I agree there’s something for everyone and I think Halide is a great app, however from trying out your new feature, to my eye it just looks like a “RAW” photo, which is fine.. but you’ve branded it to try and make it out to be more than that. I don’t want to start a fight, just saying how I see it.. maybe you can enlighten me.
Btw, in mood.camera you can use the “Stock DIGI-N” preset and you’ll just get ProRAW images without any sharpening.
Sure, perhaps you aren’t quite understanding the image processing pipeline? ProRAW images aren’t really technically a real raw — as in, raw data — a raw file is typically raw sensor data. That is to say, not pixels! RAW files have to be turned into pixels by a process called ‘Debayering’ - since photo sites on the sensor collect green, blue and red intensities, you can use various (one-way) algorithms to deduce pixel color and brightness values and compose a bitmap. This process is often also adjusted for with various parameters: you can think of exposure, white point, contrast — once the bitmap data is available, denoising and more. Apple does a lot more than that: their ISP delivers bitmaps to the image pipeline, and they take LOTS of them to combine them into one single shot. In doing so, you inherently noise reduce (you are averaging color values after all), smooth over things, but they also do semantic analysis to do more or less noise reduction or detail enhancement or color adjustment for certain things.
ProRAW does all that too, it just does it with higher quality and a bit less heavy handed processing (ie. some sharpening steps are skipped, etc. — apple obviously does not document what it does or doesn’t, but you can observe it pretty well). ProRAW files are bitmaps. They have been debayered; they have processing baked in, and are always the result of multi-frame merging and Apple’s imaging pipeline.
By your saying ‘you can use this preset to get a ProRAW image without sharpening’ it sounds like you are equating a ProRAW file sans-sharpening to a native RAW file, which isn’t really comparable. For one, the latter isn’t yet an image. We use Process Zero to make it an image: our own minimal pipeline generates the image from one frame, as opposed to Apple’s multi-frame method. Going from your website you are always using Apple’s processing, but putting adjustments on top of that.
I hope that clarifies things. you were also commenting on our Instagram that you have ‘had this feature for a while’ — feel free to get in touch if you want to talk more about this, but I think you’re not correct. We’re happy to talk about it directly if you feel like this is at odds with your product.
Badmouthing us or dismissing years of hard work as mere branding isn’t a nice way to show up in the little community of iPhone photography. We’re all just making cool stuff! Let’s be nice to one another and respect the work.
