From the course: Photos for macOS Big Sur and iPhone Essential Training

Working with ProRAW - Apple Photos Tutorial

From the course: Photos for macOS Big Sur and iPhone Essential Training

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Working with ProRAW

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- [Instructor] On iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max we have a format available to us called Apple ProRAW, and this shot was captured in Apple ProRAW. And you can see that we have the RAW up there in the upper left-hand corner. All right, so what does that mean when we have RAW selected, or we shoot in RAW, and ProRAW in particular? Well, ProRAW's a little different in that what Apple tries to do is give you a headstart on the RAW editing process. In other words, instead of just having a shot that's totally RAW, which means has no adjustments whatsoever, they apply some of their magic to the shot. So you still have the capability of a RAW file which means you can recover highlights and shadows, but you have a headstart. It looks better. Okay. Now we have to set this up in order to have it available with the phone. And I'm going to show you how to do that right now. So we're going to get out of this right here and we're going to go to Settings. We're going to go to Camera, and we're going to go to Formats. All right, this is where you set it up so that it's available to you. Now, before I get to RAW, let me just mention that you have two settings up here at the top, high efficiency and most compatible. Most compatible's your standard JPEG and high efficiency is HEIF. I like high efficiency. It's more widely used now and it saves you space, and it looks great. So unless you have a reason to shoot with JPEG, high efficiency is the way to go. All right, that was just a slight detour. Back to Apple ProRAW. By default, it's going to be turned off. We want it turned on, because when we turn it on like this, let's go to the camera. Let me show you what's available to you. Now it's available in the upper right hand corner. Now, it's not turned on in the sense that I'm not shooting in RAW right now. I'm actually shooting in high efficiency, but I have the ability to use RAW just by tapping on it. And now I'm in RAW mode. Okay. Now I can capture in RAW and have all that magic available to me. Are there any downsides to that? Why not just capture in RAW all the time? There are downsides to it. This file is going to be about 32 megabytes. The high efficiency file is going to be a fraction of that, just a few megabytes. All right, so you only want to capture in RAW when you need it. So most of the time you're going to leave it turned off, but you want to have it available for when you do want to shoot in RAW, for when you have that situation with a really bright sky, that maybe you want to tone down those highlights a bit, or maybe open up the shadows on the landscape, you know, that kind of stuff. And I'm going to show you how that works in an upcoming movie, how Photos for Big Sur can take those Apple ProRAW files and really allow you to adjust them exactly the way that you want. But the big thing that you have to do is know how to turn on ProRAW in the camera settings, and then know that this little badge is up here, is going to be off unless you turn it on. But when you have those special situations, just tap on it, activate it, shoot in RAW, and then you can edit to your heart's content later on in Photos.

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