The Power of RAW on iPhone
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:
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[…]
