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Yesterday, I believe I felt the ground move. Not a seismic event, not yet. But a definite tremor. I’m talking about the iPhone 12—more specifically the announcement of the new Apple ProRAW format. We have very little information about it at this point, just a mere paragraph on the iPhone 12 Pro page, with a Coming Soon label. But if I understand this (and what was said during the event) correctly, we’re looking at software that will unlock the layers created during capture. In other words: control over computational photography. This is potentially very, very big. From the website: “ProRAW gives you all the standard RAW information, along with the Apple image pipeline data. So you can get a head start on editing, with noise reduction and multiframe exposure adjustments already in place...” That pipeline data is what makes photography on the iPhone possible. Scratch that: it’s what makes good photography on the iPhone possible. The hardware certainly keeps getting better and better, but we all know you can’t beat physics—there are limits in place that happen to follow the rules of our universe. And software is the key to transcending those limits. Apple said the Photos app—obviously—would be able to read and edit Apple ProRAW files. But they also mentioned opening the format to third-parties as well. What if Capture One and Lightroom were to include support for this? Capture One already has a framework in place for layers, so it wouldn’t be a stretch (1). Now, none of us know what these layers will look like or how much editing the format will allow: are there blending modes involved? Is it all complex masks, mixing bracketed exposures? And what about effects? We know the Portrait Mode bokeh is a simulation which can be altered in iOS/iPadOS. It’s also not entirely clear to me if the format will be exclusive to the new, top-end iPhones. Technically, this image pipeline is already in place. Would the format be widely available or will Apple keep this exclusive to the Pro models? Personally, if it’s technically feasible, I believe they should go as broad as they can, because the opportunities here are important. I was looking at the prices on the new iPhones: we get clobbered by the exchange rate in Canada so it’s pretty crazy—right off the bat you’re in for a thousand dollars, on the “cheapest” model. The Pro Max with it’s 65mm telephoto lens is either $1549 (128GB) or $1689 (256GB). These aren’t phone prices anymore: they’re camera prices. Computational photography IS a seismic shift, but to this day it’s been esoteric, a secret locked inside the machine. If this takes off and the format truly provides photographers with meaningful control over the images, I think we’re entering new territory. And I haven’t even mentioned filming, with on-the-fly Dolby Vision HDR encoding. We may be in for a wild ride. This is the part where I mention Aperture would’ve been the killer app.
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