The Power of RAW on iPhone
Sebastiaan de With (updated link):
RAW files store more information about detail in the highlights (the bright parts) and the shadows (the dark parts) of an image. Since you often want to ‘recover’ a slightly over or under-exposed photo, this is immensely useful. […] It also stores information that enables you to change white balance later on.
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Now this is where most people get confused: apps that don’t support RAW will still load the image. However, they just load the low resolution preview instead of the full-resolution image. And they won’t warn you. Believe it or not, the built in iOS Photos app doesn’t support RAW[…]
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RAW Caveat 2: RAW Skips Apple’s Magic
Apple’s stock camera app does a lot of cleanup behind the scenes. This is ‘magic’. Yes, magic. The imaging processor in every smartphone and camera does some magic. This is the kind of stuff that is a closely guarded secret. […] Sounds wonderful, but this isn’t always great. Sometimes the noise reduction is aggressive and destroys fine detail; other times the grain can be pleasant.
Update (2018-03-02): Sebastiaan de With (updated link):
Remember how I mentioned 90% of my edits are just to make the image look like what I perceived with my naked eye? Selective color adjustments are perfect to let you tweak individual colors so they look ‘right’. Don’t get too caught up in wild adjustments; try to make it faithful to the mood and look of what you shot.
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With a split tone adjustment, you assign a tint to the highlights in your image and a tint to the shadows — preferably contrasting tints like yellow highlights and blue shadows. This gives the image a color contrast, which is visually interesting and pleasing. It changes the entire look!
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If you’re editing in Adobe Lightroom, it’s automatic perspective correction tools are incredibly powerful[…]
