Another nail in the DSLR’s coffin.
Here’s Apple on the technology.
Your intrepid writer was to be seen at 2AM of a beautiful Scottsdale night (Jammies? Scotch tartan, green. Slippers from LL Bean) banging away in both JPG and ProRAW on the iPhone 12 Pro Max after installing iOS 14.3, the operating system which added ProRAW support.
Great news? My ancient Lightoom 6.4 imports the files faster than a Wall Street shyster can take your money, no questions asked. Apple uses the universal DNG file format, saving us yet another upgrade from the nasty people at Adobe and allowing what is now ‘legacy’ software to continue working fine. No monthly shakedown payment required.
Here’s the import dialog in LR for both the JPG and ProRAW files:
The import dialog.
The files after import:
The imported files.
As Apple advises, file sizes for the RAW images are much larger, suggesting you want to selectively use the technology to conserve storage space – there’s a toggle in the photo taking screen:
File sizes.
The ProRAW highlights in this extreme dynamic range image seem beyond redemption:
ProRAW highlights.
But after working the sliders vigorously ….
Slider adjustments.
….a crackerjack image emerges:
After slider adjustments.
ProRAW is not true RAW, in the sense that Apple (wisely) retains its image manipulation to provide the sharpest images by melding the best, and adding Deep Fusion where appropriate. But the results meaningfully improve on SOOC JPGs, just be prepared to work the post-processing software quite a bit. Nothing a Preset or two in LR couldn’t largely automate.
