Was hoping they'd be able to improve it with ProRAW but no it works exactly the same as before, which is in some ways impressive how they're able to make it consistent with a totally different format with a different bit depth and tone curve. But the way it used to handle highlights is just horrible and they really need to change it.
Here's a photo I took in ProRAW and edited with boosted exposure and highlights.
Yes I know it's "beta" or whatever, but the things I'm describing here have been in Photos since forever, and worked exactly the same with JPEG and HEIF files, it's not actually a problem with ProRAW, it's a problem with the Photos app, specifically its algorithms for those sliders.
Firstly, there's always a lot of ugly posterization around highlights when you use the "highlight" and "exposure" sliders too much and I would say this is an amateur level mistake even open source free photo editing softwares would be able to avoid, not sure why it's still here.
Secondly this may sound odd but it's almost impossible to blow out highlights with these sliders, you generally don't want to blow highlights when taking photos but sometimes you do for artistic effect but you can't do it with Apple. I know the highlights are lost here in this photo but that only happens when you export to JPEG, all the details are there when viewed on the phone, which just looks extremely strange because it's so bright any normal camera would have blown out the highlights (including the iPhone itself of course) if you actually took the photo at that exposure level. And isn't that the point of these exposure sliders? To make the photo look exactly the same as if you took it with a different exposure? Which Adobe always does extremely well.
Thirdly, there's a couple confusing terms in the editing app. "Exposure" is the weird one I've been complaining, it generates weird unnatural results and doesn't actually reproduce the effects of higher or lower exposure. However, if you use the "brightness" slider it actually has more of an exposure adjustment effect and won't produce much weird effects. So what's with the names and why have both of them?
There's also "brilliance" which simply makes no sense, what it really does is an old school HDR effect filter where it selectively darkens bright parts of the image and brightens dark parts of the image, and it produces weird ugly posterization in highlight areas.
Last but not least, sometimes you can mess things up so bad the brightest parts of the image become darker than the halo it is producing, just so ugly. This again is like amateur level mistake, it should be impossible for any of these sliders to ever mess up the order of brightness in the image, if pixel A is brighter than pixel B in the original image then no matter what you do, they can at most, be the same brightness, the order should never be reversed! This is how it works in lightroom, none of the basic sliders will ever make a light bulb darker than its halo, but Apple Photos will. Look at the photo I posted, see how there's a dark outline around the highlights on the wall? It's because pixels of that specific brightness has been made darker than than even areas that was darker than it in the original image.
Here's a photo I took in ProRAW and edited with boosted exposure and highlights.
Yes I know it's "beta" or whatever, but the things I'm describing here have been in Photos since forever, and worked exactly the same with JPEG and HEIF files, it's not actually a problem with ProRAW, it's a problem with the Photos app, specifically its algorithms for those sliders.
Firstly, there's always a lot of ugly posterization around highlights when you use the "highlight" and "exposure" sliders too much and I would say this is an amateur level mistake even open source free photo editing softwares would be able to avoid, not sure why it's still here.
Secondly this may sound odd but it's almost impossible to blow out highlights with these sliders, you generally don't want to blow highlights when taking photos but sometimes you do for artistic effect but you can't do it with Apple. I know the highlights are lost here in this photo but that only happens when you export to JPEG, all the details are there when viewed on the phone, which just looks extremely strange because it's so bright any normal camera would have blown out the highlights (including the iPhone itself of course) if you actually took the photo at that exposure level. And isn't that the point of these exposure sliders? To make the photo look exactly the same as if you took it with a different exposure? Which Adobe always does extremely well.
Thirdly, there's a couple confusing terms in the editing app. "Exposure" is the weird one I've been complaining, it generates weird unnatural results and doesn't actually reproduce the effects of higher or lower exposure. However, if you use the "brightness" slider it actually has more of an exposure adjustment effect and won't produce much weird effects. So what's with the names and why have both of them?
There's also "brilliance" which simply makes no sense, what it really does is an old school HDR effect filter where it selectively darkens bright parts of the image and brightens dark parts of the image, and it produces weird ugly posterization in highlight areas.
Last but not least, sometimes you can mess things up so bad the brightest parts of the image become darker than the halo it is producing, just so ugly. This again is like amateur level mistake, it should be impossible for any of these sliders to ever mess up the order of brightness in the image, if pixel A is brighter than pixel B in the original image then no matter what you do, they can at most, be the same brightness, the order should never be reversed! This is how it works in lightroom, none of the basic sliders will ever make a light bulb darker than its halo, but Apple Photos will. Look at the photo I posted, see how there's a dark outline around the highlights on the wall? It's because pixels of that specific brightness has been made darker than than even areas that was darker than it in the original image.
