It’s like a RAW file but better — here’s how ProRAW works and how to enable it on your iPhone 12 Pro or later.
When Apple announced the iPhone 12 Pro, it introduced a powerful new camera feature: ProRAW. This feature is available now for all Pro and Pro Max models, starting with the 12 series and newer, and if you’re picky about your photo processing, it’s definitely a feature worth checking out. ProRAW combines the benefits of computational photography with traditional RAW image capture — kind of the best of both worlds.
So why would you want to use ProRAW in the first place? Let’s go back to digital photography school. A traditional RAW image file preserves a lot more of the information that’s captured when you take a photo. Usually, your iPhone’s camera will process that data into a HEIF or JPEG image, throwing away the extra data and essentially “baking in” things like white balance, exposure, and detail in shadows and highlights. It’s a smaller, more manageable file, but it’s not as flexible for post-processing. A RAW image retains more of that original information and provides a lot more flexibility for photo editing.
Shooting RAW images on a traditional camera is generally preferred if you want to get the very most out of your images, but it’s not quite the same story on a phone camera. That’s because a traditional RAW file is just one frame, and it misses out on computational photography benefits like multi-frame processing. A smartphone camera JPEG image might be less flexible, but it can include more detail and less noise than a smartphone photo processed from a RAW image that didn’t benefit from those computational techniques.
Enter ProRAW. A ProRAW image combines all those benefits into one file. Multi-frame processing is applied, and the final image that’s saved preserves much more information than a standard iPhone JPEG.
That considered, ProRAW is a powerful tool to use in specific situations — you just need to know how to enable it on your phone. Here’s how to do it. (I followed these steps on an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 16.3.1.)
- Go to Settings > Camera > Formats.
- Toggle on ProRAW.
- On an iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max, you’ll see an option to choose either 12-megapixel or 48-megapixel resolution. If you’re going to use ProRAW more often, 12-megapixel files are a little lighter and easier on your storage. But for maximum detail, go for 48 megapixels.