Very nice write up. However, who is the audience? The demographic that this info is relevant to must be infinitesimal.
A serious photographer will try to maximize quality with camera gear that starts out with strong baseline IQ potential - Pro camera, large sensor, quality lenses.
People who subscribes to the value prop of iphone 12 pro max, do not lean towards this model for the above reasons.
Honestly, I went out to Marin Headlands this morning to photograph the sunrise, brought my 60mpix fullframe camera and some amazing lenses. But while waiting for the best light or long exposures I snap off a couple pictures on the phone. And I was just thinking, if I'd just post to Instagram and not print, I probably wouldn't even bother with the fullframe camera - a nice hike without 20lbs of gear and as great photos if you don't need the resolution/detail. HDR+ and the other computational photography goodness makes for great photos straight out of the phone and a tiny bit of editing then goes long way.
I bet if you showed 20 non-photographers 2 images a phone screen, one from the phone and one fullframe edited, most wouldn't appreciate the difference.
That said, I wouldn't give up my camera for many shots but I can understand why many people do. Post-processing camera raws is definitely more cumbersome than quickly editing photos on a phone.
For your use case, are you going to pixel peep and compare RAW file formats differences? As if that knowledge would somehow materially affect your Instagram photo result.
You're right, my point was a little lost in my long-winded answer.
RAW files just give you more latitude after the fact, and editing can either really eek out the last 20% or allow the photographer to better express their "artistic vision" and achieve a look (eg split toning or color grading). All this worked before on jpegs even, but raw just closes the camera/smartphone gap a tad bit more - especially when it's easily available to everyone.
You might be right that it's currently a niche, but if the UX improves, widespread adoption might happen.
I agree that most non-photographers probably couldn’t reliably predict if a 3x3” image came from a phone or larger-format camera, but my suspicion is that subconsciously people will think the image with features like true narrow DoF “look better” even if they can’t articulate why.
Almost no-one who matters cares about "image quality". It's something that just needs to be good enough. It's not a particularly important aspect of making a good photo. OP's story highlights a much more important aspect: being in the right place at the right time.
I guess I'm getting old, but I can't help but observe that the image quality provided by a smartphone today is superior to anything available even to rich amateurs when I was a kid in the 90s. This is especially so when you look at color accuracy and dynamic range as well as resolution (which is much less important, but much more often obsessed over).
Good thing I don't care at all what most people care about. If everyone had your attitude we'd all be listening to pop music instead of classical as well.
While I love shooting in RAW on Sony A7RIV which of course the iPhone can't hold a candle to (except maybe in full right for non moving objects that don't need a shallow depth of field). That being said far more often that not, I don't have that camera with me, or the ability to grab it and take a photo in seconds when a moment is fleeting, so certainly use my iPhone camera very often since it's always with me, always on. And being able to get more out of those photos in raw editor that I would use for my normal mirrorless photos, is a great benefit. So while of course shooting raw in general is niche and shooting proraw would of course be more niche, certainly don't think it would be infinitesimal in any respect.
>Very nice write up. However, who is the audience?
Any pixel-peeping digital photographer, so millions...
>A serious photographer will try to maximize quality with camera gear that starts out with strong baseline IQ potential - Pro camera, large sensor, quality lenses.*
You'd be surprised. There are other elements "serious photographers" sometimes optimize for, including weight, stealth, convenience, and so on.
Stealth is a bigger part than most would think about, but it is a big benefit with most camera bodies being a dark color. Holding it close to your body instead of extended arms allows that dark color to blend in especially if the photog is also wearing dark colors.
If a pro photographer is on an assignment, sure they're almost certainly going use a high-end camera--probably a full-frame DSLR/mirrorless. But a ton of "serious photographers" aren't always on a photographic mission and, for them, something they have on them anyway that they can take good photos with anyway is pretty attractive.
I'm "serious" for some definitions of the word and I definitely don't bother to haul around a dedicated camera as much as I used to.
And of course tons of pro photographers have shot with the iPhone and such phones. Even more so in photojournalism, street photography, documentary photography etc.
Now, ad work, wedding, magazine portraiture, etc will of course mostly use their medium formats or $10K mirrorless setups...
If a mirrorless digital camera company ever made their software anywhere near as good as this, or if Apple ever brought their software expertise to a device with a full-frame format sensor and lens mount, they would absolutely dominate that market.
AFAIK a good chunk of digital camera processing is still done in ASIC/hardware and mindshift to GPU/CPU SIMD/software will take time, so it will probably be a while until camera manufacturers even begin to catch up.
That said, Olympus does a couple computational photography approaches (handheld multishot high res) and Fuji recently introduced in-camera HDR - but I tried neither.
They should drop their custom ASICs and just stick a Qualcomm Snapdragon as a replacement. They could use Android and create a platform with an app store with APIs to access their sensor. Opening up the hardware in this standard way to developers would really add a lot of value to their cameras.
I have no idea why they haven't done this already.
This is a huge area for disruption IMO. Using a Snapdragon chip plus an FPGA/ASIC to translate SLVS-EC to MPI and buying a sensor would allow for a camera with much better performance characteristics possibly even at a lower price, and the programmable hardware would open up an insane amount of possibilities and allow for incredible value.
If anyone wants to consider doing this, shoot me a message.
Sony cameras secretly are Android devices. You can write your own Android apps for them[1].
Why this isn't advertised, promoted, & made available? Why digital cameras seem to want to get their lunch taken by phones? Not sure!
I think it was way too soon, but Samsung had a good go with a series of Samsung Galaxy Cameras[2] that were proud Android brandishing devices. Android has gotten better, mobile chips have gotten way better. But even something more like the unofficial OMF that I linked, a Sony camera, that doesn't look like an Android system, it looks like a camera, but is really Android and can run Android? That makes hella-sense to me.
Well, only the older ones, the A7iii and onward don't have an accessible Android subsystem. But even for those before the A7iii, it's more of a subsystem and doesn't have access to a lot of functions that are done by specialized chips.
I’m sorry but I cannot fathom using Android (or iOS) on a professional camera. My Canon gear is extremely fast and responsive and Android is anathema to that. It powers on instantly and I can flip through menus as fast as I can physically turn the control wheel. I can change batteries in less than a second. My cameras will run for years without slowing down. My 7D is ten years old and as performant as the day I bought it. (It’s actually better since a firmware update lets me hotswap memory cards with my 5Dmk3.)
They can process raw images in body and display them at any zoom level without lag, loading or any other issue. My R5 has a touch screen but it’s faster and more comfortable to use the physical controls, especially since you can change settings without actually having to even look. It’s almost identical to my 5Dmk3 except they moved a couple of buttons because of the articulating screen hinge.
This is exactly what most photographers want. Familiar hardware that doesn’t get in the way. That gives the best optical quality that accurately and faithfully captures a scene giving total creative freedom to the photographer not the processor.
The idea of ruining a perfectly good system by pushing Android onto it ‘because apps’ or whatever it is such HN/disruptive nonsense.
Look at any smartphone photo on a large screen and they’re basically mush when it comes to detail. This is fine for most people, these phone cameras are far better than the point and shoot market they have rightfully destroyed.
People edit professional camera photos on large screens and nobody wants to use their camera to edit. Nobody wants their professional camera to introduce computational artefacts onto their exposure. Nobody wants to wait for it to boot. Nobody wants battery life to fall through the floor.
Lytro made a light field camera that ran Android. It was a fun gimmick and is now gathering dust on my shelf. Now Zeiss is making one for $6k and no one who actually cares about photography will buy it.
I have no idea why this was downvoted. Android is bloated and clunky, and far too many manufacturers put it in devices where it solves precisely zero problems and creates hundreds.
I hear your concerns, I recognize your needs. I just don't see that rebasing the camera's software atop something more flexible & open-to-building-atop like for example Android would in any way pose a threat to the camera as you know & love it.
The fact is there's no reason you'd even have to know a camera is running Android. You can put whatever user-interface shell you want on to an OS, and it could run the same form factor, present the same (hopefully better) menus and interfaces & buttons, flip through menus just as fast, have the same optics, allow the same batteries. Get Micron or someone to use persistent memory so the boot time is even less than what you have now, which is not, as you say, instant, at least not on any camera I've ever seen.
New cameras like the Sony A7S iii have really good buttons-or-touchscreen interfaces. I think a lot of people have thought buttons are the way to go, have a die-hard perspective on what a proper camera is, but they, now that the future is here, are finding the flexibility offered amazing, finding that they would never want to go back.
> The idea of ruining a perfectly good system by pushing Android onto it ‘because apps’ or whatever it is such HN/disruptive nonsense.
The software defined world is one of open possibilities. "Because apps" is such a droll unimaginative slander of that notion. It's great that you feel so well served by your fixed-function cast-in-stone device, but it A) doesn't have to be that way forever, for every-one, and B) if cameras do get more flexible & capable of user-defined behaviors, it doesn't mean you have to lose this thing you evidently love.
Allowing people the flexibility to explore additional ways of doing photography seems to me like it should be obvious & is a frontier I look forward to opening.
I come from a different place. My friends are all pro-sumer, not professionals, but we're all insulted beyond belief how inflexible, how bad the computational photography is on our fancy mirrorless cameras, especially as compared to modern Pixel cameras. More-so, failure to start allowing more creative uses of cameras is an existential risk to cameras. Yes, some photogs will keep readily buying forever, but a lot of consumers find way more value from their phones, and cameras ought to want to be able to compete, to be devices for creativity. Right now, they are, but primarily inside the same lines they have been for decades on end now.
> This is exactly what most photographers want.
Not that big a market, compared to the rest of the world, who also enjoy taking photos, it turns out. But I think the photogs would be better served too, in the long run; much better served.
The user interface in my A7ii is actually Android, mostly. Responsive Android is absolutely doable if you design it a certain way, and there is no need to remove features like removable batteries or literally anything else.
There is also absolutely no need for it to introduce artifacts into your images. RAW+JPEG is already good enough for this.
The actual advantage of an open camera are huge. For example, it would be trivial to adapt the camera to literally any mount, from EF to E to G and so on, which in and of itself is completely disruptive.
Phone processors have other aces up their sleeve. For example, unlike the Canon EOS R5, they can actually process 8K video indefinitely without breaking a sweat.
As for battery life, you're once again very wrong. The biggest draws in battery life in a camera are the processor and the sensor. Using a phone processor would allow for much lower energy usage as the lithography is incredibly more efficient, and all the high-battery-usage parts of a phone would disappear, such as always-on LTE modems, background processing, and so on.
For boot, Android with a camera sized battery and no modem can last weeks in standby, months in sleep mode. Your camera already doesn't turn off, but instead enters a low-power state. Try removing the battery of an A7 or EOS R, discharging the internal energy storage, and see how long it takes to start.
The actual advantage of this is that it allows you to become a camera manufacturer for much lower costs, meaning that you don't have to limit yourself to a single mount, and can outsource some R&D externally. For example, you won't need to be Fuji to have accurate film sims, you won't need to be Canon to have native level EF compatibility, and you'd even be able to do revolutionary things like autofocus manual lenses.
Beyond that, you'd be able to do things like temporal noise reduction, 3D depth mapping for haze removal, and so on, that can be either used for automatic processing and/or made available in RAW format for further editing.
Basically, you're describing "what if a phone company made a bad camera". What I'm talking about at least is "what if photographers made a camera untethered by the restrictions of existing cameras using commodity hardware". I think the second has the potential of seriously providing value.
> For example, it would be trivial to adapt the camera to literally any mount, from EF to E to G and so on, which in and of itself is completely disruptive.
That’s a bit hyperbolic, the collar isn’t the only difference between those lens connectors.
It is a bit hyperbolic, but both the EF, E and Nikon G mounts have been essentially fully reverse engineered as far as driving a lens. The issue is that the communication to the body of some information isn't fully understood yet and might never be, which prevents third-party lenses as well as adapters from working properly.
If you were to make a camera that is fully open, maybe even modifiable on the info it sends to the lens and what information it wants back, then you would get aftermarket adapters for Canon EF (you could also make one yourself with publicly available info). Sony E would be a tougher nut to crack, but there is a fair bit of info already out and there are already E mount adapters feasible.
So yes, maybe trivial is hyperbolic because of the Sony E mount, but very feasible.
I agree the mounts have been mostly reverse engineered, but that doesn’t detract from my point (which I might not have done a good job of articulating). The point I was trying to make is that each mount has different focal characteristics which would make it non-trivial to support on a single body (with a swappable collar adapter). Doable, yes, but not trivial. Even ignoring the focal differences, electrically (aka lens to camera communication) wouldn’t be what I would call trivial either.
(For background, a friend and I worked on designs for making an open camera platform a few years ago)
Oh, I didn't mean that the physical mounts have been mostly reverse engineered. I meant that the camera→lens communications have been fully to almost fully reverse engineered.
Mount optical characteristics are very simple. Just make sure your base mount has a larger diameter and a shorter flange distance, and you're golden. If you are designing your camera around that it is almost trivially done.
The code for implementing a basic E mount is on github, for the EF mount you just have to go looking around on some forums or buy it from the guy behind Metabones, same for Nikon G.
Fun fact, Android was originally designed to be a digital camera OS.
> The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004
They don't even need to go full smartphone processor and OS, adding something GPGPU-esque to offload the computations to would work. Deep Neural Nets brought us many "edge TPUs", I don't see why they wouldn't equally work to process images quickly and they're reprogrammable.
> AFAIK a good chunk of digital camera processing is still done in ASIC/hardware
I’m not authoritative on this topic, but I can’t think of a camera produced by one of the majors which isn’t mostly or entirely ASIC based for image processing.
> Fuji recently introduced in-camera HDR
Canon has had in-camera HDR for years, but I’m not sure I’d really put the output in the same category as a modern smartphone.
Having demosaicing and complicated features like shot compositing happen before “raw” encoding disqualifies this from use in professional-oriented cameras.
In most situations that photographers actually care about (i.e. capturing beautiful, good light), ILCs already murder the iPhone. Computational photography may be cool but it is just helping the iPhone emulate ILCs.
iPhones make good photos because they stand out from competition. People look at them and see they are different. Soon everybody is going to be fed up with dramatic lighting, extended dynamic range because competition will be doing the same.
Good photos stand the test of time because they are interesting, not because they have pumped colors and HDR.
Ohh, I just remembered the long-delayed Zeiss ZX1 ($6000 fixed-lens 35mm f/2.0 camera) that has Adobe Lightroom built in. I like the concept, I bet the implementation is quite flawed though.
If I were spending that money on a fixed-lens camera, it'd be a Leica Q (thanks, craigmod :/ ) but the concept is interesting.
A used Q in good shape can now be had for a reasonable amount of cash. I’m still on Q1 and love it. (Although the hardware interface improvements to Q2 are subtle but impressive.)
The iPhone 12 may have some cool auto computational features, but in no way is it better than an ILC camera like a DSLR. If you actually compare image quality side by side, a DSLR typically will smoke an iPhone. Not to mention there is no way to go past ~100mm on even the best phones.
Oh I forgot, I only do portraits and stopped taking interchangeable lens cameras with me places over half a decade ago. I don't do landscapes or wildlife photography, nor did I ever have a desire to to make rivers look like smudges with a long exposure.
For portraits, iPhone 12 Pro in okay lighting is the first one where I say, yeah good enough and often times better.
I don't care about DXOMark, I care about what humans think, and across mediums a photo from an iPhone 12 Pro absolutely is good and great enough.
Well, if you take one single kind of image that the software is optimized to almost fake, yes you can get close. But you'll never get to the level of, say, an a7iii+85mm1.4 even for portraits, even in good light.
In any case, good enough and better are two very different words. I really enjoy taking pictures on an ILC much more and the results I get are noticeably better even in portraits, including by people that don't know what I took it with. For example, good luck emulating the look of a 135mm f/2.8 (at night) with an iPhone if we're talking about portraits, or good luck doing better than a 50mm 1.4 for street, good luck doing better than a 70-200 2.8, and so on.
But yes, it has a much lower skill ceiling and often more consistent results, and it really does get close.
I enjoy the a-series but that’s exactly what I’m moving on from
I think I’ll get a gimbal and some contraption to trigger flash and maybe some adapter lenses as they trickle out for this form factor
Yes, the consistency in such a wide range of lighting situations is what’s attractive. Along with the built in non-destructive editing. Soon, ProRAW for even more of that. Live Photos by default which “captures the moment” more than the composition itself, and a software and syncing pipeline that supports that seamlessly. With the nearest replacement being an entire tool-belt and bags of gear.
I think at this point we will see the market choose, and often times I ahead of the accepted trend on that. A daguerreotype was probably superior processing technology than film and paper but it wasn’t convenient enough to remain an option. Same went for film and dedicated digital cameras. I think this is where we are now with the iphone 12 pro and ProRAW, even for photo enthusiasts.
Well, to boot, no, film and paper were far way easier and more powerful to process than daguerréotype, and digital is also way more powerful to process than film. That being said, I do think you lose out on a lot of convenience with an iPhone as your sole camera.
To start, you can actually crop. You can use lenses with a higher focal length than 70mm, which for many people makes all the difference in portraits. If you're using something like ProRAW, you're limited to 1/3 of an FPS vs 20FPS.
If you want to capture the moment on an ILC, you can also just hold the shutter. This would be the very first time we go from a platform that has higher image quality and more editing lattitude to a technology that has less of it. The replacement isn't an entire tool belt and bags of gear, for me it's an A7ii and a 28-75 2.8 (for a total cost lower than the iPhone 12 Pro + my current phone and will outlive it by four or five times).
As for sales, the iPhone has already gobbled up everything except the high end camera market, which is actually seeing increasing sales, so we'll see about that. I don't find it all that probable.
As for ProRAW, it's technically completely inferior to, say, an ARW file.
Even if I wasn’t, I love large prints and we always have some up in our house. Cell phone pictures are fine if you’re looking at them on your phone - not so much at 20x30”.
knowing that you only do portraits makes me disagree with you even more, no way your iphone can come close to a portrait shot with an 85mm or 135mm lens. Also the bokeh effect on iphones looks super unnatural
I keep trying to leave my DSLR at home, but instead am looking at upgrading my Nikon. I love the iPhone and what it can do, and think flagship phones are the best snapshot cameras there have ever been.
But, my Nikon with my 50mm just takes noticeably better pictures in so many situations, particularly portraits. And if I expand my lens usage to my wide angle or my 300mm now we’re into types of pictures phones are completely incapable of taking.
"Understanding RAW" I was reading this article thinking, "I should have bought an iPhone 12 Pro." But then taking a step back, I think there's an Adobe Lightroom for Mobile app which allows you to take photos with DNG file format: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/capture-photos-mo...
ProRAW just seems like a container format which includes all the additional Apple goodness which comes from computational photography.
I find people misunderstand what RAW is about and what and who it is for.
If you think your pictures are better, you are deluding yourself the same way audiophiles moan about qualities of their high end, thousand dollar per feet audio cables.
I use RAW files and full manual because I have an actual workflow where I shoot a bunch of photos in similar setting and want to be able to create Lightroom preset and apply to all photos shot with same place, lighting and exposure.
It also sometimes saves me because when I am super clumsy and forget to calculate and adjust exposure I may get a photo that is under or overexposed a lot but for some reason I still want to keep it.
No, it is not going to let you make better pictures. If you want to make better pictures here are some things that are infinitely more productive to achieve that:
- try to do some exercises like trying to move about, compose and visualize your shot before taking the photo,
- try another exercise and for 6 months only take a single photo whenever you see an occasion to make photos,
- try another exercise and for 6 months only go about with a single primary lens (I have used original Fuji X100 to not be tempted, with great results),
- try to learn zone system. Learn to evaluate highlights and shadows and adjust your exposure without any meter. Use it to make pictures you want in lighting with extremely high dynamic range,
etc.
Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better.
Shooting raw lets me save a few percent of photos where exposure is a little wrong. This is huge on its own, and you mention it.
It also lets me stretch things and make scenes work which would otherwise exceed the dynamic range of the exposure and the built in tone mapping would guess wrong.
Storage is cheap these days. If you're not doing something boost-shooting/burst intensive, why not shoot raw? Most of the time the result will be the same, and occasionally it will let you do much more.
And, here, IMO, the rant is particularly off base. A big part of ProRAW is being able to have big linear HDR stacks, which is immensely powerful and absolutely will let you do things you couldn't do any other way.
Or you could do both. My camera is set to save two images per shot--one RAW and one JPEG. This is a great learning tool for a beginner like myself. The default settings yield somewhat over-saturated colors for JPEGs, so it's always nice to have a side-by-side comparison for every picture.
RAW is supposed to be the data that the sensor captures (well, today that's more or less true). The actual images saved on phone/SD (JPEG or HEIC or whatever) are just processed RAWs with some destructive presets (WB, contrast curve, sharpening, color tone-mapping, ...) applied and written out to storage. Some of these presets are destructive (gamma curves, bit-depth reduction for JPEG) and cannot be undone.
So of course RAW doesn't make for better photos, but for original input data to do your own edit on. If you don't know how to edit, you're probably better off with the experience/work that the manufacturer put into the in-camera presets.
In my opinion the main advantage is that RAW files save the full color-depth info _and_ RAW files are not gamma-mapped (i.e. linear encoded), that enables all of your use-cases above. You would still get 90% of that advantage if you were to demosaic, color correct to a profile-connection-space but keep the linear encoding and original 12-16 bit depth, even if you were to compress that data via DCT/JPEG to save space. That's sort of what ProRAW is.
> I use RAW files and full manual because I have an actual workflow where I shoot a bunch of photos in similar setting and want to be able to create Lightroom preset and apply to all photos shot with same place, lighting and exposure.
This is basically a scene-referred workflow, but without any standardization (like ACES). Because all the files conform to the same transfer function, you can grade ("create a LR preset", which is just like grading just worse UX) once to create a look and then apply that look to all footage ("photographies") at once to get a very consistent look. I've said it before, I'll say it again, the movie industry has this figured out, they got standards (ACES) and tooling for this. (And, movie tools are far, far superior to any photo tool I've seen yet when it comes to color. All the photo editing tools seem to be stuck in some kind of moronic hellhole were half of them get disqualified from the start for being destructive editors and the other half has bad UX and is basically limited to an operational vocabulary straight from a darkroom).
Apart from stuff like this there are some scenarios in which RAW might still result in a better overall IQ but the JPEG engines in cameras are really, really good and for practically any scene they're fine, and even for most very high contrast scenes (like shadow + oncoming sun) they'll still produce fine images.
I am an amateur. I have a color card but it only gets used in very complex lighting situation when I need some help understanding what the lighting was to resolve some color issues. I may use SpyderCube when working with indoor light that I do not control.
My understanding of is that brain works in a different way when interpreting moving and still images. In a moving image the differences from reality are much more easily picked up by the brain and so color or image distortion problems stand out much more.
Also, I think, brain is trained to some particular standards of how the moving image is shot and processed. We can easily recognize "movie" or "television" shooting and processing methods and this is starkly visible when somebody is messing with it. For example, The Fellowship of The Ring looked very strange to me the first time I watched it because of how smooth it was due to higher framerate, but at the same time I did not find it out of place for television.
They sure will, since some of us who shoot raw-only don't masturbate about a single/composite picture for 10-30 minutes. We shoot our fullframes as we walk/hike/climb/ski/whatever and move on, to snap another 50 or 200 on that day while not slowing down. Ever been in altitude? You will damn sure appreciate the enhanced options RAW format out of good sensor will give you in postprocess. Ever did a night photo of nature, mountains, stars, milky way etc? Well good luck with JPEGs on those. And I could go on and on for quite some time.
I am not even going into how tools don't make picture better, that's pure clueless rubbish.
> try to learn zone system. Learn to evaluate highlights and shadows and adjust your exposure without any meter. Use it to make pictures you want in lighting with extremely high dynamic range
This is pretty hard to do with the stock iphone camera app.
raw doesn't automatically give you better results, but it retains much more information and therefore in post production you have a lot more room to make artistic changes (color grade)
Oh dear. I'm sorry, but you are objectively wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. But I guess I'll try nevertheless :)
- Sharpen/noise reduction: If you want to avoid over-denoising and over-sharpening you need RAW, there's no way around it. I find Apple's rendering (and most other phone makers) distasteful. Anything above ISO 800 is just trash on JPG but pretty good on RAW. It's the reason I left my Canon G10 and later S100 on the drawer years ago when the iPhone started shooting RAW.
- Dynamic range (latitude, for old folks like me). If you want detail on the sky and on the shadow under the rock on a sunny day, you need RAW. Also, no other way around it.
Magic-AI-Smart-Auto-HDR+ can sometimes help but it's comical at most others.
Distributing the tones is part of the creative process.
>Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better
Oh yes, they will. That camera doesn't matter motto never dies, it seems. Tools are extremely important. They don't work on their own, of course, but are definitively part of the equation.
Since we're on HN, a good analogy would be that because all computers are Turing Complete, they are all equivalent and you shouldn't worry with specs, OS, languages, editors, compilers, etc.
While one can make an interesting sports event shot with a pin-hole you can't use it to freeze someone in mid-air, etc, etc. I think you get the point :)
Smartphones have gotten very good at handling shots with huge dynamic range but I’m not sure if I really like these kinds of photos. Having everything in the photo in range looks very artificial sometimes.
> That camera doesn't matter motto never dies, it seems. Tools are extremely important. They don't work on their own, of course, but are definitively part of the equation.
I've attended a lot of photo meets, and if I had a dollar for every shooter who showed up with the latest and greatest gear, only to post poorly composed, poorly lit, overprocessed dreck weeks later...
I think a better analogy is bicycles. You can have the fanciest, lightest racing bike in the world, but if you're not a trained athlete it's not going to help you much. If you are a trained athlete, you can crush nearly any amateur with a $150 bike from Walmart. All other things being equal, gear matters. It's rare that all the other things are equal, though.
Fancy cameras on phones are awesome, but what I really wish they'd give us is the ability to control off-camera lighting.
All else being equal, I like reading books printed on good paper. But good paper will not make the story interesting and the story will still be interesting even if printed on crap paper.
Of course, if you are an author you would like to make the experience pleasurable for your reader.
BUT.
If you are obsessing with the quality of the paper that you will use to print your book to the point that it detracts you from your work, before the story is even written yet, before you even learned to write interesting stories, you are completely misplacing your focus.
Those analogies break pretty fast. Try reading a book on an LCD on a sunny day.
Depending on the kind of work you do you may not need to obsess over your tools and that obsession may actually hinder your creativity, when a base level of “fine” would do.
But that doesn't mean tools don't matter. They very much do, at everything that can be called craftsmanship.
When I was a kid I bought a cheap mountain bike bicycle from Wallmart equivalent in Europe.
Getting out with friends meant having to go back home after the first jump (usually less than a kilometer away) because the chain derailed, the brake will block and so many horror histories.
When I went to the bikes workshop to fix it,just looking at the weak frame they refused telling me that if they did fix it, it will break again and be responsible. So I had to fix it myself. In practice it meant replacing the entire bicycle part by part.
I bought an expensive bicycle later that never derailed or blocked or anything in its entire life using it every day.
Sometimes expensive gear can save you an enormous amount of time.
Obviously, if a camera is defective and it prevents you from making shots you may want a more costly, reliable camera that will not fail on you when you need it.
But I can assume that at some point, when you add to the cost of a bike, you no longer buy reliability. You may even reduce reliability as components are getting lighter and more frail and difficult to replace/repair.
RAW naturally doesn't make you a better photographer, but there are clearly benefits that can result in better looking pictures than what the in-camera JPEG conversion is capable of. Not only that, I even see one of RAWs promises fulfilled: That over time, RAW development programs will improve, resulting in better looking images developed from the same RAW. If I develop a RAW taken 15 years ago with a current development program and compare the result to what I got back then, this is clearly the case.
So much confusion. ProRAW is not raw because it stores demosaiced (not raw) data. ProRAW is good ole Linear DNG[1] and it has been around forever. However, it's very cool we now have real-time HDR merged linear captures. This has been possible post shot[2].
Lastly, I'm not sure why Apple chose to go with RAW (not raw), because that's how them n00bs spell it out. Raw is not an abbreviation.
Early digital cameras still had RAW files, if anything they were more important since the onboard chips for synthesizing JPGs weren't very powerful.
At the time, portable storage like Compact Flash or Sony Memory Stick was often formated in good ol' FAT32, so 8.3 file names using only capital letters was a longstanding convention.
They were .RAW files, not .raw, in other words, and frequently enough, still are.
It makes a lot more sense if you say it as upper case every time you say it out loud. "I shoot in raw format" vs "I shoot in RAW format!!" It makes the conversation more interesting.
The very term “raw format” is confusing. Having long since ceased to mean “unprocessed sensor data”, nowadays raw (or indeed the ever-shouting all-caps “RAW”) is primarily a marketing term used to denote lossily processed data left and right (ProRes RAW, BRAW, Sony’s “raw” .arw files that in fact come lossy from some cameras), causing much dismay to terminology purists or photography enthusiasts who want to work with the full range of values their camera is capable of capturing.
On the other hand, there is a definition for what constitutes scene-referred data.
ProRAW is scene-referred AFAIC. Un-demosaiced CMOS data is useless, and I am not holding my breath for any breakthroughs in demosaicing algorithms. As TFA stated, control over hardware gives Apple the opportunity to handle this stage better than what we are used to in the decoupled camera manufacturers vs. post-processing software developers world.
Unless there is more loss happening in addition to demosaicing, I am inclined to say this is on balance good stuff and good tidings for DNG format, although I wish Apple called it for what it is (i.e., DNG, not ProRAW).
> nowadays raw (or indeed the ever-shouting all-caps “RAW”) is primarily a marketing term used to denote lossily processed data left and right (ProRes RAW, BRAW, Sony’s “raw” .arw files that in fact come lossy from some cameras)
That does happen but I don't agree that it's "primarily" used that way. Canon and Nikon are still dominant and still use it to refer to uncompressed raw images.
My exposure to this issue was mostly through mirrorless cameras (where Sony has been huge) and raw video capture formats (I almost got a BMPCC this year, but at the last moment found out that they have entirely dropped support for CinemaDNG and replaced it with compressed BRAW).
I was not at all expecting raw capture to mean something else here compared to DSLR world, so I guess my disappointment shows.
That's why I didn't mention "raw format", only raw. :)
> Sony’s “raw” .arw files that in fact come lossy from some cameras
Yeah, had one of those. First gen ⍺7. To me raw denotes that data has not been demosaiced. But, as you note, mosaiced data can also be cooked and lossy compressed.
I'm not saying ProRAW (i.e. multi exposure linear DNG) is a bad thing. In fact, I've been waiting for something like this for years. The output from my Pixel cameras with their computational features like Night Sight has floored me. But still, there's almost no editing headroom in these overly contrasty JPEGs. The future is merged!
>"This may be surprising to some: ProRAW is not a proprietary or closed format. Credit where it is due: Apple deserves kudos for bringing their improvements to the DNG standard. When you shoot with ProRAW, there’s absolutely nothing locking your photos into the Apple ecosystem."
This guy is actually thankful for Apple's - o so unusual and unexpected - stance here.
It hasn’t really gone anywhere. Partly because of technical issues of getting the signal out of the layers of photosites, but also, I think, because of good ol’ Moore’s Law. (Or Dennard scaling, whatever.) Back in the days of 3-megapixel cameras, it would have mattered a lot to have every photosite be a full RGB capture, but now that we’re at such high resolutions, you’re pretty much always downscaling to display the image, so you don’t need that per-pixel perfection.
And, you can do tricks like sensor shift, where you pop a camera on a tripod and use the image stabilization mechanism to shift the sensor subtly to create a very high resolution sample.
I would imagine that Foveon has better sensitivity than a Bayer filter. Using a Bayer filter fundamentally loses a lot of light. (I don’t know how efficient Foveon is in practice.)
Nicely written. I'm not sure I'd have gone to "the dress is BLUE" but there is the question out there about how people want to discuss visual perception issues, in the context of a service delivering RGB (I mean, that many of the "what colour is this dress" consisted of poorly encoded representations of states of colour, using classic #RGB encoding, and were not actually well formulated visual perception examples suitable for use on an electronic display. Some of them literally encoded the two 'things' being compared differently, and did not actually stimulate a perception-response outcome: they were different colours as rendered)
"RAW data is usually stored in the DNG file format, which stands for Digital Negative. Some camera makers have their own formats, but those companies are jerks."
I disagree with the second part of this quote. The major players (Sony, Canon, Nikon) have their own file formats which reflect the choices their engineers made in deciding how to record the raw sensor information at the time of the exposure. Theoretically you can make the case that one of them did it better than the others but since the applications photographers use to process RAW images are given the ability to read these RAW formats they aren't being jerks just for wanting to express their engineering genius in their own way. If, for example, Nikon REFUSED to give Adobe and others the ability to decode their raw NEF files, insisting you have to buy a piece of Nikon software in order to view and transform the raw images from your camera, then I would agree they are jerks. But just because a camera maker's engineers decided that (for reasons I don't know) the open DNG format won't deliver the best quality to their customers doesn't make them jerks.
Otherwise this is a pretty good article, even if it's little more than an educational promotion for Halide's camera app.
> The major players (Sony, Canon, Nikon) have their own file formats which reflect the choices their engineers made in deciding how to record the raw sensor information at the time of the exposure.
Reflect how, and why couldn't that data be stored in a DNG?
The goal of DNG was long-term archival and maximum compatibility; Nikon NEF, Canon CRW, and Sony ARW file formats are meant to capture the point-in-time exposure information. Some of that point in time information involves the decisions the camera made about the exposure (Active D Light for Nikon... I'm sure Sony and Canon have their own settings they are saving) that matter for recording metadata about the image capture that go well beyond just the image itself for the purposes of long-term archival.
The purpose of DNG was to replace all those proprietary formats. It's stated in the introduction to the spec.
If you want to store your proprietary "Active D Light," according to the spec: "DNG allows proprietary data to be stored using private tags, private IFDs and/or a private MakerNote."
It’s probably more of a legacy decision at this point, and photographers love their workflows almost as much as they love taking pictures.
Also, the hardware in DSLRs is typically custom ASICS. Do you think there is a hardware limitation that prevents Nikon from outputting DNG at the same performance level as NEF?
There's not much difference between the different formats in terms of engineering genius. The Raw data from a camera is basically a matrix of numbers...not too much innovation possible there. The fact that there are different formats is somewhat of a historical accident, and they preceded the DNG format. The format absolutely CAN be stored in a DNG, and in fact Pentax cameras have the option of either DNG or PEF.
You can download a free converter from Adobe that takes these proprietary formats and converts them to DNG. It contains the exact same information, so no, there's nothing special in these formats. If you want to do something innovative and don't want to follow Apple's example and contribute to the spec, use the "DNGPrivateData" tag. It's in the spec for this very reason.
If you insist on using your own format for some strategic reason, annoying the entire RAW ecosystem, you're acting like a jerk. On the other hand, if you're doing it because you want to express your engineering genius, I agree that isn't acting like a jerk. That's acting like a child.
Yes, coming from someone who is promoting yet another raw format, that sounds a bit grand. And this is Apple we are talking, which doesn't come across as a very standards based/supportive company.
Are you saying Apple is promoting another format? Because if so, you didn’t read the article.
Apple is just using LinearDNG, which has been a public, open standard forever. There is absolutely nothing proprietary that they’re doing, besides slapping a marketing label on it.
I do hope we see similar features from the Galaxy and Android world, altough I'm not holding my breath, based on how tight the software, hardware integration needs to be to pull this off. It might be a very long time until we see something similar, which would probably be half-baked regardless.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadA serious photographer will try to maximize quality with camera gear that starts out with strong baseline IQ potential - Pro camera, large sensor, quality lenses.
People who subscribes to the value prop of iphone 12 pro max, do not lean towards this model for the above reasons.
I bet if you showed 20 non-photographers 2 images a phone screen, one from the phone and one fullframe edited, most wouldn't appreciate the difference.
That said, I wouldn't give up my camera for many shots but I can understand why many people do. Post-processing camera raws is definitely more cumbersome than quickly editing photos on a phone.
For your use case, are you going to pixel peep and compare RAW file formats differences? As if that knowledge would somehow materially affect your Instagram photo result.
RAW files just give you more latitude after the fact, and editing can either really eek out the last 20% or allow the photographer to better express their "artistic vision" and achieve a look (eg split toning or color grading). All this worked before on jpegs even, but raw just closes the camera/smartphone gap a tad bit more - especially when it's easily available to everyone.
You might be right that it's currently a niche, but if the UX improves, widespread adoption might happen.
People don't just read things that "materially affect" their results.
If we did we would read 10% of what we actually read in HN...
I guess I'm getting old, but I can't help but observe that the image quality provided by a smartphone today is superior to anything available even to rich amateurs when I was a kid in the 90s. This is especially so when you look at color accuracy and dynamic range as well as resolution (which is much less important, but much more often obsessed over).
Any pixel-peeping digital photographer, so millions...
>A serious photographer will try to maximize quality with camera gear that starts out with strong baseline IQ potential - Pro camera, large sensor, quality lenses.*
You'd be surprised. There are other elements "serious photographers" sometimes optimize for, including weight, stealth, convenience, and so on.
I'm "serious" for some definitions of the word and I definitely don't bother to haul around a dedicated camera as much as I used to.
And even here, "almost certainly" is the key term. E.g. Alex Majoli shot wars for Magnum Photos with compact digital cameras (this one: https://www.dpreview.com/articles/9257233153/olympusc5060 ) and won awards.
And of course tons of pro photographers have shot with the iPhone and such phones. Even more so in photojournalism, street photography, documentary photography etc.
Now, ad work, wedding, magazine portraiture, etc will of course mostly use their medium formats or $10K mirrorless setups...
That said, Olympus does a couple computational photography approaches (handheld multishot high res) and Fuji recently introduced in-camera HDR - but I tried neither.
I have no idea why they haven't done this already.
If anyone wants to consider doing this, shoot me a message.
Why this isn't advertised, promoted, & made available? Why digital cameras seem to want to get their lunch taken by phones? Not sure!
I think it was way too soon, but Samsung had a good go with a series of Samsung Galaxy Cameras[2] that were proud Android brandishing devices. Android has gotten better, mobile chips have gotten way better. But even something more like the unofficial OMF that I linked, a Sony camera, that doesn't look like an Android system, it looks like a camera, but is really Android and can run Android? That makes hella-sense to me.
[1] https://github.com/ma1co/OpenMemories-Framework
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_NX
They can process raw images in body and display them at any zoom level without lag, loading or any other issue. My R5 has a touch screen but it’s faster and more comfortable to use the physical controls, especially since you can change settings without actually having to even look. It’s almost identical to my 5Dmk3 except they moved a couple of buttons because of the articulating screen hinge.
This is exactly what most photographers want. Familiar hardware that doesn’t get in the way. That gives the best optical quality that accurately and faithfully captures a scene giving total creative freedom to the photographer not the processor.
The idea of ruining a perfectly good system by pushing Android onto it ‘because apps’ or whatever it is such HN/disruptive nonsense.
Look at any smartphone photo on a large screen and they’re basically mush when it comes to detail. This is fine for most people, these phone cameras are far better than the point and shoot market they have rightfully destroyed.
People edit professional camera photos on large screens and nobody wants to use their camera to edit. Nobody wants their professional camera to introduce computational artefacts onto their exposure. Nobody wants to wait for it to boot. Nobody wants battery life to fall through the floor.
Lytro made a light field camera that ran Android. It was a fun gimmick and is now gathering dust on my shelf. Now Zeiss is making one for $6k and no one who actually cares about photography will buy it.
The fact is there's no reason you'd even have to know a camera is running Android. You can put whatever user-interface shell you want on to an OS, and it could run the same form factor, present the same (hopefully better) menus and interfaces & buttons, flip through menus just as fast, have the same optics, allow the same batteries. Get Micron or someone to use persistent memory so the boot time is even less than what you have now, which is not, as you say, instant, at least not on any camera I've ever seen.
New cameras like the Sony A7S iii have really good buttons-or-touchscreen interfaces. I think a lot of people have thought buttons are the way to go, have a die-hard perspective on what a proper camera is, but they, now that the future is here, are finding the flexibility offered amazing, finding that they would never want to go back.
> The idea of ruining a perfectly good system by pushing Android onto it ‘because apps’ or whatever it is such HN/disruptive nonsense.
The software defined world is one of open possibilities. "Because apps" is such a droll unimaginative slander of that notion. It's great that you feel so well served by your fixed-function cast-in-stone device, but it A) doesn't have to be that way forever, for every-one, and B) if cameras do get more flexible & capable of user-defined behaviors, it doesn't mean you have to lose this thing you evidently love.
Allowing people the flexibility to explore additional ways of doing photography seems to me like it should be obvious & is a frontier I look forward to opening.
I come from a different place. My friends are all pro-sumer, not professionals, but we're all insulted beyond belief how inflexible, how bad the computational photography is on our fancy mirrorless cameras, especially as compared to modern Pixel cameras. More-so, failure to start allowing more creative uses of cameras is an existential risk to cameras. Yes, some photogs will keep readily buying forever, but a lot of consumers find way more value from their phones, and cameras ought to want to be able to compete, to be devices for creativity. Right now, they are, but primarily inside the same lines they have been for decades on end now.
> This is exactly what most photographers want.
Not that big a market, compared to the rest of the world, who also enjoy taking photos, it turns out. But I think the photogs would be better served too, in the long run; much better served.
And I don't think they'd lose anything either.
There is also absolutely no need for it to introduce artifacts into your images. RAW+JPEG is already good enough for this.
The actual advantage of an open camera are huge. For example, it would be trivial to adapt the camera to literally any mount, from EF to E to G and so on, which in and of itself is completely disruptive.
Phone processors have other aces up their sleeve. For example, unlike the Canon EOS R5, they can actually process 8K video indefinitely without breaking a sweat.
As for battery life, you're once again very wrong. The biggest draws in battery life in a camera are the processor and the sensor. Using a phone processor would allow for much lower energy usage as the lithography is incredibly more efficient, and all the high-battery-usage parts of a phone would disappear, such as always-on LTE modems, background processing, and so on.
For boot, Android with a camera sized battery and no modem can last weeks in standby, months in sleep mode. Your camera already doesn't turn off, but instead enters a low-power state. Try removing the battery of an A7 or EOS R, discharging the internal energy storage, and see how long it takes to start.
The actual advantage of this is that it allows you to become a camera manufacturer for much lower costs, meaning that you don't have to limit yourself to a single mount, and can outsource some R&D externally. For example, you won't need to be Fuji to have accurate film sims, you won't need to be Canon to have native level EF compatibility, and you'd even be able to do revolutionary things like autofocus manual lenses.
Beyond that, you'd be able to do things like temporal noise reduction, 3D depth mapping for haze removal, and so on, that can be either used for automatic processing and/or made available in RAW format for further editing.
Basically, you're describing "what if a phone company made a bad camera". What I'm talking about at least is "what if photographers made a camera untethered by the restrictions of existing cameras using commodity hardware". I think the second has the potential of seriously providing value.
That’s a bit hyperbolic, the collar isn’t the only difference between those lens connectors.
If you were to make a camera that is fully open, maybe even modifiable on the info it sends to the lens and what information it wants back, then you would get aftermarket adapters for Canon EF (you could also make one yourself with publicly available info). Sony E would be a tougher nut to crack, but there is a fair bit of info already out and there are already E mount adapters feasible.
So yes, maybe trivial is hyperbolic because of the Sony E mount, but very feasible.
(For background, a friend and I worked on designs for making an open camera platform a few years ago)
Mount optical characteristics are very simple. Just make sure your base mount has a larger diameter and a shorter flange distance, and you're golden. If you are designing your camera around that it is almost trivially done.
The code for implementing a basic E mount is on github, for the EF mount you just have to go looking around on some forums or buy it from the guy behind Metabones, same for Nikon G.
> The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#h...
I’m not authoritative on this topic, but I can’t think of a camera produced by one of the majors which isn’t mostly or entirely ASIC based for image processing.
> Fuji recently introduced in-camera HDR
Canon has had in-camera HDR for years, but I’m not sure I’d really put the output in the same category as a modern smartphone.
Good photos stand the test of time because they are interesting, not because they have pumped colors and HDR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbeEkwlTeqQ
https://daxpix.medium.com/can-the-magsafe-hold-a-camera-lens...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSC-QX100
If I were spending that money on a fixed-lens camera, it'd be a Leica Q (thanks, craigmod :/ ) but the concept is interesting.
Introducing ProRAW in a software update is already going to solidify that.
If digital cameras want to compete here is what they need to do:
- add live photos as a default
If photography enthusiasts wants to gatekeep:
- buy an older camera and stick with that... collectible.
If Apple wants to continue making their devices more appealing than dedicated cameras:
- Add live photos to portrait mode
For portraits, iPhone 12 Pro in okay lighting is the first one where I say, yeah good enough and often times better.
I don't care about DXOMark, I care about what humans think, and across mediums a photo from an iPhone 12 Pro absolutely is good and great enough.
In any case, good enough and better are two very different words. I really enjoy taking pictures on an ILC much more and the results I get are noticeably better even in portraits, including by people that don't know what I took it with. For example, good luck emulating the look of a 135mm f/2.8 (at night) with an iPhone if we're talking about portraits, or good luck doing better than a 50mm 1.4 for street, good luck doing better than a 70-200 2.8, and so on.
But yes, it has a much lower skill ceiling and often more consistent results, and it really does get close.
I think I’ll get a gimbal and some contraption to trigger flash and maybe some adapter lenses as they trickle out for this form factor
Yes, the consistency in such a wide range of lighting situations is what’s attractive. Along with the built in non-destructive editing. Soon, ProRAW for even more of that. Live Photos by default which “captures the moment” more than the composition itself, and a software and syncing pipeline that supports that seamlessly. With the nearest replacement being an entire tool-belt and bags of gear.
I think at this point we will see the market choose, and often times I ahead of the accepted trend on that. A daguerreotype was probably superior processing technology than film and paper but it wasn’t convenient enough to remain an option. Same went for film and dedicated digital cameras. I think this is where we are now with the iphone 12 pro and ProRAW, even for photo enthusiasts.
To start, you can actually crop. You can use lenses with a higher focal length than 70mm, which for many people makes all the difference in portraits. If you're using something like ProRAW, you're limited to 1/3 of an FPS vs 20FPS.
If you want to capture the moment on an ILC, you can also just hold the shutter. This would be the very first time we go from a platform that has higher image quality and more editing lattitude to a technology that has less of it. The replacement isn't an entire tool belt and bags of gear, for me it's an A7ii and a 28-75 2.8 (for a total cost lower than the iPhone 12 Pro + my current phone and will outlive it by four or five times).
As for sales, the iPhone has already gobbled up everything except the high end camera market, which is actually seeing increasing sales, so we'll see about that. I don't find it all that probable.
As for ProRAW, it's technically completely inferior to, say, an ARW file.
Good enough? Maybe. Better than a much larger sensor and better lens? No way.
I’m only going to sound realistic
goalshifted into "it is ok enough for this single type of photo + light".
That's where we are today, and that's what "better" colloquially means.
Even if I wasn’t, I love large prints and we always have some up in our house. Cell phone pictures are fine if you’re looking at them on your phone - not so much at 20x30”.
But, my Nikon with my 50mm just takes noticeably better pictures in so many situations, particularly portraits. And if I expand my lens usage to my wide angle or my 300mm now we’re into types of pictures phones are completely incapable of taking.
If you think your pictures are better, you are deluding yourself the same way audiophiles moan about qualities of their high end, thousand dollar per feet audio cables.
I use RAW files and full manual because I have an actual workflow where I shoot a bunch of photos in similar setting and want to be able to create Lightroom preset and apply to all photos shot with same place, lighting and exposure.
It also sometimes saves me because when I am super clumsy and forget to calculate and adjust exposure I may get a photo that is under or overexposed a lot but for some reason I still want to keep it.
No, it is not going to let you make better pictures. If you want to make better pictures here are some things that are infinitely more productive to achieve that:
- try to do some exercises like trying to move about, compose and visualize your shot before taking the photo,
- try another exercise and for 6 months only take a single photo whenever you see an occasion to make photos,
- try another exercise and for 6 months only go about with a single primary lens (I have used original Fuji X100 to not be tempted, with great results),
- try to learn zone system. Learn to evaluate highlights and shadows and adjust your exposure without any meter. Use it to make pictures you want in lighting with extremely high dynamic range,
etc.
Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better.
Shooting raw lets me save a few percent of photos where exposure is a little wrong. This is huge on its own, and you mention it.
It also lets me stretch things and make scenes work which would otherwise exceed the dynamic range of the exposure and the built in tone mapping would guess wrong.
Storage is cheap these days. If you're not doing something boost-shooting/burst intensive, why not shoot raw? Most of the time the result will be the same, and occasionally it will let you do much more.
And, here, IMO, the rant is particularly off base. A big part of ProRAW is being able to have big linear HDR stacks, which is immensely powerful and absolutely will let you do things you couldn't do any other way.
So of course RAW doesn't make for better photos, but for original input data to do your own edit on. If you don't know how to edit, you're probably better off with the experience/work that the manufacturer put into the in-camera presets.
In my opinion the main advantage is that RAW files save the full color-depth info _and_ RAW files are not gamma-mapped (i.e. linear encoded), that enables all of your use-cases above. You would still get 90% of that advantage if you were to demosaic, color correct to a profile-connection-space but keep the linear encoding and original 12-16 bit depth, even if you were to compress that data via DCT/JPEG to save space. That's sort of what ProRAW is.
This is basically a scene-referred workflow, but without any standardization (like ACES). Because all the files conform to the same transfer function, you can grade ("create a LR preset", which is just like grading just worse UX) once to create a look and then apply that look to all footage ("photographies") at once to get a very consistent look. I've said it before, I'll say it again, the movie industry has this figured out, they got standards (ACES) and tooling for this. (And, movie tools are far, far superior to any photo tool I've seen yet when it comes to color. All the photo editing tools seem to be stuck in some kind of moronic hellhole were half of them get disqualified from the start for being destructive editors and the other half has bad UX and is basically limited to an operational vocabulary straight from a darkroom).
Apart from stuff like this there are some scenarios in which RAW might still result in a better overall IQ but the JPEG engines in cameras are really, really good and for practically any scene they're fine, and even for most very high contrast scenes (like shadow + oncoming sun) they'll still produce fine images.
My understanding of is that brain works in a different way when interpreting moving and still images. In a moving image the differences from reality are much more easily picked up by the brain and so color or image distortion problems stand out much more.
Also, I think, brain is trained to some particular standards of how the moving image is shot and processed. We can easily recognize "movie" or "television" shooting and processing methods and this is starkly visible when somebody is messing with it. For example, The Fellowship of The Ring looked very strange to me the first time I watched it because of how smooth it was due to higher framerate, but at the same time I did not find it out of place for television.
I am not even going into how tools don't make picture better, that's pure clueless rubbish.
Your post sir doesn't make much sense whatsoever.
Of course, using an iPhone camera for photography is always going to have limits. But I find the camera good enough for most day-to-day use cases.
This is pretty hard to do with the stock iphone camera app.
- Sharpen/noise reduction: If you want to avoid over-denoising and over-sharpening you need RAW, there's no way around it. I find Apple's rendering (and most other phone makers) distasteful. Anything above ISO 800 is just trash on JPG but pretty good on RAW. It's the reason I left my Canon G10 and later S100 on the drawer years ago when the iPhone started shooting RAW.
- Dynamic range (latitude, for old folks like me). If you want detail on the sky and on the shadow under the rock on a sunny day, you need RAW. Also, no other way around it. Magic-AI-Smart-Auto-HDR+ can sometimes help but it's comical at most others. Distributing the tones is part of the creative process.
>Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better
Oh yes, they will. That camera doesn't matter motto never dies, it seems. Tools are extremely important. They don't work on their own, of course, but are definitively part of the equation.
Since we're on HN, a good analogy would be that because all computers are Turing Complete, they are all equivalent and you shouldn't worry with specs, OS, languages, editors, compilers, etc.
While one can make an interesting sports event shot with a pin-hole you can't use it to freeze someone in mid-air, etc, etc. I think you get the point :)
I've attended a lot of photo meets, and if I had a dollar for every shooter who showed up with the latest and greatest gear, only to post poorly composed, poorly lit, overprocessed dreck weeks later...
I think a better analogy is bicycles. You can have the fanciest, lightest racing bike in the world, but if you're not a trained athlete it's not going to help you much. If you are a trained athlete, you can crush nearly any amateur with a $150 bike from Walmart. All other things being equal, gear matters. It's rare that all the other things are equal, though.
Fancy cameras on phones are awesome, but what I really wish they'd give us is the ability to control off-camera lighting.
All else being equal, I like reading books printed on good paper. But good paper will not make the story interesting and the story will still be interesting even if printed on crap paper.
Of course, if you are an author you would like to make the experience pleasurable for your reader.
BUT.
If you are obsessing with the quality of the paper that you will use to print your book to the point that it detracts you from your work, before the story is even written yet, before you even learned to write interesting stories, you are completely misplacing your focus.
Depending on the kind of work you do you may not need to obsess over your tools and that obsession may actually hinder your creativity, when a base level of “fine” would do.
But that doesn't mean tools don't matter. They very much do, at everything that can be called craftsmanship.
Getting out with friends meant having to go back home after the first jump (usually less than a kilometer away) because the chain derailed, the brake will block and so many horror histories.
When I went to the bikes workshop to fix it,just looking at the weak frame they refused telling me that if they did fix it, it will break again and be responsible. So I had to fix it myself. In practice it meant replacing the entire bicycle part by part.
I bought an expensive bicycle later that never derailed or blocked or anything in its entire life using it every day.
Sometimes expensive gear can save you an enormous amount of time.
Obviously, if a camera is defective and it prevents you from making shots you may want a more costly, reliable camera that will not fail on you when you need it.
But I can assume that at some point, when you add to the cost of a bike, you no longer buy reliability. You may even reduce reliability as components are getting lighter and more frail and difficult to replace/repair.
Lastly, I'm not sure why Apple chose to go with RAW (not raw), because that's how them n00bs spell it out. Raw is not an abbreviation.
[1] http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/dng/linear.htm
[2] https://jcelaya.github.io/hdrmerge/
Everyone spells it with all caps. Browse DPReview for a bit. "RAW" is just the convention, even though it makes no sense.
Early digital cameras still had RAW files, if anything they were more important since the onboard chips for synthesizing JPGs weren't very powerful.
At the time, portable storage like Compact Flash or Sony Memory Stick was often formated in good ol' FAT32, so 8.3 file names using only capital letters was a longstanding convention.
They were .RAW files, not .raw, in other words, and frequently enough, still are.
On the other hand, there is a definition for what constitutes scene-referred data.
ProRAW is scene-referred AFAIC. Un-demosaiced CMOS data is useless, and I am not holding my breath for any breakthroughs in demosaicing algorithms. As TFA stated, control over hardware gives Apple the opportunity to handle this stage better than what we are used to in the decoupled camera manufacturers vs. post-processing software developers world.
Unless there is more loss happening in addition to demosaicing, I am inclined to say this is on balance good stuff and good tidings for DNG format, although I wish Apple called it for what it is (i.e., DNG, not ProRAW).
That does happen but I don't agree that it's "primarily" used that way. Canon and Nikon are still dominant and still use it to refer to uncompressed raw images.
I was not at all expecting raw capture to mean something else here compared to DSLR world, so I guess my disappointment shows.
That's why I didn't mention "raw format", only raw. :)
> Sony’s “raw” .arw files that in fact come lossy from some cameras
Yeah, had one of those. First gen ⍺7. To me raw denotes that data has not been demosaiced. But, as you note, mosaiced data can also be cooked and lossy compressed.
I'm not saying ProRAW (i.e. multi exposure linear DNG) is a bad thing. In fact, I've been waiting for something like this for years. The output from my Pixel cameras with their computational features like Night Sight has floored me. But still, there's almost no editing headroom in these overly contrasty JPEGs. The future is merged!
This guy is actually thankful for Apple's - o so unusual and unexpected - stance here.
Slave mentality at its finest.
Amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor
It hasn’t really gone anywhere. Partly because of technical issues of getting the signal out of the layers of photosites, but also, I think, because of good ol’ Moore’s Law. (Or Dennard scaling, whatever.) Back in the days of 3-megapixel cameras, it would have mattered a lot to have every photosite be a full RGB capture, but now that we’re at such high resolutions, you’re pretty much always downscaling to display the image, so you don’t need that per-pixel perfection.
And, you can do tricks like sensor shift, where you pop a camera on a tripod and use the image stabilization mechanism to shift the sensor subtly to create a very high resolution sample.
I disagree with the second part of this quote. The major players (Sony, Canon, Nikon) have their own file formats which reflect the choices their engineers made in deciding how to record the raw sensor information at the time of the exposure. Theoretically you can make the case that one of them did it better than the others but since the applications photographers use to process RAW images are given the ability to read these RAW formats they aren't being jerks just for wanting to express their engineering genius in their own way. If, for example, Nikon REFUSED to give Adobe and others the ability to decode their raw NEF files, insisting you have to buy a piece of Nikon software in order to view and transform the raw images from your camera, then I would agree they are jerks. But just because a camera maker's engineers decided that (for reasons I don't know) the open DNG format won't deliver the best quality to their customers doesn't make them jerks.
Otherwise this is a pretty good article, even if it's little more than an educational promotion for Halide's camera app.
Reflect how, and why couldn't that data be stored in a DNG?
If you want to store your proprietary "Active D Light," according to the spec: "DNG allows proprietary data to be stored using private tags, private IFDs and/or a private MakerNote."
Also, the hardware in DSLRs is typically custom ASICS. Do you think there is a hardware limitation that prevents Nikon from outputting DNG at the same performance level as NEF?
If you insist on using your own format for some strategic reason, annoying the entire RAW ecosystem, you're acting like a jerk. On the other hand, if you're doing it because you want to express your engineering genius, I agree that isn't acting like a jerk. That's acting like a child.
Apple is just using LinearDNG, which has been a public, open standard forever. There is absolutely nothing proprietary that they’re doing, besides slapping a marketing label on it.