Another topic piqued my interest, so I am learning to shoot and edit Apple/Halide “Process Zero” images. These are created with Halide 2.15 or greater app, which was released about a week ago. This blog post explains them: Process Zero: The Anti-Intelligent Camera
So far, I have shot a small number of Process Zero images. I will post a few of them here, license them for Play Raw, and see what we can learn about them. The first one will be in the next post.
Ok, the first thing is that Apple’s image processing is not done. You have to set the exposure, yourself. In this, my first attempt, the image was far overexposed. But the parts that are well exposed look pretty good.
Ok. on the sixth attempt, I finally got a sample that is not badly overexposed. I’m having two problems with the Halide app, and both may just be my inexperience. 1) In manual mode, when I change the ISO setting, it also changes the exposure (“shutter speed”) setting, and vice versa. I feel like I should be able to set both to my own preference. 2) Also in manual mode, so far I have not found a way to adjust the aperture, which I think is one of the most basic of manual settings. The aperture is always wide open at f/1.5. I will study this, further.
As to my problems with Halide. 1) It doesn’t necessarily change the ISO when I change the Exposure, but I’m sure it was happening sometimes when I was outside trying to take pictures. I’m still a bit confused. 2) The Halide docs state that the iPhone camera is fixed aperture, so you control manual exposure with ISO and Exposure, only.
There’s not really room for a variable aperture in such a small lens, so that’s why. I believe there are a few (as in two or three at most) phones that let you change it, but they still only give a choice between a few fixed settings. Of course, with those tiny sensors changing the aperture doesn’t change the depth-of-field much, so I’m not sure it’s such a big loss.
One major issue with smartphone RAW is that sensor noise is almost never profiled (in darktable at least) and the denoise module default settings wipe out all the details, so it has to be deactivated…