Upgrade Your Photography Game with Apple's New Image Format

The iPhone-maker continued its slew of offerings this year with its brand-new ProRAW image file format, which gives users — photographers at any level — greater control and creativity over their shots.

A RAW file format, in simplest terms, is an image format in its most unedited state — its most natural, if we may put it. This allows greater flexibility and editing prowess.

ProRAW — on the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max and using the latest iOS 14.3 — gives users more flexibility when editing exposure, colour and white balance in an image; as defined by Apple, it combines the information of a standard RAW format along with iPhone image processing.

The new format fuses the capabilities of Apple's camera tech on its iPhones, including Smart HDR, Deep Fusion and night mode. Images taken in ProRAW formats can be edited photos in the native Photos app and other third-party ones that support such.

In the simplest terms, Apple's ProRAW allows a photographer to have more freedom in editing and processing.

Apple is no stranger to adopting unique file formats to help its users: It has used the HEIC format — High Efficiency Image File — to reduce size while maintaining the crisp quality on photos.

ProRAW sounds like another flowery offering from Apple. But it actually helps, especially for high-end users — and even those starting to learn photography can pick up a thing or two from this.

According to the iPhone's settings, each ProRAW file is approximately 25MB.

RAW images have been a wish for users — photographers in particular — on iPhones. The introduction of ProRAW fulfills this.

As always, while new rollouts seem and sound complicated, Apple has done its best to make ProRAW very understandable for its users — whatever level they may be.

Apple also chose the DNG — digital negative — file format for its RAW images, the universal and most recognized RAW image format that is supported by most of the industry — and that even makes it more flexible.