12 ms·

Understanding ProRAW

171 points by tomduncalf 6y ago

jordache 6y ago
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.
- altarius 6y ago
  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.
  - jordache 6y ago
    i don't doubt the use case you brought up. 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.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >As if that knowledge would somehow materially affect your Instagram photo result. 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...
    - altarius 6y ago
      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.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    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.
  - redvenom 6y ago
    This highlights the difference between someone who cares about image quality and someone who just cares about reactions and likes.
    - foldr 6y ago
      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).
      - redvenom 6y ago
        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.
        foldr 6y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. The musical analogy would be obsessing over "audio quality", which has nothing to do with music genre.
- heavymark 6y ago
  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.
- _alex_ 6y ago
  They run a sustainable business selling a power-user camera app for the iphone. People who like that app like this information.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >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.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    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.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    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.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >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. 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 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...
hughes 6y ago
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.
- hughes 6y ago
  Are there even any camera companies that even have ambitions of reaching a level like this?
  - altarius 6y ago
    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.
    - 67868018 6y ago
      Olympus is dead now, though
    - akuma73 6y ago
      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.
      - srsm 6y ago
        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.
1-6 6y ago
"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-mobile-ios.html 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.
- sandofsky 6y ago
  They're both DNG files, but there's a very big difference in what they contain. It's explained in the article.
lmilcin 6y ago
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.
- mlyle 6y ago
  I think this is a bit of a rant. 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.
  - raegis 6y ago
    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.
unicornporn 6y ago
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. [1] http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/dng/linear.htm http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/dng/linear.htm [2] https://jcelaya.github.io/hdrmerge/ https://jcelaya.github.io/hdrmerge/
- sandofsky 6y ago
  Are you referring to confusion in the article, or among users? Everyone spells it with all caps. Browse DPReview for a bit. "RAW" is just the convention, even though it makes no sense.
  - samatman 6y ago
    It makes a tiny bit of 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.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 6y ago
ur-whale 6y ago
>"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. Slave mentality at its finest. Amazing.
centimeter 6y ago
So “pro” is a synonym for “not”?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pabs3 6y ago
Are there no sensors that natively see in colour without the filter matrix over the top?
- perardi 6y ago
  The Foveon, which is used in Sigma cameras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor 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.
  - amluto 6y ago
    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.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ggm 6y ago
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)
mikece 6y ago
"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.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > 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?
  - mikece 6y ago
    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.
    - sandofsky 6y ago
boromi 6y ago
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.

171 points by tomduncalf 6y ago

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.

altarius 6y ago
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.
- jordache 6y ago
  i don't doubt the use case you brought up. 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.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >As if that knowledge would somehow materially affect your Instagram photo result. 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...
  - altarius 6y ago
    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.
- centimeter 6y ago
  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.
- redvenom 6y ago
  This highlights the difference between someone who cares about image quality and someone who just cares about reactions and likes.
  - foldr 6y ago
    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).
    - redvenom 6y ago
      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.
      - foldr 6y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. The musical analogy would be obsessing over "audio quality", which has nothing to do with music genre.
heavymark 6y ago
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.
_alex_ 6y ago
They run a sustainable business selling a power-user camera app for the iphone. People who like that app like this information.
coldtea 6y ago
>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.
- dylan604 6y ago
  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.
- ghaff 6y ago
  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.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >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. 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 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...

hughes 6y ago

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.

hughes 6y ago
Are there even any camera companies that even have ambitions of reaching a level like this?
- altarius 6y ago
  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.
  - 67868018 6y ago
    Olympus is dead now, though
  - akuma73 6y ago
    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.
    - srsm 6y ago
      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.

1-6 6y ago

"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-mobile-ios.html 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.

sandofsky 6y ago
They're both DNG files, but there's a very big difference in what they contain. It's explained in the article.

lmilcin 6y ago

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.

mlyle 6y ago
I think this is a bit of a rant. 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.
- raegis 6y ago
  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.

unicornporn 6y ago

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. [1] http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/dng/linear.htm http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/dng/linear.htm [2] https://jcelaya.github.io/hdrmerge/ https://jcelaya.github.io/hdrmerge/

sandofsky 6y ago
Are you referring to confusion in the article, or among users? Everyone spells it with all caps. Browse DPReview for a bit. "RAW" is just the convention, even though it makes no sense.
- samatman 6y ago
  It makes a tiny bit of 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.
- dylan604 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
6y ago

ur-whale 6y ago

>"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. Slave mentality at its finest. Amazing.

centimeter 6y ago

So “pro” is a synonym for “not”?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pabs3 6y ago

Are there no sensors that natively see in colour without the filter matrix over the top?

perardi 6y ago
The Foveon, which is used in Sigma cameras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor 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.
- amluto 6y ago
  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.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ggm 6y ago

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)

mikece 6y ago

"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.

Dylan16807 6y ago
> 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?
- mikece 6y ago
  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.
  - sandofsky 6y ago

boromi 6y ago

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.