Apple announces ProRAW image format for iPhone 12 Pro

AppleInsider

Coming to iPhone 12 Pro later in 2020, Apple ProRAW is a new imaging format that combines Apple's computational photography features with the benefits of shooting in RAW.

Apple's iPhone 12 Pro can now shoot in Apple ProRAW

Typically when shooting in RAW, users lose the benefits of Apple's computational photography features such as Deep Fusion and Smart HDR. With iPhone 12 Pro, users will be able to shoot in the new Apple ProRAW format which blends the two.

Apple created a whole new image capturing pipeline that combines multiple steps of processing and combines that into a new image file at the time of capture without any shutter delay. That includes processing done by the CPU, GPU, ISP, and Neural Engine.

Apple ProRAW

Photographers can retain full control over color, details, and dynamic range while shooting but get the power and flexibility of RAW.

Users can shoot in Apple ProRAW directly from the built-in Camera app and a third-party API will allow developers to build ProRAW capture into their own apps.

Apple will ship iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max without Apple ProRAW support and will deliver the feature in the future, similar to how Deep Fusion and Portrait Mode were added post-launch.

polymnia

Huge for iPhone photography! 

While RAW format capture has been been available a while, it was sad to give up the special Apple software processing to get RAW. It will be incredible to get the processing latitude of RAW while retaining the propriety ISP that was previously exclusive to the Apple Camera app. 

melgross

For photographers, this is really one of the more important feature upgrades. It’s funny, because just the other day I was thinking about third party apps that can shoot RAW on an iPhone. What’s bothered me for some time is that while theoretically, RAW is better, as it is on “classic” digital cameras, it’s really not on an iOS device. I’ve tried pretty much all the apps that allow RAW shooting on an iPhone. All of the them are worse than shooting a standard pic with Apple’s camera app. This has been more true the past two to three years than before, and you couldn’t really do it earlier.

the problem is that Apple’s multiple shots, using different conditions, which are then in camera analyzed, and then, pixel by pixel are combined or thrown away to give the final file. The jpeg’s are excellent. The newer HEIF format is much better yet, if you choose the higher quality mode. One reason is that it’s 10 bit. I’m hoping that these new combined RAW files are also 10 bit or higher. Classic digital is usually 14 bits for 35mm derivatives, and various medium format is generally 16 bit.

can’t wait for the reviews, and more detail from Apple in interviews.

edited October 2020

mcmillan

I have to respectfully disagree with Melgross with regard to RAW images captured on iPhone having less quality than JPG or HEIC shot in Apple’s Camera app. I’ve been shooting and processing  RAW+JPG with Halide almost exclusively since the start of this year and it is only on rare occasions where the contrast may be too high to get a good image from the RAW that the JPG is actually the better image. 

I’ve found that shooting RAW gives much better detail and clarity than JPG. The processing that Apple does can sometimes overdo it in certain circumstances. 

It will indeed be interesting to see how ProRAW looks as shot and what adjustments we can do to them.