What is Apple ProRaw? iPhone 12 pro users Check this out… By The Art of Photography

Some big news today apple has released iOS version 14.3, which adds a pretty amazing feature for still photography, and so this is a new file. Format called apple pro raw, and I want to talk about what apple pro raw is, what it's going to offer you as a photographer, what it does with the phone and all that stuff, and I just kind of realized that I am not wearing the right shirt today when we're talking about file formats. We are way beyond the JPEG. JPEG is a file format, so is had. Well pro raw is a hybrid raw format that apple are now giving us access to, and it's going to enable some pretty amazing things on this phone. There is a slight gotcha here in that the only two phones that are supported right now are the iPhone 12 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro max.

There is a reason for this, and it has to do with the processors. This whole process is very intensive, and it's something that is made possible because of the new a14 processor that is in these phones. So unless you have an a14 processor, you're kind of out of luck in terms of capturing apple pro raw, but I have been testing the beta version of iOS 14.3 for the last week, and I've been playing with the images in the native Apple software as well as Adobe Lightroom, and the results are very impressive. The images are spotless. There is a noticeable difference between showing in pro raw versus a JPEG format, and you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to editing and that's the real benefit for shooting in raw if you're not familiar with what raw files are well, the idea is that you just have raw image data, and so this is up to the software that you're using to interpret that data, but because you're getting the raw data and nothing is baked in permanently.

Then you can do things like bring back shadow detail. If an image is too contrast your dark, you can bring back a little of highlight, detail and there's a lot of flexibility that you get with that now. Pro raw is a hybrid format, so it supports the raw functionality, but it also adds in the layer of computational imaging that these phones are known for doing. Computational imaging has been a big deal for apple and the iPhone over the last two or three years, and it enables us to do things that we were never able to do on phones before. In fact, some of these features are things that we can't do on proper cameras either.

These include things like night sight or portrait mode or even HDR, where you can capture a wider dynamic range and bring it into something that looks really natural for the human eye. Now, what's cool about this is as a user, you don't notice any of this happening at all. In fact, the experience is identical to the same as it's always been you're going to open the camera app you frame up your subject, and you hit the shutter button and then an image pops up. What you don't see is behind the scenes where the phone is actually going to take this through an entire imaging pipeline to come up with a deep image files. Apple calls if it's going to actually send all this information after it captures multiple exposures in rapid succession.

It sends these over to the neural engine, and it's going to build out segmentation masks, so it can identify where a human face is or where a sky is, and it can treat each one of these independently and then bring them all back together. So all this happens very fast. Now we have the ability to actually get this into a raw format. It doesn't just bake it into a JPEG. So if you're super picky about how you edit your images, you want a higher image quality.

This is going to give you a lot of flexibility in terms of what you're able to do with these files. But first I want to talk about how we actually enable this in iOS 14.3. First thing you need to do is go into the settings app and then what you're going to do is scroll down until you find the camera settings and what you're going to do is open that up. The first option that you have says formats we're going to go ahead and tap that when you go in there you're going to see the choice of high efficiency or most compatible and then underneath that you're going to see apple pro raw, what you want to do is enable apple pro raw once you've enabled that, then, when you go back, and you open up the camera app you're going to see the option, it's going to be by default x out, but it's on the top right-hand side of the screen. If you want to take a raw image, what you're going to do is enable that- and this is going to allow you to shoot raw.

This is a really cool feature. It is available on all four lenses, so you've got the three back facing lenses as well as the selfie camera on the front- and this is what opens this up now. We have had the ability to shoot raw in iPhones before and so the way you would access. This is through a third-party app. It was not available natively in the camera app.

So if you used Lightroom or something like that, you could go in, and you could get a raw image now. This concept is not new. Clearly for the iPhone. There are other manufacturers that have given us the ability to shoot raw images, but the big difference here is that pro raw will include all the computational imaging information. As I mentioned, the image quality that I'm getting out of the stuff that I've shot with pro raw is fantastic.

It is noticeably better than both JPEG had and even the old ROG format that we used to be able to do through a third party app like Lightroom you're, going to have much more color information to work with much more light information, and you can really take this an extra step in the editing. The biggest difference is that this raw file includes all the information from the computational imaging that we have done in the phone. So, for instance, if you have a HDR image, you're going to get a HDR raw file and there's a lot of information there what's interesting about this, now is at the time I'm filming this. I was able to get Lightroom support for this, but it treats it just like it would any other raw file, which is very cool, but what's really cool are the possibilities that potentially could become of this with open raw support from apple they've opened this up to third parties, and you can access things like image segmentation. So we don't really have that in the tool set that we have right now at this point in time, and what that requires is a lot of thinking through the user interface and what the manufacturer of the software is going to.

Allow you to do with that information. I think it would be very overwhelming just to have a bunch of info that you don't really know what to do with so. In other words, segmentation like being able to separate the face, the skin, the sky and all those things there have to have enhancement tools that we're going to see develop. That will go with this, but I think that's particularly interesting and exciting, because I think over time, that's when you're going to see how apple pro raw is going to differ from just a standard raw file format and the other cool thing is that it is a ROG file. So if software does not recognize or have access to all the apple raw features, it will treat it just like a raw format file.

So this is going to give you a lot of flexibility right out of the gate in the fact that they've chosen to go with the ROG and, of course, you're going to get an amazing image quality. It's 12-bit you're going to get 14 stops of dynamic range and the results are really outstanding. So it's going to be interesting to see where this goes, and I think that I'm going to be honest with you. I said this in my iPhone review. Initially, if you haven't seen that I will link this up here.

A lot of reviews that I've seen and a lot of the word on the street that I've seen is that. Well, this really wasn't a big improvement for apple, but between Dolby Vision for video and then being able to shoot using apple program. This is a next level phone, and is it enough to want to upgrade to an apple, iPhone, 12 pro or an iPhone 12 Pro max yeah? It is your really going to like what you get out of this. I would love to hear from you guys, though, so drop me. A comment below I'll see you on the next video until then later.

Source : The Art of Photography