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by cphaynes 3194 days ago
I got the 8 Plus (upgrade from the 6S Plus), mainly for the camera. Lugging my Nikon D610 has become a pain in the ass.

I wish iOS would allow native DNG (RAW) captures with their camera app. They added HEIC but not DNG? It'd be so much faster to snap a pic and capture DNG with the native app, rather than firing up LR Mobile / VSCO, etc.

3 comments

The native Camera app doesn’t have it but iOS 10 included the ability for apps to get the raw sensor data. I imagine there are third-party apps that provide it.
While I agree, I speculate that Apple doesn't allow this simply for iCloud Photo Library backup aspects. The HEIC/HEVC save backup space. Backing up RAW/DNG would be data costly. I realize there are ways around this, but it's not Apple's style.
There are apps like ProCam that take RAW images and save them to the camera roll, they sync over iCloud Photo Library without issue. I think the normal user is just fine with JPEG or HEIF and the space savings are more important, so Apple has kept it out of Camera.app.
I'm not sure why they couldn't, though. They provide several different format options for recording video, like 1080p vs 4K.
Yeah, but at the end of the day the different video settings still use "standard" formats that a normal consumer can open on their desktop or laptop. HEIF being the real outlier, changing any of the settings buried in Settings.app for the built-in Camera.app doesn't effect the ability of a normal user to view their content on a current operating system (Windows 10 or macOS High Sierra). RAW images change all of that - Windows 10 has really basic support for some RAW formats, and there are some workarounds like RAW+JPEG in ProCam but it results in two separate files combined as one "image" in your iCloud Photo library, syncing this to a Windows PC results in two files and just confuses users (macOS works around this by hiding everything in the Photo Library, invisible to most users).
Check out the app “Manual"