iOS 14.3 brings ProRAW feature to iPhone 12 Pro series

On the afternoon of December 15th, Apple officially pushed the iOS 14.3 system today. The new system brings a series of improvements, naturally including ProRAW photo shooting for iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max users.

The ProRAW feature was released together with the iPhone 12 Pro series and is also a unique feature of the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Apple's ProRAW

In fact, the iPhone has always been able to take RAW format photos. The original meaning of this type of photos is "unprocessed", that is, the CMOS image sensor converts the captured light source signal into raw data of digital signals.

Since RAW files record all image information, photographers can give full play to their imagination when doing post-production. However, RAW files shot by mobile phones lose the advantages of smartphone computational photography because they lack multi-frame synthesis, noise reduction and other processing.

The purpose of Apple ProRAW is to break this shackles, so that files have the control and flexibility of the RAW format, while also experiencing the powerful function of "computational photography".

Eric Zhang's work shot with ProRAW and edited with a third-party app

Apple has built a new image pipeline that combines the processing done by the CPU, GPU, image signal processor, and neural network engine into a new deep image file. It not only provides all standard RAW information, but also comes with Apple image pipeline data. It can be simply understood that ProRAW has increased the optimization of the mobile phone algorithm for images compared to standard RAW, such as smart HDR, deep fusion and other capabilities.

After post-processing (by Eric Zhang)

In iOS 14.3, Apple puts the ProRAW switch in Settings-Camera. By turning on this switch, you can see the button for shooting ProRAW images in the upper right corner of the camera, and the captured images can also be edited directly in the Photos App.