Photographs Of A Socially Distanced Holi? Apple iPhone’s ProRAW And Portraits May Be The Ideal Tools

Festivals, if you do celebrate them with fervour, are usually a good time to take some really nice photos. That’s particularly true for the Holi festival, which can be a lot about colours. For that, you’ll need a good smartphone camera, if you really want pristine colours and the ideal detailing. While I’ll admittedly remain very much socially distanced and away from any celebrations, if you indeed are looking forward to the festival of colours, the Apple iPhone may just be the best smartphone camera for you to be carrying along. Apple seriously upped the smartphone photography game with the iPhone 12 line-up, particularly with the Apple iPhone 12 Pro and the Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max. The iPhone 12 includes features such as Deep Fusion, Smart HDR, Night Mode for all cameras and improved dynamic range. And then there is ProRAW photography mode, which has and continues to redefine the benchmark for smartphone photography. Portraits on all iPhones and ProRAW additionally on the iPhone 12 Pro series, really could be the ideal tools.

Each ProRAW photo is a .DNG file, or Adobe Digital Negative format, and packs in 12-bit colour information and 14 stops of dynamic range. The way Apple’s ProRAW photos work is that multiple image frames are captured at different settings and the data from all of these is then combined into one image. Deep Fusion does its bit here with pixel-by-pixel analysis of each photo to create this one final photo that you see in the DNG format. While I would love to show you the beauty of ProRAW photos, a variety of factors wouldn’t allow you to have the complete experience. The way the web pages pare down the image quality so that you don’t have to wait for the websites to load, and also the display you may be looking at, to name a few. Thanks to the much higher resolution and the larger size for each image, there is a lot more data that you have to work with for cropping, zooming in, editing or dialing up the highlights.

A standard JPG of an artwork was about 4.4MB in size while the same frame in ProRAW was a whopping 28.8MB in size. What the larger size means is that you have a lot more data to work with while editing an image, with much less noise, better dynamic range and sharper details to work with. Any photo editing app that can support DNG raw files will be able to work with the Apple ProRAW files. While the Photos app on the iPhone as well as on macOS has been updated to allow editing of ProRAW photos, third party apps are very much an option for you. To enable ProRAW on an iPhone 12 Pro or iPhone 12 Pro Max, go to Settings -> Camera -> Formats -> turn on ProRAW in Photo Capture.

There are significant improvements to not just the hardware side of things with the larger sensors and the ability to handle lighter than before, but also on the software side. That is computational photography as Apple calls it, and it is for the Apple iPhone 12 and the Apple iPhone 12 Mini as well. That significantly improves portrait photos, particularly in low light. The background blur is in your control, so is the lighting, but what really helps you get the exact excitement from a portrait photo you click is the precise differentiation between the subject and the background, more often than not. There are updates for Deep Fusion, and there is the new Smart HDR 3 as well that will improve the dynamic range in photos much more. And night vision on all cameras. You’ll notice that Deep Fusion is now more active than before. In more photos, in more scenarios and generally doing more. That means there is certainly more detailing that is on offer. You will also notice that the iPhone 12 Pro camera gets additional options—including something called scene detection where the iPhone tries to understand what you are trying to capture and alters the exposure and colours, though this is something you can turn off.

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