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by kelsolaar 1239 days ago
I always shoot in Raw (using the Lightroom iPhone App) to make sure that this kind of defects never occur. Noise is generally preferable and acceptable that the disaster trail left by denoising et al. At least you can do it yourself in a way that pleases you instead of having a ruined photograph.
3 comments

With the pixel6 (and most android phones) you can set it up to do both. So you have the "nice" version generated by the phone and a dng raw file to work with. I have that set up along with syncthing to deliver the raw photos to my laptop (pro tip, this is super handy).

The new iphone and the pixel6 both use the same trick where they have a 50 megapixel sensor (probably the same and likely a Sony sensor) that produces 12.5 megapixel raw photos with four pixels combined information. So the dng I get from my phone has already had some processing done to it but not a lot. Also worth noting that both phones have multiple lenses with different focal lengths and sensors. So, it matters a lot which one you use. You'd control this via the camera app typically with its different modes and zoom levels. I'm not sure if it uses exposures from all sensors to calculate a better raw but that would not surprise me.

In terms of noise, the image quality is actually very good. I've done some night time photography with both the pixel6 and my Fuji XT-30, which is an entry level mirror less camera. The Fuji has better dynamic range and it shows in the dark. But the noise levels are actually pretty good for a phone camera. Very usable results with some simple post processing. Especially compared to my previous Android phone (a Nokia 7 plus) which was noisy even in day light. Mostly doing raw edits is not worth doing that but it's nice to have the option. The phone does a decent job of processing and mostly gets it right when it comes to tone mapping and noise reduction. When it matters, I prefer the Fuji. But sometimes the phone is all you have and you just take a quick photo and it's fine.

A high end full frame camera will get you more and better pixels and more detail. Even an older entry level dslr will generally run circles around smart phone sensors. And that's just the sensor and camera. The real reason to use these is the wide variety of lenses and level of control over the optics that those provide. In phone bokeh is a nice gimmick. But it's a fake effect compared to a nice quality lens. Likewise you can't really fake the look you get with a good portrait lens (the effect that things in the background seem bigger). Phone lenses have a fixed focal range and generally not that much aperture range. There's a reason people pay large amounts of money to own good lenses. They are really nice to use and deliver a great photo without a lot of digital trickery. And they are optimized for different types of photography. There is no one size fits all lens for all photography.

That is what I was thinking. The poster said the photo looked okay at the moment they took a picture and the phone's processing takes over and he then gets junk.

I wonder how hard to is to take 'RAW' photos without adding an app first.

You can use the camera app. It’s all in the settings menu for Pro models: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/take-apple-proraw-pho...

This is a “there’s already a solution, but the average consumer wouldn’t know about it, because the defaults are made for them” type of problem.

One could claim that it's a UI problem, and should be exposed in the Camera app. This may be true, but the files are 10 to 12 times larger, with a real "quality hit", as perceived by the average user, for overall aesthetics. I personally think it should be in the settings menu. It's not something you would want enabled without understanding and intent.

It’s a little frustrating that apple added this feature, for this exact kind of thing, and they’re, inadvertently or not, getting a little dumped on, do to lack of knowledge/research.

These features (Google also attempted to standardize it, not sure they succeeded) were a big deal in the photography world.

Sorry, I do not have an iPhone. How easy is the 'RAW' feature to find?

I understand what you mean about most users do not need such a feature. But while supporting computers I am surprise how many features of programs users do not know exist not just because they do not use them but also how hard it is to get at some features.

Personally, I seen too many programs where you need to know to turn OFF certain functions before you can enable some other feature. The users often never see what they needed because it is so hard to enable that feature without know they need to turn something else OFF.

To find the RAW feature you need to do two things:

Go to Settings -> Camera -> toggle Apple ProRAW on

Then in the Camera app there will be a "RAW" button that you can tap on to enable RAW capture

Third party camera apps like Halide (https://halide.cam) focus on just using the RAW capabilities by default

+1 for Halide, which I didn't know about. Apple doesn't give non-Pro 13s access to RAW images (that I know of), but Halide does out of the box. The camera AI was driving me crazy on my 13mini; now I have a solution. Are there other similar apps of similar quality? In particular, I'd love an excellent BW app which is (at least relatively) AI-free.
The iPhone RAW mode still does quite heavy processing though.

Here’s a comparison I just made between the iPhone camera’s RAW and default modes, and Halide: https://i.ibb.co/XFMJVjz/9-DD734-F7-CA00-4-E53-85-C7-283315-...

ProRAW appears to not be as processed, but still processed: "Apple ProRAW combines the information of a standard RAW format along with iPhone image processing" [1]

1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211965