Apple ProRAW iPhone 12 Test - Does it make the difference? By LEAP ALIFE.

Welcome to leap alive when apple unveiled, the new iPhone 12 pros. They also announced the new apple pro raw as an exclusive feature for the new pro iPhones. But what exactly is apple pro raw? Let me explain normally, when you take photos, your phone or your camera processes, the data captured by the sensor and saved it into compressed format such as JPEGs PNG and to had files. While these photos looks great straight out of the camera, the image data is so compressed to preserve the storage that there's not much data left over for any professional adjustments and the pros don't like that. They prefer raw when you shoot raw, the phone or camera did little to none processing and compressing to the image file, which means the file contains all the data collected by the sensor, and when you have all those data, you can make much, much more adjustment than what you can do with the compressed format. Then here comes the apple pro raw, the apple pro raw uses, computational photography and multi-frame processing to make adjustments to the photos.

So the look goes straight out of the camera, then saved it into ROG raw format, which contains a lot of data. So now you have the image that looks good straight out of the camera. They can be heavily edited later. However, there is one downside to it, because shooting raw collects all the data they really eat up the space real fast, a single pro raw file uses around 25 megabytes of storage, which is 10 times bigger than the magic file. So beware of that and also apple pro raw is pretty new.

There aren't many apps that support it. Yet, as for December 10th 2020, when you try to import pro raw into Lightroom the processing that have been done by the iPhone isn't here, yet it will appear as a normal ROG file with dull, looking color and not properly exposed. Let's hope, adobe releases the support for pro raw real soon, but now, let's see how the apple pro raw do against the normal photo taken by the iPhone 12 Pro max, but keep in mind that this is still the beta version of the iOS 14.3. So things could get a lot better or worse in the future. Here is the photo number one straight off the camera.

These photos look nearly identical, but when you start to adjust the exposure, you can see the two act differently. One very obvious thing is the shadows: take a look at these trees right here. When you max out the shadow, the app only allows a certain amount of adjustments to the non-raw, while the raw you can lift it much, much more sure. It looks pale, but you can always add a little contrast back to make it look a little more punchy and on this side, lifting the shadow to the max doesn't even help reveal anything here on the non-raw. But after you raise enough shadows on a pro raw, you can see.

There's a wall and a pillar sure there's a lot of noise, but it is still very impressive again here they look pretty identical at first, but applying the same adjustments on the saturation and the vibrancy really makes them look different. Overall, the non-raw looks super saturated and vibrant. I mean way too vibrant. It doesn't look natural at all, while the color on the raw still look natural and accurate to the source. Moving down to the building, the gray on the building is totally messed up, that it has a green tint and purple fringing on it.

But on the other hand, the gray on the pro raw remains gray, with no tint shift or color fringing. To be seen in this picture, I try to expose for the sky as a result. The buildings down there are underexposed, so I tried to lift the shadow up. Then this happened at first. They still look pretty similar.

Both doesn't seem to change much, but when you zoom in into the underexposure area, you will see that there are more details to be dug up in the pro raw than in the normal photos to the left on the non-raw. There are tons of grains, plus some green tints on the underexposed areas here. Take a closer look on this pillar, and you'll see that the pillar is so overexposed that the details can be recovered here on the non-raw, but there are still details on the raw even when they are overexposed on the pro raw. While there is still some noise, it is significantly less than the non-raw, and on top of that there is no green tint in the area. In the test, I tried to shoot an overexposed photo, but the iPhone camera app kept pulling the exposure back to normal.

I have no idea why, but I eventually did get a couple of overexposed shots. Correcting the overexposed photo is extremely difficult task and apple pro raw is no different. Pulling back on the highlight and lifting the shadows up really messed up the photos, especially on the pro raw side. When applying the same settings to both photos, the FDIC files came out looking better than the raw. This may be because of the photo app limits.

The amount of the adjustments you can do to the had file. The adjustments made to the photo don't mess up the photo up as much as the pro raw straight out of the camera. The non-raw generally appears to be a little brighter than the pro raw, even though the exposure was locked when I shot the photo and after some adjustments here and there, this is the result. Pro raw has overall a cleaner look due to lesser noise and gain throughout the image. As you can see, there are certain amounts of digital sharpening process on the non-raw as well.

While it looks good when viewing the whole picture, it is really terrible when you really zoomed in for detail lights on, the right of the image are blown down really mushy on the non-raw, while the pro raw holds up really well, you can identify each light here, moving on to the night mode. As always both look about the same. In the beginning, I shoot this photo out of the windows, so please don't mind the reflection here. Overall, the non-raw appears a little more punchy, but taking a closer look, and you'll see that it's not really that good. The highlights here are overexposed lose some detail, while it is mostly still under control in the raw.

However, the yellow lights on the left of the raw tends to be more saturated than the non-raw. When trying to pull the shadow up is where the raw really shines kept a lot more detail than the non-raw one. I don't see any area where the shadow is crushed here, while there are many areas that can be recovered on the HIC counterparts and also these houses still looks decent compared to the very mushy looking ones on the non-raw sure. The raw obviously has a lot more noise, but it just simply contains more detail. You can just fix the grain and noise problem with the simple noise reduction tools during the post-processing.

The photos taken from the ultra-wide and the telephoto cameras are pretty comparable, so editing photos from both cameras has a very similar result by applying the same adjustments to the photos that at first looks identical. The non-raw images will be over saturated, which looks like HDR photos from those super cheap Chinese phones from couple years back no offense. Probably this is a little worse. Things are pretty well handled on the pro raw, not only the color still looks pretty natural and still feels true to life. The highlights and the shadows are pretty well-preserved as well.

Now that is very impressive for a phone camera to be able to capture that amount of data which makes me wonder how will the apple pro raw hold up against an actual camera comment down below? If you want to see how the apple pro raw versus an actual raw file, that's it for now, don't forget to press subscribe, thumbs up and click on the bell icon to see more great content in the future. See you guys next time stay safe.

Source : LEAP ALIFE.