When Apple announced the iPhone 12 Pro, it introduced a powerful new camera feature: ProRAW. This feature is already available for all Pro and Pro Max models, starting with the 12 series and later, and if you’re picky about photo processing, it’s definitely a feature worth checking out. ProRAW combines the benefits of computational photography with traditional RAW image capture, the best of both worlds.
So why would you want to use ProRAW in the first place? Let’s go back to digital photography school. A traditional RAW image file retains much more information that is captured when you take a photo. Typically, your iPhone’s camera will process that data into a HEIF or JPEG image, discarding the extra data and essentially “embedding” things like white balance, exposure, and detail in shadows and highlights. It’s a smaller, more manageable file, but it’s not as flexible for post-processing. A RAW image retains more of that original information and provides much more flexibility for photo editing.
Shooting RAW images on a traditional camera is generally preferred if you want to get the most out of your images, but it’s not exactly the same on a phone camera. This is because a traditional RAW file is just one frame and loses the benefits of computational photography like multi-frame processing. The JPEG image from a smartphone camera may be less flexible, but may include more detail and less noise than a smartphone photo processed from a RAW image that did not benefit from those computational techniques.
Enter ProRAW. A ProRAW image combines all of these benefits in a single file. Multi-frame processing is applied, and the final saved image retains much more information than a standard iPhone JPEG.
It’s great if you want to process your own photos instead of leaving it up to your phone, but there’s a downside: much larger image files. High-resolution ProRAW files average around 75MB compared to around 3-4MB for a standard JPEG. That means around 14 ProRAW files will add up to around 1 GB, so it won’t take long for you to fill up your phone’s storage with massive image files.
Considering that, ProRAW is a powerful tool to use in specific situations; you just need to know how to enable it on your phone. Here is how to do it. (I followed these steps on an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 16.3.1.)
Once ProRAW is enabled, you need to turn it on in the Camera app. There are two ways to do this:
You can use 12-megapixel ProRAW with any of your iPhone’s cameras, including the selfie camera, though 48-megapixel mode will obviously only work with the 14 Pro’s main camera. ProRAW doesn’t support portrait mode either.
Your ProRAW files will be recorded as DNG files, which can be edited directly on your phone or in your photography software of choice, where you can bask in the glory of all those pixels. Just remember to disable ProRAW when you’re done for the sake of your device storage.
