In addition to composing the perfect composition, it takes skill to set the metering mode of your DSLR or mirrorless camera to capture detail in shadows and highlights. We can also adjust the aperture, shutter speed and ISO to achieve a balance between revealing details and keeping ugly noises at bay. And then there’s the joy of processing a Camera Raw file in a digital darkroom, like Lightroom Classic to bring out more color and detail before rewarding us with a perfect print that we sharpened in post to give it more power!

However… the AI-assisted computational photography found on smartphones like mine iPhone 16 Pro takes a lot from the art of photography. Sure, I can shoot Apple ProRAW, but the iPhone Camera still uses Smart HDR to combine multiple exposures recorded quickly to capture detail in light and dark areas in the resulting .DNG (Digital Negative) file. The iPhone’s Fusion camera can also recognize multiple people in the frame and expose for them individually, using AI-created masks to reveal color and texture in their skin and clothing. The photographer becomes a link in the chain that triggers AI “magic” with a press of the camera control button. This can result in fantastic looking photos, but where is the “artist” in this equation?

Halide 2.5 is a third-party camera app that’s designed to give iPhone photographers more manual control over camera settings like ISO and shutter speed. The latest version of Halide has a new trick up its sleeve – Process Zero. This feature is a response to the increasing invasion of AI in the art of photography. Process Zero allows you to capture a RAW .DNG file without using any computational AI assisted photography. This allowed me to use my iPhone more like a classic DSLR!

Shooting in Process Zero, I had to take my time before pressing the shutter button! I set the Halide 2.5 to Manual mode and was able to slide horizontally to change the ISO speed and vertically to change the shutter speed. Useful Zebra overlays showed over or underexposed areas. An overlay grid helps me apply the “Rule of Thirds” to my composition. Like my old man Canon DSLR, I prioritized my manual settings to capture highlight details, as these are much harder to recover in editing if the sky is overexposed. The resulting Process Zero RAW .DNG file showed some sky detail, but backlit shadows were severely underexposed. Fantastic! This meant I had to process the digital negative file PhotoshopHis Camera Raw workspace, as I would with a traditional negative in a darkroom. Editing a photo for me is just as creatively rewarding as taking it, so I don’t want artificial intelligence to take away that sense of reward!

I used Adobe Camera Raw editor’s Linear Gradient Mask tool to select the sky in my Process Zero photo and then pulled the Dehaze slider to reveal the colors and details stored in the RAW file. I was able to use the Shadows slider to selectively reveal more detail in underexposed shadows without removing properly exposed highlights. Manually processing a RAW file helped me feel more like an artist rather than letting Apple’s Computational Photography steal my thunder!