

- #APPLE PHOTOS RAW UPGRADE#
- #APPLE PHOTOS RAW ANDROID#
- #APPLE PHOTOS RAW PRO#
- #APPLE PHOTOS RAW SOFTWARE#
#APPLE PHOTOS RAW SOFTWARE#
This is how Alok Deshpande, Apple's Senior Manager of Camera Software Engineering, explains ProRAW:

Apple says it is "the best of both worlds." With Apple ProRAW, it is a powerful option for those who have been intimidated or put-off by RAW in the past, while those who like RAW won't miss out on clever multi-frame processing tech like Deep Fusion. You lose the ability to shoot bursts of photos, and many popular photo sharing apps like Instagram can’t handle the raw files-you’ll have to save a jpeg version before you share, which is really inconvenient if you’re just trying to ship a quick picture of your sandwich to your Instagram Story.Apple ProRAW is essentially a hybrid format, a middle ground between shooting in pure RAW with the convenience of JPG/HEIF. First, each image hovers around 25 MB in size, which is 10x to 12x larger than a typical file. It’s a smart policy because ProRAW does have some real drawbacks. Stan Horaczekīecause ProRAW is still so specialized, Apple requires you to turn it on every time you open the camera app if you want it enabled. When should you use ProRAW? When there’s a lot of bright sky in a photo, raw files can help keep it from blowing out to pure white. It can recognize the sky and know when it might blow out and it can see a face and automatically brighten it up if needed.

And it’s still using machine learning to recognize specific aspects of an image and tweak the exposures of those areas with local adjustments. Deep Fusion emphasizes high-frequency details-think textures and patterns with lots of small elements-in order to improve the perceived fine detail. The Smart HDR feature combines several images every time you press the shutter button in order to try and provide the correct exposure across the entire image, even when there’s an abundance of contrast. ProRAW, however, tries to give shooters a starting point that’s much closer to a finished image. You can see that the photo on the right is slightly flatter than the jpeg, which is better for editing. The photo on the left was shot in jpeg and the photo on the right in ProRAW. That’s one of the big differentiators between Apple’s raw format and those that you’ll get from a typical DSLR. ProRAW goes beyond the typical image info included in a normal raw file, however, because it includes Apple-specific data that relates back to its features like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion.
#APPLE PHOTOS RAW ANDROID#
Apple and Android phones already offered access to regular DNG files through some advanced apps like Adobe Lightroom, but the files didn’t offer much of an advantage over the smaller jpegs.
#APPLE PHOTOS RAW UPGRADE#
That’s actually an upgrade in compatibility over most of the major camera manufacturers like Sony, Canon, and Nikon, all of which use proprietary raw formats that don’t typically work with common editing programs right away.

It uses the Digital Negative (DNG) format for its base, which is a common standard that most image editing software can read straight away. Stan Horaczek What is Apple’s new ProRAW format?Īpple can sometimes take flack for introducing new file formats that aren’t very compatible with different platforms, but ProRAW isn’t like that. You’ll notice the difference in file formats when you start editing your photos. That’s fine if you’re just snapping and sharing photos, but try editing that photo in an advanced program like Adobe Lightroom and you’ll miss that extra data. Jpegs are great because they’re relatively small in terms of storage and they’re almost universally compatible, but it’s what’s known as a “lossy” format, which means it tries to jettison as much of that original image data as possible without affecting the overall appearance of the image too much. When you push the camera button on your device, it captures more information than it needs for a final file-lots more. Right now, you’re almost certainly shooting jpegs (or the less-popular HEIC format) on your smartphone even though raw has been available in some form or another for more than half a decade. It’s not on by default-you’ll have to go into Settings > Camera > Formats > Apple ProRAW to enable it-but it could open up a lot more potential from your smartphone photos once enabled.
#APPLE PHOTOS RAW PRO#
Tucked in with its typical array of bug fixes and new features, the company rolled out its new ProRAW photo format for the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max.
