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Well, I have now had my hands on the new iPhone 12 Pro Max for a little under two weeks and I have to say the Camera is quite impressive. Whilst I have not really been able to get out and truly put it through its paces, I have certainly been trying to think of it as a serious alternative to lugging around my DSLR. Now don't get me wrong, I am not by any means advocating that it will replace my DSLR, but I do consider the iPhone as an immediate, always to hand, reason to never miss a photo opportunity again.
As a registered iPhone iOS Beta tester, I have recently installed the latest iOS 14.3 Beta update, which includes the first look at ProRAW for the iOS Camera App and first impressions appear to be that it is a serious contender, in that it works well with all the native iPhone 12 Pro lenses and saves a RAW image in .dng format that can be directly edited in the Lightroom app.
ProRAW does not appear to work with the PORTRAIT or Panoramic mode but that is most likely due to the fact that the iPhone needs to save the additional information in some special format in order to process portrait mode photos and Panoramic shots.
Apple contend that the ProRAW format will offer a full 14 stops of Dynamic Range, allowing for some serious post processing. When you take a ProRAW photograph, the data is saved in RAW format, however the image you are presented on your screen is in fact a jpg representation of what the iPhone algorithm thinks represents what the eye saw, and it is reasonably good.
However, the real fun starts when you open the RAW image in Lightroom, where you will initially see the TRUE RAW image data and can start doing your own post processing.
I must say that initial impressions of the ProRAW data does open the image in what appears to be an underexposed format.
However, there is certainly sufficient dynamic range to overcome this easily in post processing.
I can see you all thinking, what's the big deal, we have been able to shot RAW with third party apps like, Lightroom and Halide for ages. The thing about ProRAW though is, that it is truly aligned to the iPhone camera and the detail that can be recovered in the RAW data, certainly appears to be much greater than with the third party apps that shoot RAW and this is noticeably different for the Night Mode particularly.
I am sure that once 3rd party camera apps get their hands on all the full ProRAW details, then they will add support for using ProRAW features directly.
In the meantime though, if you are in the Apple Beta test program, you can get an early look at ProRAW, but do remember it is a beta test and who knows whether ProRAW will even make the cut for the iOS 14.3 release, because these things are never a given where Apple are concerned.