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How raw is “raw”? If you take a long exposure in a dark room with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than it should. Would a “raw” version of that photo be a traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a short video sequence? (that would actually make the most sense)

I have an iPhone11 but not sure that has the raw option.




If you use a third-party app like Camera+ to shoot RAW, then it is the raw, completely unprocessed sensor data as a DNG file, like any DSLR. Shooting RAW on the ultra-wide camera in a dark environment results in a completely unusable image.

If you use the iOS camera on an iPhone 12 or newer and enable the "ProRAW" option (which is shown as just "RAW" in the camera), you get a processed image, but with the data used as a base for the processing intact for re-processing when you edit it.


It wouldn’t make any difference in this instance, all the computational stuff still happens.

I just took a long exposure on my 12 Pro and purposely moved the camera around a bit and my phone produced a sharp RAW image.


That's the definition of a non-RAW image.


Recent iPhones (and many Android phones) have optical image stabilization; an element in the lens moves to compensate if the phone shakes during the exposure. Very new iPhones (and some Android devices) also have sensor-shift image stabilization, which moves the image sensor.

These features are also available on many dedicated cameras and interchangeable camera lenses.


I don't have an iPhone but I've always been shooting RAW on my phones and then processed the photos in LightRoom. As soon as I use one of the "lenses" on my phone (like "night shot" or "panorama" or even "wide angle"/"tele") I only get a JPG. The RAW file is only created when I shoot using the basic camera. This is the case for my current OnePlus but also previous phones (Google, Nokia).




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