Apple has, over the past month, developed a brand new photo system that gives more possibilities to photographers without reducing the software features of the iPhone camera: ProRAW.
Ben Sandofsky, one of the developers of the Halide application, one of the best available for photography, looked at the new capabilities of ProRAW, announced with great fanfare by Apple during the presentation of the iPhone 12 and which appeared during a dedicated iOS update a little less than a month ago.
Making RAW more popular
For the developer, this new option given to photographers by Apple aims to make RAW a more widespread file format in the world of photography. More complete, but also heavier than JPEG, RAW allows better saving of information in a photograph.
Sandofsky explains that Apple collaborated withAdobeto provide this new level of photo quality. The idea was to use the power of RAW, without, as could be the case before,set aside iPhone camera software technologies. In detail, RAW normally does not make any modifications to the photo, so that the photographer can make any adjustments that he considers necessary.
© Halide
Integrate the RAW without forgetting the rest
But this new ProRAW offered by Apple is very different on this point. Indeed, Apple did not want to lose the advantage it had acquired regarding its software processing of each image. ProRAW thus retains functions such as HDR, Deep Fusion or even depth detection by Apple. More broadly, all image modification technologies are still relevant with ProRAW.
But Apple's ProRAW, as Ben Sandofsky points out, also has some weak points. Indeed, it does not work in burst mode, and theProRAW photos are not taken into account on all social networksand therefore cannot be shared without a loss of image quality. Other concerns, if overall Apple's ProRAW is a success, it is not yet up to standard RAW in terms of noise reduction and sharpness in particular.
