How to shoot RAW photos with your compatible iOS 10-running iPhone

Back in June, Apple officially unveiled iOS 10. One of the novelties that did not make enough headlines were the numerous new APIs that got introduced, with one of the more intriguing ones being iOS 10's RAW image capture support in the DNG (Adobe's Digital Native) file format. 

Much to the delight of shutterbugs, it allows developers to implement RAW image capture in their camera apps and let users capture lossless, uncompressed photos that are editing-friendly. choose whether to capture JPEG, RAW only, or JPEG + RAW, which is akin to what most DSLR cameras out there offer. However, you can't shoot RAW with Apple's stock camera app. 

We already showed you a couple of iOS apps that let you do just that, but we felt like we have to further elaborate on all that RAW business, as in what's it exactly, do you need it in your life, and do you have to actually care? Let's delve in and find out whether this camera fancy schmancy is worthy of your attention. 

What is RAW and why should you care?

Simply put, RAW images are lossless files that contain uncompressed and minimally-processed data captured from the camera sensor of the device. That's usually the format Also known as "digital negatives", said files need to be developed with additional software, like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Apple Photos, Corel AfterShot, etc. We wouldn't delve further into this issue for further reading check Wikipedia or look around on Google. 

What are the benefits of RAW versus JPEG?

Countless, but we will narrow it to a couple of things. 

First of all, the lack of compression means that if you export a JPEG or a PNG file out of your source RAW, there will be zero loss of detail in comparison with a regular JPEG photo taken with the camera in the same situation. Essentially, you get the highest level of quality you can eke out of your phone's sensor. 

Also, RAW files usually have a bit depth of 12, 14, or16 bits compared with the measly 8-bit depth of a run-of-the-mill JPEG file. This means that RAW files retain a way larger amount of different brightness levels that you can edit without compromising the overall image quality - an 8-bit JPEG gives you 256 levels to play around with, while a 12-bit RAW gets you 4096. This lets you fine tune the shadows and the highlights and correctly expose your photo. 

RAW also lets you correct severely over- or under-exposed photos without deteriorating the overall quality of your photo thanks to the larger amount of information it holds within itself. Additionally, when you're shooting in JPEG your phone automatically sets the white balance of the image; with RAW, you can set the white balance afterwards in a non-destructive way.

We can go on, but what you need to take home at the end of the day is that  RAW is a much, much better choice if you want to produce quality images. With a bit of manual post-processing and touching-up, a RAW file can easily blow a JPEG pic out of the water. 

Now, many will be quick to argue that one can also edit JPEG image to achieve similar results. While that is mostly true, we shouldn't overlook the fact that unlike RAW, compressed JPEG images are way less forgiving when it comes to subsequent editing. 

Let's talk examples now. We took a resident iPhone 6s Plus, downloaded Manual (a camera app that supports RAW), and went out for a walk. We shot some regular JPEGs with the default iOS camera app and shot the RAWs with Manual.