Process Zero is so great that it could be a completely new camera app for the iPhone, and not just a new mode in the already awesome Halide app.

Phone cameras almost always produce great results, thanks to powerful computers that apply machine learning and AI to the raw data from the sensor to create a perfect image. The problem is that those images can be too perfect. The automated processing can often go too far, and if the photographer knows what they’re doing, they can often fight the algorithms to get the photo they want. The makers of Process Zero call it “the anti-intelligent camera,” and that’s a perfect description.

“AI-powered smartphone photography has dramatically changed what people expect from their images. Today, we expect our phones to produce perfect, well-balanced photos with little effort, thanks to features like HDR, Night Mode, and scene detection. These tools have made photography more accessible to the average user, but they also take away some of the creative control from photographers,” Jeffrey Wang, founder of Perfect Moment Photography and Video, told Lifewire via email. “The ability to manually adjust settings and bypass Apple’s typical multi-frame HDR processing gives photographers the freedom to craft their images with more purpose, making the iPhone a viable option for more professional-level photography.”

A typical smartphone photo is actually made up of many photos. The camera takes a series of photos, often at different exposure settings, and then creates a composite from all that raw material. It might take frames where each person is smiling, or at least not blinking, and stitch them together into the same frame. It will certainly take that bright sky and those deep shadows and make sure that they both have lots of detail. The sky will be a beautiful blue, and so on.