Take ProRAW Photos

Apple has allowed users to shoot RAW photos on their iPhones since iOS 10 was released back in 2016, however doing so always required a compromise — you were forced to choose between getting a pure RAW photo or taking advantage of Apple’s advanced computational photography features.

For the first couple of years of RAW support, that wasn’t really a huge tradeoff, since there weren’t really all that many advanced photography features to lose, but with last year’s debut of Smart HDR, Deep Fusion, and Night Mode on the A13-equipped iPhone 11 models, suddenly this became something of a Hobson’s choice for many photographers: either shoot RAW for maximum editing flexibility or get much better photos on the front-end by taking advantage of the A13’s Neural Engine.

Fortunately, Apple has solved this dilemma with a new “ProRAW” format that it’s introduced with the iPhone 12 Pro, which allows a pure RAW photo to be encapsulated with all of the computational photography data calculated by the A14’s Neural Engine. When editing the photo later on, photographers can choose whether to apply some or all of this data selectively to the underlying pixel-by-pixel RAW image, giving them the best of all possible worlds.

Unfortunately, even though the iPhone 12 sports the same A14 chip as the iPhone 12 Pro, Apple has only added ProRAW support to the more expensive flagship models. It’s unclear if this is an artificial limitation to distinguish the higher-end model as a “Pro” device, or if there’s some technical reason for it, although it is worth noting that the iPhone 12 Pro does have 50 percent more RAM, which could account for the difference.