iPhone 12 Pro Raw vs “Not Raw”

[dk001]

Been playing with it on my 12 Pro Max and LR on the desktop myself. I'm leaning to the ProRaw side. I've been working with similar RAW & ProRAW shots from the 12 and RAW from a Canon 20MP compact and DSLR for comparisons.

Been leaving my Canon out of it for now. 🤞
Sticking mostly to phone to phone comparison.

 

[sparksd]

Been leaving my Canon out of it for now. 🤞
Sticking mostly to phone to phone comparison.

I've had a set of particular "real world" shots that I've used for some time to test new cameras and lenses on. I know mentally exactly what the "real picture" looks like so it's a good reference point and my gold standard to measure camera or lens performance against is my DSLR and L-Series lens. I'm pretty amazed at the performance of the 12 Pro Max and ProRAW. And then there's that 4K video ...

 

[dk001]

I've had a set of particular "real world" shots that I've used for some time to test new cameras and lenses on. I know mentally exactly what the "real picture" looks like so it's a good reference point and my gold standard to measure camera or lens performance against is my DSLR and L-Series lens. I'm pretty amazed at the performance of the 12 Pro Max and ProRAW. And then there's that 4K video ...

Haven’t started on the video yet.

 

[TrueBlou]

A RAW file isn’t a photo. It’s not even an image. It’s data, and I mean “raw” data. Each of the square pixels on your camera sensor picked up a certain amount of light (0 means it was pitch black), and that “intensity” is recorded for each pixel and saved in a file. Again, just numbers. Even without getting too technical, I think you can understand that a pixel that recorded an intensity of 37431 cannot convert that single number into a colour. Alone, it represents some greyscale value ranging from pitch black to perfect white.

Whatever you use to view/open the “photo” — your iPhone itself, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc — is taking the RAW file values and doing some crazy interpolations of all the data, and creating a colour (or b&w) photo out of it. The result of this data interpolation is saved as a JPEG. If you are “looking” at a RAW file, it is basically a JPEG you’re viewing, except the underlying raw sensor data is still all there.

RAW files are easier to edit than JPEGs, especially when it comes to colour and white balance, because all the raw data is still there. By editing a RAW “photo”, you’re just telling the software to do the “RAW data” —> photo conversion different than before.

Since every software that can read RAW files has different instructions as to how to convert raw data into an image, the way a “RAW photo” looks will vary between software. That’s not true of images (JPEGs, TIFFs).

In comparison, a JPEG is a very explicit set of Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) values assigned to each pixel, and should look exactly the same in every photo software, every browser, and every OS (as long as it’s viewed on the same computer monitor, same iPhone, or same tablet). An actual photo can’t be interpreted in any other way because the colour of each pixel is already set. That limits what can be done to the colours of a photo file, because not only has an RGB value been assigned to each pixel, but JPEGs are only 8-bits, whereas RAW files store much more information that that.

Excellent description, having come in here to write much the same, you saved me a bunch of typing. Always a bonus

 

[Abstract]

Excellent description, having come in here to write much the same, you saved me a bunch of typing. Always a bonus

Thanks!