Apple ProRAW is great! But the workflow isn't…

[Music] uh apple pro raw has finally been released for the iphone this was a feature of ios 14 i've probably been most looking forward to and as of the update this week to 14.3 pro raw has now been enabled for all iphone 12 pro and 12 pro max this means that you can shoot raw photography natively with the standard camera app it's a brilliant new feature it's had high praise on the internet but i do still see there is one major fundamental flaw that gets in the way of truly calling this pro raw and one extra thing that's been added in ios 14.3 is separate from pro raw but is worth mentioning and shouting about and that is finally the addition of pow frame rates for recording videos finally we can record in 25 or 50 frames a second rather than being held to 30 frames or 60 frames a second which is the ntsc counterpart so for those of us in europe and australia and asia we can shoot in our frame rates that match the electricity of our lights and all of the other form factors finally we can shoot 25 frames a second that is a big win and i'm very happy for that let's take a look into what pro raw is what it can do and some constructive feedback on how it can be even better but before we dive into what pro raw is we need to understand what the iphone did previously and also what raw photography is [Music] so previously when you took a photo on the iphone it would take it in a compressed format and it would do some computational photography things such as smart hdr and deep fusion those are two technologies that play with the iphone smart hdr is a feature that takes multiple exposures and blends them all together for a great balanced image it will take areas for highlights for shadows for the mid tones and it will use intelligent masking so that it can blend certain areas of an image and overall make a big impact on the whole image deep fusion is a technology that happens after you've taken the image and it improves things like textures and detail and works especially well for low-light scenarios computational photography isn't exclusive to apple pretty much all smartphone brands are doing their own form of computational photography and they'll come with their own creative taste on what balance that they want to produce so previously this would be in a high efficiency image format and previous to that it was in a jpeg these are compressed formats they are finished and finalized images raw photography on the other hand is an uncompressed format you've got immediate data for all of your rgb channels and you can flexibly adjust everything about your image so you have controls over your white balance your shadows your highlights the exposure pretty much everything about that digital file afterwards can be manipulated freely and flexibly it gives you a greater width to edit your images and overall the quality will be higher however it comes at a sacrifice of having greater file sizes and just more work involved [Music] apple pro raw is kind of like a hybrid between the compressed processed images and the original raw images straight off the camera sensor it gives you the benefit to the technologies such as deep fusion and smart hdr but it gives you the flexibility of a raw image that you can take into an application like lightroom or capture one and you can make your adjustments and really tailor it to your own taste so let's take a look into what pro raw is and what it can do what it's missing and how it can be better so i've got a number of images here that i've taken on the iphone so if we look here this is an image taken with the native camera app and it's using the image processing of the iphone so it's in the heic format and this is an image taken about a second later in the pro raw format you'll see that immediately there is a different view on here however if i was to view between these on my photos app on the phone the images actually look very similar because ios is going to process the pro raw image in the same manner that it does with its processed images and it will give the same context of color on the shadows highlights and everything all combined however when we take that dng format and we open in lightroom lightroom isn't doing any of that processing it's just got a raw file to work with so if we go into our develop module there are a few things at play and a few things that are already natively set from that file so interestingly there's a white point set there's some clarity and the white balance is obviously set but everything else is as standard for a raw file now i can push and pull this with my exposure and i can bring back the highlights the shadows and you'll see that that detail in areas such as the sky is still fully available and likewise i can bring up the shadows and i can do other adjustments and that's of course the flexibility of a raw file at play here so on the iphone you're going to be getting the best of both worlds in terms of previewing your images you'll see the processed image as its own or you'll see a pro raw image that also has some processing applied as you're viewing it with the ability to edit it further if you want to when you extract that file and you open it in something like lightroom you're going to miss out on that processed look however you still have that flexibility and it's down to you to make those adjustments i've already made some adjustments to an image and i've tried to do this in a way that would match up similar to how apple is processing it on the fly so if we compare these side by side on the left we've got the image from the iphone processed as a high efficiency format and on the right this is the pro raw with some edits that i've made to kind of tweak it if we were to adjust these further you'll actually see how much more detail is held in the pro raw so for example if i was to bring up the exposure in the pro raw ignore the highlights for the moment and let's just look at some of this shadow detail and raise up some of the shadows of course yes it's noisy but it's overall still got some detail there now if we do the same on this image which is the high efficiency and let me just compare that so that's now our processed raw and if we look at the high efficiency and if we bring up the shadow detail and some of the exposure and we zoom in we see that we actually lose some of that detail and we introduce even more noise this is of course even more apparent when we look down into lower corners we can really see how the processed image compared to the raw image when you start to manipulate it and move things around it just falls apart and that's just the downside of shooting in a processed format things aren't as flexible and editable to the same quality so what's missing from this workflow what is my biggest gripe about editing pro raw images well it all comes down to how you actually get the images in the first place i don't speak for all pros but i get the impression that the majority would want to be editing their photos on their computer i've spoken about this extensively before in regards to getting video footage from an iphone to a mac it's not the easiest process in a traditional workflow we'll take images on a camera that are saved to a memory card we'll then import that memory card and all of our images go into our library in lightroom generally speaking i'll keep my lightroom library fairly professional in the images i've taken they're all very intentional images and they sit there as a library iphones on the other hand save every single image that enters your phone into the photos app whether that's images from apps themselves with the saved camera features such as instagram snapchat conversations with your friends on whatsapp or images saved from twitter screenshots pretty much everything that enters your phone as an image gets saved into the photos app it means that the photos app has evolved into this huge dumpster fire of every single image it's no longer that intentional place of images that you've taken with your camera it's just everything my photos app has about a hundred thousand images in it from all over the place things that i've airdropped from my mac back to my phone that i've taken on my camera and i just want to post them to socials things that i've taken on my phone and then i've edited in other apps and then they come back as an edited version it's just got everything so unlike the memory card scenario with a camera it makes it very difficult to choose which images you actually want to import into a library that is full with intentional images images that i would be happy to share and cool photography but the problem doesn't stop there it actually goes further in terms of the connectivity between the iphone and your library because of course you could plug your phone in and you could open up in lightroom and choose which images you want to copy across unfortunately it's a very manual process because of course there's going to be images from everything on your phone but it is doable there is a further downside to this though and that the lightning port on the iphone only supports usb 2 speeds so if you're going to be importing a lot of images it's pretty slow usb 3 has been around for over a decade now and we're still importing images with the cable using usb 2 speeds that's just not really good enough is it it makes it slow and cumbersome to preview all of those images that you want to choose it makes it slow to copy across it's just not the most reliable workflow the next best thing is probably airdrop which of course is apple only it will only work between macs and ios devices this means you can browse through on your phone choose particular images and air drop them across again though in reality doing this for large numbers of images can be a little bit unreliable and sometimes the connection just doesn't quite work it works pretty reliably for individual images and small batches but when you start going into the hundreds that's when things get really tricky and sometimes things do fail not only that but you still have to be browsing through your library on a small device and choosing which images you want to add and which ones you don't adding to the further connectivity it's rumored that next year's iphones won't have a port at all so we're sort of limited to this airdrop functionality or a wireless solution it doesn't look like they're going to be adding a faster solution over a cable so this all kind of gets in the way it makes it very difficult to get your photos from your phone into your computer to start editing but i've been having to play around and i think i found a workflow that although is not the best scenario it's very workable and is the most efficient that i found and it all revolves around the photos app on the mac rather than browsing through your whole library what i've done is i've created a smart album called iphone raw that matches the following conditions it makes sure that the photo is a raw image and it makes sure that the camera model is from an iphone and you can choose to have it from a specific type of iphone but as i expect in the future i will upgrade to later versions of the iphone it's easier if i just choose iphone in general and this is going to match your whole library and create a smart album of only your raw images from here i can then select all of them and i can go to file export export unmodified original for 86 photos using the original file name or you could create a title sequential whatever you want to use you can then export these images and i've just got a folder location on my computer called the import bin and i drop it into my iphone and all of my images go there as my import bin so i export all of these originals we can then switch over to lightroom hit import and we choose our location which is our input bin with the iphone folder and you can see that it's already found images that have been previously imported along with some others that aren't in the library so this makes sure that the suspected duplicates aren't included this is an issue that happens quite a lot with airdrop because it's very hard to remember where you left off to choose the next images to airdrop from and to and you end up having a lot of wasted time with files that you don't actually need and from here i can import and if i make sure that i use move rather than copy they'll move from the finder location into my lightroom library and i'm not wasting any storage space so of course this isn't an ideal workflow but given the situation i do believe this to be the most efficient workflow available one of the issues i preemptively see is the wi-fi and reliability of internet of course having these images taken on the phone you're gonna have to rely on them being uploaded to icloud so that they can then be downloaded to your photos app on your mac that's gonna require two lots of bandwidth for the same amount of data one going up one coming down but likewise when you export your photos from the photos app to find on your mac if you've got the icloud document sync enabled there is a good chance that those files that are exported are also going to be uploaded to icloud that is a third round of image bandwidth data and then when you import those into lightroom if the location of those images is also included in your icloud file sync there's a good chance they will be uploaded again for a fourth time so just bear that in mind especially if you're in an area where the internet comes at a premium if you have limited data usage maybe you're hot spotting because you're traveling all of these things just to bear in mind that your images can without realization be uploaded multiple times and downloaded multiple times even though it seems like it's the same image it's going to be using your bandwidth i've run into issues like that in the past which is why i've had to segregate some locations and folders to not be synced but ideally i do like the sync functionality i think it's a great feature but sometimes you just have to know which one you can have and which one you can't and just make your sacrifices in terms of my photos app itself that is just a whole wasteland of hundreds of thousands of images that i have no intention of going back through and organizing and tidying because i just know that it's going to continue to get messier and messy as time goes on it's just one of those cupboards that i just don't dare open to sort out i just keep chucking stuff in it and seeing what happens further down the line really um it's yeah it's an area that i'm not proud of but at the same time it's not really my fault so so of course there are some key issues with the current setup and i fully understand why they exist and apple at times can be quite stubborn in the way that they work but i do also believe that it is for the majority of the benefit for most users in many ways it can be frustrating but in other ways it removes so many of those variations that get in the way of things i do wish there was a little bit of a balance between the two because although i appreciate the fact that pro raw is enabled and it's available on all cameras on the iphone you don't have to pick and choose between the better camera or the better sensor it's just all there for you that's very apple it's also very apple to be confined into a single library with not much control of movement of things [Music] so is there anything else that could solve this well one huge feature that could definitely solve this immediately is if the iphone had a removable memory card slot and the ability to save images taken with the camera direct to the memory card is that gonna happen no apple are most likely never going to do that if anything they're just going to continue to remove ports and simplify the experience for most people this is perfectly fine it does everything that they want it to when they don't have to worry about things like storage and where things are going but for the pro user and the more intense user it can be a little bit frustrating and that's where we do have to come up with these workflows do i wish that there was a better more hybrid integration for sure i would love there to be a better workflow that just allows a little bit more flexibility to push and pull where your files go on the device another feature that may solve this issue almost immediately is if there was a actual dedicated photos app just for images taken on your phone rather than a photos app that includes all images ever how about a photos app just for photos and then maybe a media app or an extra section that has images and media that have come from external sources another feature if they weren't going to go as far as separating out the app is to have the smart albums available on ios to be honest i was kind of surprised that it wasn't available when i went looking for it so i'm not really sure what's going on there but i hope it arrives soon [Music] but all in all is this worth it is pro raw worth it as a file format pro to me is a great format to have and i really appreciate that it's a simple touch toggle in the camera app to enable or disable it you have to go into the settings first of all to enable pro raw and i would also give you a hot tip to do the preserve settings and enable pro raw in there that way your camera app will always remember what your last used setting was whether that was raw enabled or raw disabled i do believe the pro raw format is worthwhile having and is worth shooting in i should point out by the way that the files are about 10 to 12 times larger than what is standard on your iphone so bear that in mind when you think of your storage options and there is a little bit of a weird scenario again with sharing these images via airdrop so if you have your images in your photo library unedited and you share them via airdrop it's going to share the dng format however if you've made adjustments within the photos app such as adjusting your shadows and highlights when you share that image it's going to share a processed jpeg format that way you're sharing your edited image rather than the dng that has adjustments made it's a benefit for most people but it's something to point out if you're thinking of transferring your images if you've made adjustments on your iphone and you still want access to all of the raws the workaround is kind of a bit silly you have to duplicate the file then go and revert your raw adjustments and then share that image hopefully that whole workflow can get shortened into a single control but for the moment that is the workflow and it doesn't quite feel right but it is what it is but some positives from this whole hybrid scenario is when it comes to sharing your images with things like email or in other apps on the fly it's going to convert those dng formats into jpegs and you don't have to worry about it that is a very apple approach in getting things user ready straight out the door so pro raw as a file format is a big win for me it's just the workflow just kind of lets it down again and this is something that can be improved and i really hope it does so looking forward to future versions of ios i hope this gets addressed and i hope these issues iron out to make things a much smoother workflow and really earn its title of being called pro raw so that pretty much rounds out my thoughts on apple pro raw if you're interested in seeing more videos on my channel then make sure you do subscribe and check the links in the description so i hope this video has been informative and helpful to you and i look forward to seeing you in a future video real soon alright see you later bye bye

Channel: Joe Allam

Views: 27,655

Rating: 4.8253636 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Allam, photography, photography vlog, instagram, 4k, canon r5, r5, eos r5, r5 vlog, iPhone 12 pro max, iphone 12 pro, iphone 12, Apple ProRaw, ProRaw, ProRaw iPhone 12 Pro Max, raw photography, lightroom, ios 14.3, ios 14, Apple ProRaw Review, London, iphone photography, iphone photography tips, iphone 12 pro max camera, iphone camera settings, iphone 12 pro max review, tech, technology, uk, british, iphone 12 pro camera, canon eos r5, apple proraw iphone 12 pro

Id: ujv0y0errj0

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020