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>RAW just means uncompressed

This is not accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format




A) I'm not sure what nit you are picking, RAW formats are typically not compressed, and if they are (I haven't encountered any personally) they would be losslessly compressed. They certainly aren't quantized.

Edit: ok here's some lossless and lossy compression of RAW. IMHO, "lossy compressed raw" is an oxymoron. https://photographylife.com/compressed-vs-uncompressed-vs-lo...

B) the context is whether a raw photo can be "manipulated" in any way. The answer is a resounding yes. See: Darpa MediFor project. Search for work by Siwei Lyu (I'm on mobile and don't feel like digging through the links, there's tons of published work out there)


> I'm not sure what nit you are picking

RAW photos are not “just” uncompressed versions of the JPEGs your camera usually gives you. That would be a TIFF. Rather, they contain raw sensor data.


Yes I'm aware, I've had to debayer imagery from industrial cameras and worked on media forensics. I think we are on the same page but commenting past each other.

The problem is vendors all seem to have their own definition of what RAW means nowadays. But the typical meaning is one with the raw pixels via color filter array (eg bayer8), and need debayering (to get the usual rgb8).

You can have raw/Bayer Tiffs, I've worked with them. So the file format is not enough, you gotta know the image encoding.

"RAW just means uncompressed" yes that is technically wrong, but the point I'm addressing is "You can still manipulate a RAW image" and "without the painting-like qualities of its default image processing." It does not matter what the color encoding is, you can still do painting-like processing. I've literally worked on detectors that detect manipulation of RAW, Bayer array images. This is not theoretical.

I guess what I am saying is, Apple giving the user a raw/.dng file is not a guarantee you are actually getting the ADC output straight from the sensor.

Really, the operant question is "what is the processing provenance of this image".




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