The flexibility of Apple’s ProRaw photo format allows me to show the details of the shadows on this backlit cactus without bursting the colors of the clear dawn sky.
Stephen Shankland / CNET
ProRaw, the new photo format that Apple introduced on its iPhone 12 Pro Max, is the one that most separates me from my Pixel smartphone. I still love my Google Pixel. But, more and more often, I look for my iPhone 12 Pro Max when taking a photo. Its telephoto camera, which is next to wide-angle and ultra-wide cameras, is a big draw. The control that the ProRaw format gives me when I edit my photos, however, is the key to my changing habits in photography.
The new ProRaw technology allows me to obtain a more pleasant and natural look than I could with the standard JPEG or HEIC photos that most camera phones produce. This is important for my nature and family photos.
Reading: In-depth analysis of the Apple ProRaw CNET
The new format gives Apple an edge after a decade in which its once superior iPhone cameras lost ground to Google, whose image processing software has dramatically improved smartphone photography. Apple’s investments in photography should help maintain the loyalty of iPhone customers – especially the creative types that Apple loves to display in its ads – even when companies like Samsung try to win us over with features like wide-angle telephoto cameras.
Google led, but lost the lead
Google deserves credit for pioneering computer photography techniques that make up for the shortcomings of smartphone cameras. It made smartphones a better option for photography enthusiasts, like me, who are used to dragging a DSLR.
One of my favorite technologies from Google is called computational raw, a direct competitor to ProRaw that hit Apple on the market for two years with the launch of Pixel 3. It is the key to extracting from tiny phone sensors more image quality than I do. I thought it would be possible.
The ProRaw image on the left offers a natural view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains at sunset. In the corresponding JPEG, the mountains appear over-processed and unrealistic.
Stephen Shankland / CNET
Apple started offering ProRaw with the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max in 2020. That’s when Google reduced its photographic ambitions, betting that people would prefer good value over an expensive flagship phone during the coronavirus pandemic. Google’s Pixel 5 has only wide, ultra-wide cameras; iPhone 12 Pro models feature panoramic, ultra-wide and telephoto cameras.
The iPhone 12 Pro models start at $ 999, compared to the more modest price of the Pixel 5, at $ 699. The Pixel 5 is a good choice for many people. I happen to be someone who needs a telephoto camera, in particular the 2.5X zoom on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, whose price starts at $ 1,099.
Apple’s ProRaw works perfectly with its 2.5X optical zoom. In contrast, Google’s computational raw suffers from a lower resolution when used with the Pixel Super-Res Zoom magnification trick. I am interested in cameras with 3X and 10X zoom in Samsung’s new Galaxy S21 Ultra, but Samsung does not allow the ability to capture raw images from these cameras.
Why ProRaw is good
The biggest advantage of ProRaw is that it offers photographers more flexibility than they are used to with state-of-the-art SLR and mirrorless cameras such as Sony, Nikon and Canon. To create a compact JPEG or HEIC, a camera emits image information that you think you will not need. Taking raw photos keeps more of the original data. Apple, like Google, packages raw data using Adobe’s flexible DNG (Digital Negative) image format.
I started shooting raw with my DSLR years ago to get better control over exposure and color. I was looking for the ability to adjust the details of the shadows, illuminate the highlights and correct the color projections according to my taste, and not with the assumptions of my camera.
Apple’s ProRaw, like Google’s computational crude, gives me that freedom, but with smartphone photography. Normal smartphone photos are limited by the data captured in a single image. ProRaw, however, combines multiple frames into a single photo with Apple’s Smart HDR to offer a wider range of brightness to shade and more tonal detail than JPEG or HEIC. (The technical term for this is dynamic range.) And it applies Apple’s Deep Fusion technology, a pixel-by-pixel analysis of each photo to reduce noise while preserving texture and color. ProRaw gives me the flexibility to further preserve both the bright sky and the deep shadows of sunset scenes.
The second benefit is color flexibility. Cameras struggle to judge how best to compensate for tones like the deep blue of shaded scenes or the warm oranges of sunrise and sunset. ProRaw preserves more information about colors, allowing me to warm up the shades of someone’s shaded face so it doesn’t look like hypothermia has set in.
For this photo of a cholla cactus, I prefer the ProRaw version, lower left, to the JPEG above it. Most significantly, pushing the white to yellow and blue balance shows how much more color information ProRaw photos at the bottom have for editing flexibility.
Stephen Shankland / CNET
Another great advantage of ProRaw involves the sharpness algorithms that all cameras employ to make the edges sharp and the eyes to shine. I think Apple’s sharpness often goes too far, turning hectic scenes like a tangle of branches into a nervous mess. When I edit a ProRaw image, I can make it smaller.
For more details, check out my in-depth analysis from my colleague Andrew Hoyle at how ProRaw can improve your phone’s photo.
My ProRaw complaints
I don’t mind Apple hiding ProRaw mode until you specifically enable it. Most people don’t have the time or need to play with photos as much as I and other fans of raw photos. I am also happy that another preference allows you to configure your iPhone to remain in ProRaw mode after activating it. (By default, the phone changes back to JPEG shortly after you finish taking ProRaw photos.)
What I don’t like is looking at my phone’s screen in bright sunlight to check the icon that indicates if ProRaw is enabled. Sometimes I deactivated it with my thumb and missed the shots that should have been ProRaw.
I would prefer Apple, like Google, to record a raw computational photo and a JPEG of each photo. Apple opted for what it considers to be a simpler interface, but I prefer flexibility.
In this photo of Rio Grande, Apple’s ProRaw format, on the left, captured the depth I didn’t find in the JPEG on the right. I was also able to reproduce the warmest sunset colors lost in JPEG when standard iPhone processing tried to give me a blue sky.
Stephen Shankland / CNET
One of the reasons why I still grab my Pixel 5 sometimes is that your camera starts almost instantly with a double tap on the power button, a process that can start when the phone is still in my pocket. The iPhone requires a long press on the camera icon on the lock screen, which is slower.
Still, the ProRaw’s flexibility combined with the range of the iPhone 12 Pro’s three cameras is why it is almost always the first phone I pick up when photographing a scene from nature, my kids or other subjects. It is great that smartphones are constantly invading the lawn before maintained exclusively by state-of-the-art cameras.
If you are happy with the JPEG and HEIC photos taken directly from the phone’s normal camera, I will not belittle you. You can often get good pictures without ProRaw. But if you want more of your photos, ProRaw offers what you need.
The relatively wide dynamic range of Apple’s ProRaw format allowed me to reveal shadow details in this challenging photo looking at the sun. On the left is the unedited image.
Stephen Shankland / CNET